Day shift is quite the experience! My day started out with a mouse sighting! The mouse was in the corner where my boss’s area is located, which also happens to be in the vicinity of the coffee maker. While deep in intellectual conversation with the intelligence NCO, she stops and says, “Oh, there’s a mouse.” I look over and there is a mouse running across the corner behind our boss’s desk. He is slightly larger than a field mouse with brown fur and black eyes. I stomp my feet to make him go away before someone discovers and kills him. Apparently he ran to the XO’s office because a short while later we heard a feminine scream and the stomping of feet coming from his office. I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit when he came down to ask us if we had seen a mouse. We now have sticky mouse traps along the walls of the office.
A little later in the morning, I noticed an abundance of local workers around the building and I went to speak with their escort to be social but mainly to be nosey. They had four guys there to rewire some lights and an additional guy to spray paint windows. I got extra curious about the windows being blacked out seeing as they are about 20 feet high. The XO wants to cut back on the dust in the building and this was his solution. I can’t make this up. He believes the dust comes through our Plexiglas windows and that spray paint will resolve this issue. Not only did we lose all our natural light, but when the workers came to paint his windows, he said, “No thanks, I’m good.”
I had to shake my head and walk away. I walked down the hall away from my office and towards the MWR room. The MWR room is where we store excess items from care packages. In this room you can find hotel bottles of shampoo, popcorn, candy, cards, coffee, and anything else that comes in these wonderful care packages we receive and share with each other. As I was walking past this small room, I smelled the most wonderful smell in the world, baking bread!
My curiosity got the best of me and I walked into the closet of an MWR room to find a bread maker. There were 24 minutes separating me from a hot loaf of freshly baked bread ready to be devoured. I took a deep breath inhaling the best thing I have smelled since leaving the United States and decided to find the creator of this heavenly scent. I went from office to office asking if the occupants were the bakers, searching the building until I received an answer that made perfect sense. My full bird roommate was the culprit. I should have known with her grandmotherly essence. It was Sunday, so she was at church, but she was scheduled to arrive shortly. She timed her arrival perfectly with the completion of her fresh baked goodness.
For the next hour, I hovered between my office and the bread maker waiting for the moment when the bread was sliced and approved for consumption. The time finally arrived and I sacrificed my knife for the slicing, properly sanitizing it first as I was being watched by two germ-o-phobic nurses. The bread was still warm in the middle, soft with a crisp crust, and possibly the best thing I have eaten in a 64 days. It reminded me of home for a moment when my mother would make fresh bread in her bread maker. Such happy memories of togetherness, laughter, and fresh bread came back as to me as I closed my eyes and allowed the smells and flavors to take me back to my childhood.
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