The long haul has begun. BOOOOO!!!
Karly left this morning at about 9AM to head back to Kansas for the night and tomorrow she'll be heading back to Iowa. The long haul unfortunately means I won't seen my lovely wonderful beautiful sweet wife for about a month. I know, I know, I should count myself lucky that it's only a month and that I'm not heading to theater but I don't care how long the time is, wether it's 2 weeks or 2 years, it still isn't fun. (BTW Karly says hi!!!)
So on to the pictures. This is a beginning of the tribute to my first couple of months as a veterinarian. Yes that's right these are pictures from the first few months of my life as a veterinarian. NO I am definitely not a normal veterinarian and nor have I really had any desire to be a "normal" vet dating back to my second year of veterinary school. Since then I have persued more of a preventative medicine and herd health slant on vet med. The whole fixing broken animals just doesn't do it for me. I digress.

The first picture is of myself on the left and two buddies after a nice 2 hour session of learning buddy carries. These are the carries that you would use to evacuate a soldier (or anyone) out of harms way without the use of a litter, gurney, or some kind of wheeled object. Needless to say we got extremely dirty that day and guess what else. There were absolutely NO showers after this day. We were in the field and the streams were dried up so all we had was a sink (which was nice) to be able to shave and wash our face (thank God for that one).

The second picture is myself (though I don't look like me to me, the glasses throw me off). But that's me with my coffee cup (canteen cup) full of coffee and my trusty M-16 by my side.

Third picture: wandering in the wilderness. Actually it wasn't soo much wilderness in my opinion. There were way tooo many trails for driving and hiking which were well marked on our maps, and the vegetation wasn't very dense so doing land navigation on this 3k by 2k course was in my opinion very easy. Though with only a map and compass to go by there were quite a few people who took quite a long time to get their four points in the daylight and another four after dark (9% illumination). Here's my time to boast and say that I got all 8 points correct and on the night land navigation which started at 8:30PM I was back in bed by 9:45PM (the last group came in at 12:45AM) and we had to go all the way to the farthest end of the course.

And the last picture is of the lovely and wonderful combatives instruction. Yes a veterinarian needs to know how to defend himself when doing hand to hand combat.

By the way, I didn't bring my good camera or any other camera to the field so these are all pictures from my buddies so feel free to use them as you please.