If you want to know where I was, go here. Where were you?
PS I miss my Grandma Smith who died on 9/11/07 and hubbys grandma died on 9/11/09. Grandma’s, we miss you!
“If you want something you have never had, you have to do something you have never done“ – Dr. Shaun Marler
I found it here
…down Facebook Memory Lane
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| Right before his first show. |
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| Before Dinner Club |
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| Goofing Around |
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| Our first Thanksgiving together |
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| Our first Thanksgiving together |
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| Playing around with the camera |
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| On our way to Ft. Worth (for the first time) |
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| Brunch at Joe T Garcias in Ft. Worth |
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| Our first trip to KC |
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| Our First Christmas together. |
I’m not going to lie, sometimes I question why I used some of the photos I did, but whatever, I did so let’s all laugh now 🙂
Do you know what a relief it is to not have to go to class on a Monday night? To come home at a decent hour, get to go out and enjoy a nice walk with your husband and your pooches. I think I kind of almost forgot what that felt like on a Monday night. Sure I was home on Tuesday’s, Thursday’s and every other Friday’s, but then I was studying and reading and fretting. This was nice and relaxed! I’m not going to lie, I might be in love with Monday evenings…
Last night I was walking around the house, catching up on Dancing with the Stars, Two and a Half Men, a few blogs, just whatever popped into my head to do at the time. For some reason I walked into our office and grabbed a recipe book off my shelf. When I walked back to place it back on the shelf (shocker I know) I saw a notebook I wasn’t sure I recognized.
I pulled it off the shelf and walked into the living room trying to remember what this notebook was.
And all the sudden I had a feeling I knew what it was.
My Grandma S loved recipes. She hated to cook but she loved recipes and she loved to eat even more. She never allowed me to say food was nasty. I could not like it, but food was never to be referred to as “nasty”. That was just a horrible word.
She passed away on 9/11/07 {Cancer took her life, mean old ugly cancer}. Mom got things, AC got things, but I, I got all her cookbooks. Unfortunately at the time I was still living at home, didn’t have a kitchen of my own, and the books have been misplaced.
I have been searching for her cookbooks for years now. Every so often I still search my parents house. It’s not that the house is so cluttered or so large, but for some reason I keep passing over the box that was her cookbooks. A few made their way into my recipe book collection but not all.
But I forgot about this particular book. It’s her handwriting. Something I love! And someday with the way the world is going, our grandkids won’t be able to read her handwriting (schools around here have quit teaching cursive, which is all I write in).
And this recipe. This recipe almost brought tears to my eyes. She loved Green Goddess Dressing. I’m not sure what it is, but a restaurant around here served, in her opinion, some of the best. She asked me to make her Green Goddess dressing sometime. Unfortunately I can’t remember if this was while she was sick and I was supposed to make it when she got better or it was something she asked me to do that I never got around to. Either way, seeing this and a few other recipes for Green Goddess Dressing made me cry.
I was so happy to find this book. I’m ready to go put it in our safe because I’m scared of losing it. She was a huge part of my life (as all my grandparents were) and as the days, months and years pass by, I’m starting to lose the memory of her calling and leaving voicemails for me on our answering machine.
So I was extremely excited to find this book sitting among some of my cookbooks. Yup, I might just be in love with Monday nights.
No, I didn’t go to Afghanistan, however my sweet husband did. This is his memories. I just happened to be going through photos on our computer yesterday afternoon and saw these and asked if he’d mind sharing them.
For those of you who don’t know, this is my husband. He was on a flight from Bagram Airbase to FOB Sharana on a C-130 (that’s a military plane).
This is the morning after they landed at Bagram looking out toward the mountains.
This was a view of the mountains closer to the FOB (FOB stands for Forward Objective)
This is his buddy Tim. He was stationed there at Bagram.
This is also in the C-130 headed from Bagram to Sharana.
This was his new office before he took possession of it.
Day 1 they took a trip around the wire. This is looking out off the side of the mountain they were on.
Another view.
And yet another view.
This is on the FOB looking out on the backside of the airstrip looking at the living area.
And it’s a camel. He said they were giving camel rides.
This is their office during the initial inspection. That is why all the equipment is laying out, open.
This was his living quarters.
This was the other side of his living quarters.
This is out of the back of a Blackwater plane delivering supplies to remote FOB’s.
Another view.
Look they have a plane following them. He was delivering supplies too, not trying to shoot them down.
And yet another view.
Can you even imagine what this landscape looks like? He told me the sand over there they referred to as “moon dust” because it was so powdery fine. On a side note I’m cutting apart some of his old uniforms to make him a quilt and I’m still finding sand from over there, and those have been washed and back in the states since 2009.
And yet another view. If you look real hard kind of the middle left, you can see their plane shadow.
At this point he said he has his head hanging out the back of the airplane scared to death he was going to drop his camera.
He said this was a farming complex. He said that the farming complexes were surrounded by stone fences/walls.
Now this is Welch entering his room. If you notice the green thing, that’s an old parachute that he put over the roof of his living quarters. The white thing is a tube going to the AC to try and help cool his room.
This was a relax/play day of sorts. Very low key. They BBQ’ed, they sang, played BBall, Volleyball, just a day for them all to relax.
They were visited by many people including the St. Louis Rams Cheerleaders, Kid Rock, Toby Keith, Taylor Swift to name a few.
Boy doesn’t Welch look happy? And a little like Will Smith too…. Just sayin… Although when I met him and I said that he looked at me and knew I’d been talking to my husband. LOL.
Swiffer Wet Jets were their friends.
If you need to smoke… they have an area designated for you.
And if you need a nap, I guess just lay your head down in the office. See the large white screen above Welch? That’s a 6 foot screen where they played video games. Apparently they didn’t sleep at night, instead they played video games until it was time for work the next morning.
Sargent Welch got a promotion to Staff Sargent Welch.
This is hubby’s desk and those were his guitars he used to pass the time.
This was the C-130 that we rode from Bogram to Sharana.
And if boring wasn’t enough… see what he’s holding… it’s a magnet. Apparently they would throw it at the ceiling. And when they broke it, eh, they just taped it back together with medical tape.
Hubs being a “cool” guy hanging his feet out the back of the plane. Don’t worry, he was strapped in.
Yet again…
And this time he had company.
That is a small compound inside of a FOB that he visited.
There’s the corner and the mountainous view.
This he believes was at Bagram.
And K36 was the KHut they lived in for a year.
So Thank you for sharing these memories with us. I just find it so interesting to see other countries and sometimes can’t wrap my head around what it might have been like living there.
One of my favorite lines to spit out is, “We’re you a waiter/ess in your previous life. Now how I get there… Let’s say you just put food in your mouth at the exact time someone says something… that’s when I spit out that line because it never fails, a waiter/ess comes over and asks how everything is just as you put food in your mouth. I swear it is a conspiracy because they don’t want to bring you anything. They don’t want to know something is bad, etc. On the other hand, I was a waitress at one time and tried not to catch people like that but it didn’t always happen, so maybe it isn’t a conspiracy after all…
Maybe I’ll ponder that a while…. Then again, maybe not.
I was a waitress in college. The restaurant I worked at was actually in a horse arena. Our big time was when there was a show going on, otherwise it was SLOW. We had big horse sales going on though and when we did, the restaurant was hopping. It was a good 15 miles to town… and we had food right there. We actually had good food at that. In the kitchen it would get hot so anytime the cooks needed something we all raced for the walk-in to get it for them because it was 10-15 minutes of pure cool sensation! The cooks would from time to time get stressed out and almost have melt-downs but it all worked out.
We also had a fast food side to the restaurant. It consisted of a few select things and they would cook it all in advance to keep up with demand.
Our manager at first, was HORRIBLE. Her father owned the place so that’s how she became manager. She was a nice person but terrible managering skills! In fact one day she yelled at me and 2 other employees in front of about 25-30 customers. It embarrassed the crap out of us. We were doing our job but we weren’t “doing it her way” which actually slowed us down so she yelled at us. Yelled at us that we weren’t moving fast enough, yelled at us that we weren’t doing it her way, yelled at us that we gave the wrong order to the wrong people, even though in fact we had the right order to those people. We should have walked out and quit right then, but we stuck it out through the end of our shift and then 2 of the 3 of us quit. Our mother’s told us too. Our mother’s were on the evening shift in the restaurant and they were ready to walk out and quit but decided not to, they weren’t the ones yelled at but both mothers told us to quit. That was a Friday. Our mother’s said they were quitting Sunday night. They couldn’t leave the owner short staffed, he was a good owner.
Sunday morning both mothers got a phone call (we both still lived with our mothers) from the owner asking us to all 4 come in before the dinner shift started. He wanted to talk to us. We all agreed. The manager, his daughter, walked out of her shift on Saturday night and quit on him. Said she’d had it and didn’t want to do it anymore and left. The owner begged us all to come back to work for him and we did. I never had a problem with another manager.
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One night at the restaurant we got slammed. It was on the night of a sale so it was only to be expected, but everyone came in at once. It was a MAD HOUSE!!! It sucked! Katie and I were working again together. So were our mother’s that night. Plus there were 2 other waitresses. That was the best night in tips I’d ever had and truthfully I didn’t deserve it. To tell you how bad it was, I had one table of 12 people (by the time it was all said and done) and they waited over 2 hrs for a steak. We were that busy.
I had actually been at work that morning since 6:30 am. There was a new barn manager and he was a cocky arrogant little sh*t. He and I didn’t see eye to eye and I flat out got up in his face and yelled at him. If you knew me, you’d know I didn’t do that type of thing but he pissed me off royally. He was so mad at me he said he was going to the owner and going to get my little waitress a$$ fired. I said good luck with that. The owner told him he needed to respect me because I was one of the best waitresses he had and if he didn’t like it he could walk.
So by the time that night came around and the kitchen was already swamped, that punk sat at one of my tables and I had to wait on him. I walked up with my most professional voice, took his order brought it to him the works. Ha, he left me a tip almost what his bill was. Haha, take that punk 🙂
My other tables weren’t nearly as bad… although I was their form of entertainment. They of course kept drinking and were getting drunker and drunker. To keep them happy I think I bought them a round on the house and gave them a free appetizer. We did that for a lot of customers that night. It was insane!
So one point one of them asked me where their steak was. I told them this:
Well it goes like this… we had to go and buy the beef from the feed lot and that was all the way over in Timbucktoo. And do you know where Timbucktoo is? I don’t but that’s where we had to go. Then we had to trailer it here… all the way from Timbucktoo. While they were driving they got to thinking about what it would take to “harvest” that’s the new word for slaughter, the beef animal once we got it here. Well once we started that process we saw the leather and really thought it was beautiful so instead of cooking your steak in the back, we are making leather couches. Would you like to buy one.
I had not only my table but the 6 other tables surrounding mine drawn in with my story. I had the whole restaurant in an up-roar b/c I was getting louder and louder and wilder with my story. So then later Katie came out and was singing (she was a music major) and so the guys wanted us to get up on the bar and sing. I told them I couldn’t sing and they said ok, she sings you dance! That one table I got close to $100 tip from. Their bill came to like $150 ish.
Ok I’m sorry, I’ll quit rambling! Have a Wonderful Wednesday!
Peace, Love, and Entertaining Wait-staff