Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everybody, even if it's a little late.  My Christmas here was fairly uneventful.  Christmas eve, I had a fairly normal day, running errands and chasing down a few administrative loose ends.  I went to a Christmas eve service in our new chapel, recently constructed by an Air Force engineer team.  It's all bare plywood and trussess on the inside, but it's a big step up from the tent we were having services in before.  The service was pretty cool, and with the chapel being pretty well packed, all of those soldiers singing Christmas hymns together sounded pretty amazing.  (As you might expect, our male to female ratio here is alot higher than at your typical church service.  When everyone's singing it gives the music some real resonance.) 
On Christmas day, our sick call was closed for the day, but I got the dubious honor of being the doctor on call for 24 hours to cover our emergency room.  Thankfully, things were pretty slow.  My medics and I kidnapped a flatscreen TV and DVD player from our X-ray section and spent a large part of the day watching movies and cartoons in the clinic while we gorged ourselves on our stash of Christmas treats.  I watched "Up" and "9", as well as a couple of Madagascar shorts that someone had gotten in a care package.  (I was a big fan of both Up and 9, although 9 raised that ever-present question... "I wonder what type of crazy drugs Tim Burton is on?") 
I wasn't able to talk with my family on Christmas day, as the hospital's computers don't have Skype installed.  But, I had had a nice Christmas eve talk with both Cristin and Drew (Drew didn't do much talking) and my family, and I'm looking forward to another video chat later today.
They had another nice dinner set up for us in the dining hall, again with turkey, roast beef, and all of the fixings.  Thanks to a quick 30-minute relief from one of the other docs here, I was able to run over and grab some food. 
Today, I've got the day off.  I spent the morning sleeping in, and now I've got a handful of errands to run.  Thankfully, I don't have to worry about shopping/returns today.  So, I'm just going to relax, get my stuff done, and then maybe read for a while.