I'M ALIVE!

Well, seven months later, I'm alive, I'm well, I'm oh-so-wonderfully bitter. Did I mention spiteful? There's that too. Oh, how awesome it was to go to Afghanistan. Todays forecast? Dusty with a slight chance of rockets. Sounds like fun, sign me up again. But, thankfully, we won't be seeing a repeat of that shoddy network programming. Instead, we return to our usual pandemic of misbegotten writings and piss-poor humor, not to mention the heavily angst-ridden rants. Oh, to be the emo kid.

But enough of that. I'm well, alive, and elated!

In all honesty, though, I was literally shaking as we came into Canada. Several hours and I couldn't control it. I'm not sure, but it's something I can't describe properly. All I could think was "it's over." Not to say that what I had gone through was anything too, too stressful. There was stress, it's just I can't say that I had it any more worse off than any number of other people, because I sometimes think I had it better off in some cases.

On the flight back, about an hour out from Quebec City International Airport, we had a CF-18 (F-18) fighter escort. Was pretty sweet since they were nearly touching wingtips with the Airbus A330 I was on. The bad part was touching down in Quebec and spending an hour and a bit clearing through customs. Not a fan of doing that. "Do you have anything to declare?" "Why yes! I have a stripped down AK-47, a couple PKM's, an RPG-7, some fragmentation grenades. Nothing too serious, but you know."

Back on the plane, flew to Winnipeg where we hit dirt, grabbed our kit, handed in some paperwork and on the bus for home. Got a police escort out of Winnipeg, which was nice -- made getting out of the city quick and painless. Got back with time to spare. Even if it was oh-dark-stupid in the morning. I'm still tired from being awake so long, and that was a couple days ago.