Happy [Your Holiday] and a Merry New Year!

Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006, 9:50 p.m.

From the week before Christmas through New Year's Day, we here at Fort Stewpid work on half-day schedules. We do our morning Physical Fitness Sessions of Gayness and Pain at 6:30, then work from nine to one, then go on our merry way as bluebirds chirp and rays of happy sunshine bathe our paths.

It's a fantastic build-up to my upcoming week and a half of Christmas leave, during which I intend to a) pretend the Army doesn't exist except when my bank account is involved, b) eat more food than is generally available to most third-world countries (what? It's available to me, isn't it? You want I should waste it?), and c) spend approximately eleventy kadrillion hours in the car. Among other things.

Yes, Husband and I are going to be doing a lot of driving this Christmas season -- Georgia to New York, New York to Missouri, Missouri back to Georgia -- in an effort to visit both of our families and still spend the holidays together. Life has been going along fairly peachy for us over the past few months, so we thought we'd put that peachiness to the test by enjoying each other's company for at least a solid 3,000 miles. Possible bones of contention include:

#1: My music, and the fact that it apparently "sucks" -- all 27.64 gigabytes of it -- even though my musical tastes range so widely that you'd think I was housing at least one person from every race, creed, gender and generation inside my head

#2: My driving, and the fact that it, too, "sucks," although I don't know why, seeing as how I always manage to get to my destination without injuring myself or anyone else -- it shouldn't matter if I arrive there with or without a destroyed vehicle

#3: Food, and, whether or not Taco Bell actually produces it

#4: Stinky farts, which Husband effortlessly produces, generally due to his unwavering position on #3

#5: #4 counts as two

It should be an interesting trip, is all I'm saying.

Although it's a few days late for me to start droning on and on about last weekend, I'm going to do so anyway, because that's when I took all my pictures, dammit.

Friday night, I drove down to northern Florida to visit a friend of mine who had sent out a plea for people to come help do some volunteer work down there for this organization, no matter how many run-on sentences it ultimately caused them to create afterward.

Our job ended up consisted of helping to demolish the inside of a house so that it could be rebuilt -- a project that necessitated the use of heavy objects, dirty objects, spiky objects and other construction-y items. The whole thing was fun and rewarding, and I only managed to make myself look like an idiot one time. That one time, of course, involved the spiky tool and a hidden underground water pipe, but ... well, we won't talk about that. I will just say that my Popeye-esque muscles proved to be a bit too much for that fragile concrete, and we'll leave that where it lies (lays? Whatever).

I did manage to redeem myself later, though. There was, on the premises, a wheelbarrow with a hole in it, and I wanted to use said wheelbarrow to transport a bunch of rocks from one location to another. Since my father raised me right, I approached one of the construction guys and asked him, "Do you have any duct tape that I could use to fix this wheelbarrow?"

"Well, sure!" he replied. "But if you can fix that wheelbarrow using only duct tape, I'll have to ask you to marry me."

"Ha!" I said, for I am known in certain circles as "FixEverythingWithDuctTapeGirl."

So he gave me the duct tape, and I fixed the wheelbarrow, and I had to turn down his marriage proposal, because one husband is actually plenty for me, believe it or not. And all was right in the world.

Observe my handiwork.

The organization had a couple photographers out at the site, so there are a veritable assload of photos of our adventures in demolition here, but here are some of them, in case oyu don't want to scroll through:

Forget "whistle while you work" -- we sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" while we work.

My friend's son and his Punk Rock Leaf-Blowing skillz.

This was taken moments before I became Gozer the Destructor.

We wound up the day o' manual labor by purchasing a gallon of sangria for eight dollars, drinking it, and rocking around the general vicinity of the Christmas "tree":

Merry Tropical Christmas!

My co-worker, Babymomma, is a broadcaster for Fort Stewpid's special cable news channel. She was having a particularly annoying day on Monday, and chose to take it out on her audience while shooting this week's segment: