Back to work.

The Ullrichs are wrapping up their weekend here in Petersburg, which isn't so bad because it was definitely a good one. We went to the U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum on post after lunch on Saturday, partly because it was just something free to see and partly because it's all about AJ's job. Although I'm not really into some of the more technical military stuff, I did enjoy learning more about the history of the quartermaster corps and about what AJ will be doing for his job. Some of the highlights for me were learning about how rations have evolved over the decades, seeing what the riggers do and how the Army drops humanitarian relief and entire vehicles from planes, meeting Pipeline Pete, and finding something like the STAPLES "Easy button" that says "hooah". Adding a postcard to my collection was also pretty exciting. With all this moving around for the military my collection is definitely going to grow. :)

After the museum we checked out the commissary, where I will be doing our grocery shopping once I get my CAC card. We weren't intending to buy anything until we saw Naked Juice for $1.85 AND we don't pay tax on post! Naturally we were amazed and bought two. That place is awesome. After that we drove over to the largest PX, which for those of you who don't know is kind of like a military department store. The place was packed with enlisted soldiers in ACUs who must have just arrived for AIT. It was more than a little overwhelming being in a crowd of camouflage. You can especially spot the new enlisted soldiers because their combat boots are super clean looking, unlike AJ's. We picked up a couple things there and drove over to the other PX, where the uniform store is, so AJ could look for some new ACUs. I got a kick out of more of the street names on post--Preamble Drive, Battle Drive, Army Avenue...the Army is so gosh darn creative.


We met another couple in AJ's class for dinner at Outback that night, which was really nice. J doesn't have a car so I told her we could do some more exploring together sometime. We all have a shared love of Pixar and they're from Texas, where AJ has orders for after BOLC.


We enjoyed another nice thunderstorm when we got home that night. The storms here are frequent and come on pretty fast. On Friday night we just had very strong wind and lightning for awhile, which actually made the trees behind our apartment look very creepy. Apparently thousands of people were out of power due to the recent storms, so the cities have been setting up designated air conditioned buildings for people out of power to beat the heat. The power goes out so easily here, it's weird.


This morning we checked out a local church with two other couples. One couple has a daughter almost the same age as our niece which was really nice. We had our own little Army family row during the service. The church ended up not being for us, so we'll continue our search with another couple next week hopefully. We did go to Lone Star for lunch with our new friends, though, which was definitely a good time. After lunch we did some errands and took advantage of our apartment complex's pool, because once again, it is very hot down here. We went to dinner at some weird, fancy Arby's, which was actually super disappointing because they don't have Arby's sauce! I was really bummed about that and missing the real Arby's back home. :( Now AJ's finishing up some anti-terrorism training on his laptop and we'll just hang around until he goes to bed early for combatives training tomorrow. I think he's pretty excited for that. :)