e-mail from Lincoln

Something happened yesterday that I've decided to write to you about. In someway it's funny yet potential scary. It left me with the willies when it occurred to me what happened.

Anyway, here we live in what would be considered somewhat nice accommodations with hard floors, walls and full doors. A big improvement over tents, even tents with hard wood floors which many of our deployments have. We even have a bathroom down the hall which is just unheard of while deployed as far to often we would normally have to walk out to a modular bathroom unit of simple latrines. Anyway for all intensive purposes we have it made with real beds, lockers and air conditioning. Who could ask for more when it comes to living conditions. Granted we have six beds in a room sized for no more than four and don't really have much privacy but privacy is overrated anyway, right.

So with all of these nice accommodations I got up yesterday morning, got dressed in my exercise cloths left the building and went and worked out. I tend to do this daily from 0500 to 0600 as It helps keep me young and trim looking, ha ha right, it also wakes me up. After exercising I went back to our room and proceeded to shower and get dressed. Now you know how I am back home as I seldom turn on any lights while I'm getting ready so as not to disturb anyone else. I get most of my stuff ready the night before which makes it easy to find in the morning in a semi dark state. We have one individual in our room who works a swing shift and doesn't come in until 0400 and is only just getting to his REM sleep so we all try hard to be courteous.

Anyway, I showered, get dressed and left for work. Sounds simple right? Anyway, after about ten minutes of work I felt a tickle in my boot. What could be wrong, was my long lost athlete's foot flaring up or something else.The tickle continued and started to really bother me. So I took my other boot and stomped on my toe area of the ticklish boot over and over to no avail as it's hard to cause any true damage to your toes when wearing steel toed boots as you know. Anyway, the tickling continued until I could take it no longer, I tore at my laces and ripped my boot off with a goal of quenching my itch and jumped when a large beetle came trotting out obviously excited to be free from its confines.

You guessed it I had the willies. We are taught over and over to bang our boots together when camping or in the wilds but why do we have to do it when we live in such nice accommodations. How did such a beetle get into the building in the first place, it was a big beetle by the way, close to the size of my thumb. I wondered why I didn't feel it when I slipped my foot in the boot in the first place. Anyway, a bit nerve racking which ensured the act of banging my running shoes and boots together this morning before donning them. I guess we all learn from our life's experiences and hopefully live longer in the process, It's a good thing the critter wasn't something worse.

Check your shoes before you put them on is the new morning requirement.