Well, kids, another week has flown right by, and the clock on my Vista sidebar tells me that I have a mere 57 days left in The Brown Zone. Hard to believe—it seems like just a few weeks ago that that number was at 176 days.

Life continues to ramble on here for our little company of soldiers. Tomorrow our outgoing company commander CPT Allen comes to visit us and introduce us to the incoming commander, who takes over as Allen completes his tour. The news of this visit led to a flurry of activity, scrubbing floors, cleaning canisters, double-checking the expiry dates on all of the pharmacy items (all okay!) and generally getting spiffed-up for this visit.

The clinic was inordinately dead this week, until today when things finally picked up. I don’t mind a little “down-time” which gives me a chance to read up a bit on oncology, etc, but when we have a few days in-a-row in which the medics are sitting around the computer table, deliberately annoying each other out of sheer boredom, it gets a bit old. I am beginning to wonder if the very hot weather which has come on with the commencement of summer is the culprit here. If so, will the next couple of months be equally uneventful in the clinic? If this gets to be a pattern, we will start a series of lectures, to keep the medics learning and the docs exercising our not-yet-Alzheimered noggins.

We had an interesting little controversy this week, as my previously-mentioned good friend Barney, the big purple Chevy truck, developed a nice vertical gash in his bumper. (That’s right: we had the truck for all of a week, less than 500 kilometers and already a maimed bumper. This is why we can’t have nice things…) The kicker to this was that the offending driver of said Barnified vehicle, whomever he/she might have been, has not yet owned up to their mistake, which has left our administrative officer 1LT Coleman in an understandably foul mood.

In fact, when the fender-bender was announced to the soldiers (along with the new, onerous rules for checking out and logging in the vehicle), 1LT Coleman got an earful from the lower enlisted about how the car may have actually been hit while parked, and perhaps none of the TMC staff were to blame. This is a good theory, except that the dent in the bumper is, to any reasonable inspector, that of backing into a pole or some similar vertical object. When the medics inspected the damage for themselves, many of them still insisted (and even developed elaborate theories) that something had hit the truck rather than the other way around. 1LT Coleman started to wonder if they were right, but SFC Langer and I held fast–one glance at the bumper and it was obvious. But since the doubt had been cast, I made a mental note to look around the parking area at the cans (not really a parking area at all—just some rocks outside of the barriers) and see if I could find the point of impact.

When I got home from work that day, it took all of two minutes to find the very light pole which had been hit, replete with purple paint and a fresh-appearing (read: not yet dusty) flesh wound scraping beyond the outer, dull-appearing galvanized metal, into a more sparkly layer below. Voila! My scar! Who needs NCIS, when we have amateur crime scene investigator, MAJ Erik Rupard, on the job? No one, that’s who! (Still no perp though. Might have to get David Caruso to cross-examine each of us.)

By the way, for those of you who are (rightly) concerned: Casper, the white trailblazer, is alive, well, and undented. And Barney, though bloodied a bit, remains unbowed, and has a (mostly) dent-free bumper thanks to SPC Hert and his handy mallet.