'97 WINS!!

to the victors go the spoils
delicious beverages out of the trophy cup

a toast

its not gay if there's champagne...wait, that makes no sense

wow dude, you're a shadow of the man I once knew

Kimbrough bet a grand on the game's money line...and won big.

I challenge you to find a more stout offensive line.

I'd love to sit here and bang out a great recap of the game, but, truth be told, I'm in way too much pain. The game came down to the final play, with 2000 having a chance to win it with 4th and goal from the 10...and then '97 said "NOPE".

Top 5 Reasons '97 Will NOT Lose This Year

Class of '97 HATES losing.
Class of 2000 is OUT OF SHAPE
We have warned the refs of their cheating ways (holding)
We have better fans.
2000 is totally gay for each other.

Showdown Week '08

Ahhh, it is that time of year again.  A time when families come together to give thanks, a time for reflection and joy, a time for...The Showdown.

Yes, you are correctly asking yourself, "When will these over the hill, never-that-good-at-sports in the first place  guys realize that they need to hang up the cleats once and for all and stop these yearly shenanigans?"

The answer- that's a stupid question.

Yes, once again the class of 1997 (yeah...11 years ago, last decade/millenium) and the class of 2000 will square off in the octagon (octagon = LCHS high school) for the 8th annual playing of the Thanksgiving Showdown Classic.  Once again, I will be playing for the class of '97, who miraculously find themselves trailing in the all-time series 4-3.  How?  Lord only knows.

I'm actually a little scared for 2000 this year.  Mike Schmitt thinks I forgot about that cheap shot block he threw on me last year, well I didn't forget, and I DID hear that he's playing QB this year...Mike, I know you're reading this...

If you can't come by tickets for the game due to the sell-out, don't fret, the highlights will be shown on ESPN 8 'The OCHO' at midnight following the game.

Watch highlights from the last game '97 recognizes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86YdgoBGf3g

Just a few pics from this past weekend.  The highlight was a 'Big Ten Pub Crawl', which took place in Hermosa, and had almost 200 people sign up for it.  It was great.  The top photo is a shot of the push up contest that took place on the pier.  I did...about...5 pushups before I decided that in order to win this thing I was going to have to put out a lot more effort than I was willing to in my Wild Turkey affected state.  Clay, on the other hand, was absolutely willing to, and he and some girl went for about 10 straight minutes, neither giving in (until she collapsed).  The third picture is a shot of some random Wisco-dude lighting a shot of Wild Turkey on fire for me...why this is ever considered a good idea, at 10 am no less, is beyond my sober self.  The bottom pic is a shot of some of the guys out celebrating Mike's passing of the Bar Exam.  Mike, Kristi and Katherine all found out the good news on Friday night.  I am now officially above the law.

Bombs Away

So today I go to the gym with my workout crew.  We spend the better part of an hour doing a workout that makes all three of us want to throw up.  At one point I moved to the door thinking it was actually going to happen.  It didn't.  We 'manned up' and powered through.

After gathering ourselves on the floor of the gym for a few minutes, we decide to start walking back to the barracks.  So we're walking and talking about how I'm the only one in the group who has yet to get a muscle-up (if you don't know what one is, just let me say, they suck).  My buddy Tim makes a joke about how he's going to start a blog and call it "Muscle Up Quest- Jake Wood's struggle to join the club".  We're laughing about that when I walk under a telephone pole.

Somewhere up above me, a conversation takes place-

Bird 1- "I bet you $50 bucks you won't crap on that tall dude's shoulder"

Bird 2- "Double it and not only will I do it once, I'll do it twice, and did I mention I ate a week old burrito for breakfast?"

Bird 1- "Deal"

So there I am, trying to explain how I'm going to join the muscle-up club on Monday, still a little nauseaus from the workout, and I get this warm splat-splat-splat on my shoulder, then my forearm, then my leg.  I instantly know what it is.  I'm not sure I've ever been crapped on by a bird, but once you feel the sensation, you don't even have to look and you know.

I looked down and started to lose whatever was in my stomach.  Needless to say, I was on a street corner on the middle of a Marine base, MAKING A SCENE.  I only had about 100 more yards to go to get to my room, but the whole time was spent lamenting my luck and trying to hold down lunch.

Survivor Corps

If you read this blog last year, you may remember the fundraising that I helped my friend Dave Folwell do to support the Wounded Warriors Project.  It was a subject that, after having been in Iraq, I felt very passionately about, and through this medium we were able to raise over $5,000 (when our goal had been a modest $1,500).

Well, the need to help wounded vets hasn't subsided.  I obviously didn't write anything about it while in Afghanistan this year, but suffice it to say that 2/7 suffered many, many wounded Marines.  Unfortunately, many of them were personal friends of mine, guys that were in my old platoon from Golf Company, guys that I often wrote about on here.  Many of those Marines are still in the hospital and the majority will have some form of disability for life.

Below is an excerpt from the Survivor Corps website, take the time to read it and visit their site.  Its important.

The successful reintegration of returning service members is an issue that will have a long-lasting impact on American society, and may become the single defining struggle facing this new generation of veterans. Survivor Corps and its partners are determined to avoid the mistakes made when veterans returned from Vietnam, which resulted in tens of thousands of post-war suicides and over 200,000 men and women living on the streets. To head off this tragic outcome, Survivor Corps will build peer support programs at the community level that will bring service members and veterans together for mutual support and encourage both individual responsibility and collective action to help others in need.

Survivor Corps is offering an alternative “treatment” that can be made readily available in all communities, regardless of proximity to traditional military or govern¬ment centers of support. Our approach is nimble enough to address the needs of individual survivors, while still broad enough to build a coalition of survivors and service providers working to effect long-term positive change. This new program will help the recovery and reintegration of hundreds of thousands of returning U.S. service members at a critical time for them and their country. http://survivorcorps.org/NetCommunity/returningtroops/

Reading List

Since so many people sent me books while I was in Afghanistan, I figured I'd try to compile a list of the one's I can remember reading.  This list comes nowhere near representing all the books that I received, only the ones I was able to keep out of the claws of everyone else in my tent.  It seemed that everytime mail would make it through to us, guys would gather around my rack and books seemed to instantly disappear out of my grasp.

So, in no particular order-

Term Limits- Vince Flynn

Transfer of Power- Vince Flynn

Memorial Day- Vince Flynn

Protect and Defend- (you guessed it) Vince Flynn

Dear Mom, A Sniper's Vietnam- Joe Ward

The Killer Angels- Michael Shaara

Gods and Generals- Jeff Shaara

The Last Lecture- Randy Pausch

Endor's Game- Orson Scott Card

Somebody's Gotta Say It- Neil Boortz

To Kill a Mockingbird-Harper Lee

Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen

Rumor of War- Phil Caputo

The Things They Carried- Tim Obrien

On Combat- Col. David Grossman

Bringing Down the House, How Six Students Took Vegas for Millions-  Ben Mezrich

The Places Between- Rory Stewart

Tom Sawyer- Mark Twain

Huck Finn- Mark Twain

Ronin, A Marine Sniper Platoon in Iraq- Mike Stuart

Shooter- Jack Coughlin

Kill Zone- Jack Coughlin

Into Thin Air-  Jon Krakaur

Fight Club- Chuck Palahniuk

Angels and Demons- Dan Brown

Wicked- Gregory Maguire

Militant Tricks- H. John Toole

Macroeconomics, 4th Edition

GMAC GMAT Prep

That's about all I can come up with right now off the top of my head.  As you can see, Vince Flynn is my guilty pleasure, his character Mitch Rapp makes me want to rock out in the CIA.  I actually did read 'Pride and Prejudice', after convincing myself and my tent mates that the combination of Jane Austen knowledge and rubik's cube solving ability would make me a force with the ladies...if they love lame English lit and happen to have a rubik's cube laying around.  A lot of the books I had read before- Angels and Demons, Things They Carried, and a few more, but were good enough to read again when books were scarce.  Wicked was surprisingly good in my opinion, and I think I'll pick up the sequel soon.  The Shaara books are awesome accounts of the Civil War, and I brought home a few more that people sent and plan on reading them soon.  The Macroeconomics book was my attempt to relearn something I probably should have learned better the first time around.

There it is, off the top of my head.  If you don't see a book that you sent, chances are I either brought it home in my incredibly over-packed sea bag, or another guy grabbed it and utilized it.  

Thanks again for shipping me my own private war zone library.

Crazy Irish

**The above video depicts a series of firefights and explosions.  Nothing graphic is depicted, but be aware of what you are watching.**

This video was sent to me by one of the Irish Ranger Co. guys that we had the privilege of working with.  Our teams often worked in support of the Brits, and this video depicts what they went through for the week that they occupied a patrol base just outside our FOB.  The video in the below post, where I'm commentating, probably took place while this base was under attack.  You'll see that the Brit's, especially the Irish, love a good fight, and they love to do it in comfortable style- notice the gym shorts and flip flops.  Don't be fooled though, these guys were good, and we were privileged to work with them.

This is a video of me doing a little commentary on a firefight that was taking place just outside our little base, I think in this one a British patrol was taking contact from the Taliban about 400 meters outside our walls.  Unfortunately, this was a fairly common occurance where we were.  I'm literally sitting on my cot, with the British 'tower' in the background.  That tower had machine guns coming out of machine guns, resting on top of more machine guns, and the Brits loved firing all of them.

Hero Workout of the Day

CrossFit Website

Some of you may be familiar with the cult workout community named "CrossFit". The theory behind crossfit is 'general physical preparedness', which is achieved through a workout of the day posted to the website nightly. Basically, the workouts are a giant haze-fest, and tax your body through every channel possible- endurance, strength, power, strength-endurance, balance, etc., using conventional weights, kettlebells, pullup bars, good old roads, medicine balls, etc. One day you could be asked to do 400 meter sprints followed by 50 body weight squats for a total of 6 rounds as fast as you can, the next day you might be asked to do as many rounds as possible in 30 minutes of 225 pound deadlifts and 20 pullups.

The cool thing about it is that the crossfit community is packed with military members, many of them from the special operations community, firefighters, police officers and the like. While most of the standard workouts are named female names (like hurricanes...which represents the disaster that you feel like afterwards), many of them have been named in honor of fallen service members from Iraq and Afghanistan. That's why I'm talking about this today.

Yesterday was Veteran's Day, so in honor of all that have fallen, my workout partners and I substituted what's called a Hero Workout instead of the prescribed "Fight Gone Bad" workout.

The workout is called the 'Murphy', and it's named in honor of Lt. Michael Murphy, who was a Navy SEAL team commander in Afghanistan, and killed while leading a 4 man sniper team on a mission. The story surrounding the event has been captured in an excellent book "The Lone Survivor", written by, as you may have guessed, the only member of the 4 man team to survive, Marcus Lutrell.

The team inserted near their objective at night and humped over and through a mountain range to arrive at an overwatch spot overlooking a village in which a high value target was suspected of staying. During the following morning, a shepherd boy came across their position. The team took him alive, and facing a dilemma regarding what to do with him, decided to release him alive, knowing that everyone in the area sympathized with the Taliban and that the boy would notify the Taliban of their presence. Within an hour of releasing the boy, the team came under a fierce attack by a number of fighters estimated at over 150. A horrendous firefight ensued, with the SEAL team losing radio communications with their headquarters. Fighting to reach an extraction point for pickup, every member of the team was wounded by both grenade shrapnel and gunfire. At one point, roughly 60 minutes after initially coming under attack, Lt. Murphey took the team's satellite phone and, realizing that it was their only chance to communicate with headquarters, climbed on top of a mound of rocks, in plain view of the Taliban fighters, and placed a call to his superiors. While talking he was shot through the arm that was holding the phone, he picked up the phone with his other hand and continued to relay his message. He was then shot in the back, but he continued to communicate his team's situation until he finally succumbed to his wounds.

For his actions that day, Lt. Michael Murphy was awarded the Medal of Honor, the other three members of his team including Danny Dietz and Matt Axelson, both of whom died, received the nation's second highest award, the Navy Cross.

So in honor of all those who have fallen, we threw ourselves into a "Murph"-

Complete the following in consecutive order for time-

Sprint 1 mile
100 pullups
200 pushups
300 squats
Sprint 1 mile

Even when you're about to vomit on yourself after that, you find it hard to complain, it's obvious that things can always be worse.

The 11th Hour, of the 11th Day, of the 11th Month...

Today, as many of you know, is Veteran's Day. My email box has already been flooded with thank yous and God bless yous, and I want you to know that I sincerely appreciate it. Being a veteran is certainly something that I am proud of, my whole life I looked at veterans with sincere admiration. Every time they were asked to stand to be honored at sports games, or when they marched down Main Street for every parade, I looked at them and thought about the things they had done, the things they had seen. I was too young to truly understand what it meant to fight for your country, I thought it was all parades and uniforms and funny hats with ribbons on them. I thought it would be neat to watch a movie some day and be able to say, "I was there, they're making a movie about what I did."

I guess part of that hasn't changed. I still look at veterans of Korea and Vietnam, even the occasional WWII vet, with admiration and awe. Wow, they were in a REAL war. I still feel like a kid when I see an old man with a "Frozen Chosin" hat, complete with embroidered campaign ribbons, or when I pass the motorcycle rider on the interstate wearing the Vietnam Veterans Riding Club leather jacket. It's weird for me to think that some people out there put me in that category. I guess technically I belong in it. By definition I'm a veteran, (in fact, we in 2/7 can now jokingly say that we're combat veterans x2 because of Afghanistan). I have my campaign medals and combat action ribbons, but for some reason they seem so insignificant.

But I guess it's like what every veteran ever says.

"It's no big deal, just doing my job."
"I only did it because all my friends were, I'm nothing special."

Whether it makes sense or not, whether we admit it or not, we only do it because the previous generations are our heroes. I can sit here with all honesty and tell you that what I have done pales in comparison to those that went before me.

So, with that, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for all the thank yous. But today, don't waste them on me, I hear people's appreciation every day. My generation's warriors are the current flavor of the month. Make today a reason to call your Vietnam vet uncle and thank him, or your grandfather that spent weeks freezing in a fox hole in Korea. When you're walking down the street tomorrow, don't cross over to the other side to avoid the man holding the cardboard sign that reads "Veteran needs your help". Walk by, smile, and say hello and thank you.

So to all those who have gone before me, Thank You, and I hope that our efforts make you proud.

But fame is theirs - and future days
On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise;
Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead -
"These for their country fought and bled."
~Philip Freneau

River Time

About the only luxury that we had where we were based was a manmade canal that came off of the Helmand River and ran right through the center of our camp. The river came down from the mountains, so even when it was 125 degrees outside, you could always count on the river to cool you off. When we first started operating, we would spend every single hour of the day that wasn't on missions down at the river. It had a pretty swift current, so guys would jump/dive/flip off of the bridge going over it and then let the current carry them down about 100 yards to a second bridge that we would grab and use to pull ourselves up and out.

Everything centered around the river. Bottles of water so hot you can't drink them? Take them to the river and float em for a while. Need to do laundry? Go to the river. Smell like patrol? Go bathe in the river. Need to work on that tan? River. Used to swim in high school? Jump in and try to swim against the current. Everything centered around it.

That everything included Man-Love Thursday. This one is kind of strange to explain and even stranger for people who've never been there to understand. Here it goes. The Afghan culture is extremely different from ours (gross understatement). I won't get into specifics, but lets just say it is not uncommon for men to openly lust after one another. There were many awkward moments where the Afghan soldiers would sit there and blatantly watch Marines bathe in the river, and many times they would have the interpreters let certain Marines know that they had admirers. It was weird. Real weird. And for whatever reason, it got worse every Thursday. Never quite firgured that one out.

John and Josh, displaying the champion crab that they caught. Yes, yes they did eat it.
Tim doing laundry down at the river
This is the bridge you had to grab onto to pull yourself out of the river. If you missed this guy you'd float right out of the base.
Floating down the world's most dangerous water park.
This is the structure that we'd dive off of into the river, it was about 6ft deep at this point. The laundry and bathing was done in the background of the photo. If you look close enough, you'll see a little shack hovering over the river. That's where the Afghan soldiers would go to the bathroom, yep, just down stream from where we were bathing. Oh, and they'd watch each other use it. Weird.
Just hanging out.

This is a video of an ANA soldier that walked up to Tim while he was showering at a one of the smaller bases we worked at. The ANA took the hose and wanted to bathe Tim for him. Totally normal.

I'm impressed

Our Humble Home

The sweeeet tent we lived in. MTV Cribs style.
An intense game of chess. We spent the deployment becoming chess, spades, and rubik's cube masters.
Doing some good ol' home cooking. Taking down that damned corn one cob at a time.
Notice our tent area to the left.
Hanging out in my little corner of the tent after a night mission. Notice the cot...I hated that thing. If you sent me any unique care package items, you might see them in there (ie. SOCK MONKEY, CBS sports banner, Camp Randall post card, red chick sunglasses, etc.)

Well, I guess next up would be our actual living area. There's REALLY not a whole lot to write about here... Let's see- no water, no AC, no toilets, occasional power, lots of bugs/mice/cats, and nonstop explosions right outside our front door. Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

We shared a fairly large patrol base with a British unit and some ANP/ANA (Afghan National Police, Army). Those units had been established there for some time, so they were occupying the buildings located there. We, on the other hand, were just thrown in there, so we had to erect squad sized tents with sand bag walls. These aren't the type of tents that were fun to pitch and sleep in in your back yard when you were young. These are miserable, sauna-like, not enough space for a squad and all it's gear substitutions. We had 12 snipers in ours, and if you have ever seen a modern day sniper, you know they have more gear than a NASA mission. Space was a premium.

We made the most of our space, building a 'movie theater' out of wooden pallets and ponchos, complete with benches, a laptop PC stand, and retractable roof for blocking light. At night we could bring the roof down and watch 'The Notebook' underneath a beautiful starry sky. Trust me, that last one actually happened...awkward.

We covered the gravel floor with plywood sheets, which, at first, seemed like a great idea. That is, until we figured out that that lingering smell in our tent was being caused by the decaying mice that we had crushed underneath the wood. Sweet.

We had some combat engineers come out at one point and bring a generator. It was great. We had power for all of 36 hours before it was fried. It takes a lot of juice to power up 120 iPods. We didn't get power for a few weeks after that, but eventually they brought in a bigger generator, that made life awesome. Movie night was back in business, and it started with a 6 night Star Wars I-VI marathon. How nerdy, right?

They gave us standard GI cots to sleep on. Awesome, cots. They'd be sweet if they weren't engineered around a Marine that stands 6'1". Did I mention I'm 6'6". I spend most of my deployment with bruised shins from resting on the metal bar underneath them. Why not just sleep on the floor, you ask? Did I mention the rats, bugs and stray cats? Screw that.

Let's see, what else... Oh yeah, the constant booms. We lived in what often sounded like Stalingrad. It was not uncommon to be woken up by an explosion only 400 yards away that you could feel in your chest. Or to be playing cards in the middle of the day and here a firefight start raging close enough that tracers were snapping over the wall out into nothing. You can ask my sister Sarah about that one, as we were on the phone one night when a British call sign got ambushed only 300 yards outside the front gate, that phone call got awkward real fast.

Me: "yada, yada, yada, so Brett Favre is a traitor" (gun fire erupts)
Sarah: "Jake, is that gunfire"
Me: "ummm, yeah, hold on" ( I look over the HESCO wall, see what looks like a laser light show)
"Don't worry Sarah, you have to believe me, I'm behind a wall and in NO danger"
Sarah: "Jake that sounds really bad"
Me: "It's the Brits, don't worry, most of the shooting is them, this happens all the time, they aren't attacking the base"
Sarah: "ooookay" (fire picks up to insane rate)
Me: "Sis, I better go see what's going on, I'll call you later"

That pretty much sums up our humble abode.

A Close Look

This gives a good idea of what Sangin looks like east of the green zone. Notice the compound walls, some of them walling in nothing, some of them walling in small family farms that could be watered from wells dug deep into the ground. A lot of these compounds were empty, and even those that had homes in them were often abandoned due to the violence in the area. Those walls were usually 10-15 feet tall, and at least 1.5-2 ft thick. You would think that being made of mud they wouldn't be too sturdy, but I saw them stand up to many a heavy barrage.

This is us operating in the green zone in conjunction with a British unit. Notice the canal and the compound wall adjacent to it.

This kind of shows how Sangin becomes instantly arid the moment you step out of the green zone. You can see the mountains in the background that walled Sangin in on both sides, east and west.

Here's a look into the green zone. You can see all the tree lines, which line the canals that criss-cross the whole area, and form natural borders for tribal farms, which as you can see in this photo were busy growing the world's tallest corn. Compounds in the green zone usually housed entire extended families or tribes...aka taliban militias.

Sangin, Afghanistan

This is a Google Earth image of Sangin, Afghanistan, which was the city in the Helmand Valley province where my unit operated for 7 months while deployed. The imagery on Google Earth is amazing, so as I recount stories I will not discuss particulars about locations and landmarks as they pertained to missions or significant events, however, if you are interested in knowing what my little slice of heaven looked like for 2008, check it out.

The river you see in the northwest part of the image is the Helmand River, which runs north to south through the province and provides water for the entire area, in addition to powering the Kajaki hydroelectric dam to the north. To the east of the river is the green zone. The green zone consisted of family/ tribal operated farming communities. The primary crops for the area are opium in the spring, along with watermelon, wheat and other food staples, and corn in the summer and fall. The corn there was insane, growing to over 13 ft tall. The entire green zone is criss-crossed with man made irrigation ditches that have no rhyme or reason, creating a nightmare for foot patrols. Bordering the green zone is the 'urban' area of Sangin, with the market butting directly up to it, and family compounds spreading eastward into the desert and wadi areas. The compounds consisted of 13-15ft mud walls, enclosing the family land. Inside these enclosed ares you would commonly find nothing. Nada. Sometimes there was a mud dwelling, but more often than not you found that the family had simply decided to parcel off their land with a medieval fortress wall.

There were no paved roads, barely any electricity, all water was pulled from wells dug into the water table, raw sewage was common in the streets, the bazaar was always bustling with commerce, but the compounds were mostly abandoned. This is Sangin, and it is not a Travel Channel vacation destination.

Rock the Vote

If you have read this blog for a while you know that I try my best not to let my personal politics read through in my posts. I do this for a whole host of reasons, but primarily I think that it's because I find my own politics constantly evolving. Going from high school to college, to the Marine Corps and on to Iraq and Afghanistan, times of not collecting pay checks and periods where I do, my views are changing all the time. There are issues that I was once so passionate about that I now find myself completely indifferent on, and issues that I at one time didn't even know existed that now infuriate me. I try not to write about these things because I don't want to ever come back to my own writing and think to myself, "what juvenile, unimformed, closed-minded thinking".

Enough on that. The purpose of this post is for me to explain to you how important tomorrow is.
Tomorrow is important because it's an opportunity to demonstrate once again that the greatest experiment in the history of politics is proving a better way to govern. We all have our reasons for voting for whomever we cast for tomorrow, but our differences and vision for the direction of this country will be decided in a voting booth and not on a battlefield, and after having served and fought on battlefields and in countries where historically differences are settled with blood, it is refreshing to return at this crucial time in our country's history. I can't imagine too many people who read this blog are indifferent to the outcome of the election, but don't just hold yourself to a high standard of civic duty, hold your friends, neighbors and relatives to that same standard. Don't take no for an answer, and certainly don't let them tell you that their vote won't make a difference. Because in Afghanistan, not being able to make a difference means not having any ammo, and they would kill (no pun intended) to have the chance to change things with only a vote.

Go Rock the Vote.

I suppose that I should let everyone know that I am alive, that I survived the welcome home weekend. I managed to put in a half-way decent showing, much better than last year, when I bowed out pretty early on consecutive nights.

Halloween of course did not disappoint. My costume left something to be desired. It's kind of hard to throw something together last minute. I went as a Dream Team basketball player, using an old retro Jordan jersey, circa 1992. The biggest advantage it had was that it wasn't a sweatbox, unlike Mike's costume, a Chewbacca outfit.

On to Saturday. Let's see, normally I would analyze the Badgers' game, but I'm not even gonna go there. Pathetic. Enough said. Around noon I swapped my Wisco attire for my classic USC Law shirt, once again assuming the identity of a 3rd year law student worrying about the BAR (kidding). The crew headed up to the Coliseum and did some Homecoming tailgating. I then attended the game, and went on to witness an absolute dismantling. I left at half, the score was 42-0. I wonder what it would feel like to see the Badgers do that someday.

Sunday brought the promise of the Packers knocking off the last undefeated team in the league. It looked like it was going to happen there for a while, and as things were heading into overtime, Joe's neighbor knocked on the door and threatened to call the cops on us. Whoops, thin walls.

Now I'm just back in 29 Palms, wasting my days away waiting for the next weekend. It can't come soon enough.