The Surreal Life

I don't even know if it's on the air anymore, but that was the best title for a cracked out show in history.  Surreal Life. 

I had a dose of it today.  Surreality.  Where the beginning and the ending get a little warped around the edges, time does its strange little dance, and before we realize it, the world has...moved. 

Took the company chopper for the first time today.  This particular project we've got over here, this roads thing?  We have our own chopper.  That's right, friends and neighbors, we done got ourselves a whirlybird.  Have to for all the ground we're expected to cover. 


That's not the surreal part.  In a country where road travel is hazardous most of the time, and that's when they AREN'T trying to blow you up, and where road conditions are less than ideal, rotary winged aircraft make perfect sense. 

What doesn't was the fact that it's an Mi-8 Hip.  For those of you still reading who actually had a date in high school, that's an old Soviet built aircraft.

Our pilots were Russian, or some variant thereof.  

So to review:  I'm working on a U.S. government project, getting on a Soviet helicopter in Afghanistan. 

Savor the irony. 

Spent the day mainly flying and meeting with an Air Force captain from one of the PRTs that are in the sector where we're building a road.  Dropped some engineers off to do some Quality Assurance/Quality Control on the road, then we choppered off to our meeting. 

Nothing too eventful, which is both good and bad.  Good, because nothing blew up.  Bad, because the meeting was as a lot of meetings are:  kind of without a real focal point.  However, great stuff happening out there in the hinterlands.  Looking forward to being a part of the work at some point in the hopefully not too distant future.