It's not the heat...

The one saving grace about the weather here is of course that it's dry.  Usually.  The last few days we've had, I heard, 30% humidity, which of course feels like 300% to us.  It's mostly passed now.  On the upside, it did bring with it some cloud cover - also rare.

Clouds

In sports news, last night we got eliminated - decisively - in the semi-finals of our softball postseason.  The team that beat us is now something like 18-0 so the fact that they crushed us like a prom-night break-up hurts just a little less.  As I said before, after the season is over we'll still play pick-up games until R1 (rotation 1) goes home and R2 gets here.  Winter league unlikely though.

We were also saddened by the loss of our truck, nicknamed (by me and no one else, really) "The Beast."  We loaned it out to a friend who burst a radiator hose, kept driving (did I mention it's hot out here?) and eventually blew a head gasket.  I like using words like that but I have no idea what they mean.  Apparently head gaskets are important.  However after a few days we got a new truck, call sign (you guessed it) "The Beast II".  Still requires left-handed shifting, but now features prayer-powered ignition as well.

The Beast II.  Bigger.  Badder.  Purpler.

What else?  We went to the range again the other day.  You may wonder why we go to the range so much, since we're mainly staff weanies here.  The answer is that every range requires two safety personnel to run it and Gunny and I were the only two suckers to admit to having our range safety qualifications.  This one was bigger than the last few, as we were training some Marines who came in to take over some security functions.  I took some pictures:

Ready

Aim

 

Fire!

Assess

Pose

 A little individual mentoring

Marines: not so good with numbers

I also employed my newly formed squad of security Marines in an actual mission after having trained them for the last month or two.  Didn't take any pictures of that for obvious reasons, but I do have one of us on a bus heading over:

Game face.

As you can tell I've been walking around with my camera a bit more.  Caught another dust devil - they're really ubiquitous and harmless but they look impressive...

...don't they?

And that's about it really.  This week I meet with my new boss (old Chief of Staff retired, new one just got here).  Also start week 2 of about 4 to get my MCMAP green belt so watch what you say around me.  Other than that, not much exciting expected this week - but you never know.  Hope things are nice and dull where you are.

Sunset on the range