Happy Sunday!

This has been a very, very busy week, so my apologies for not posting. Normally, I maintain that "busy" is a state of mind, and somehow I still think that's true. On the other hand, when I'm at the armory until, oh, 1800 a few nights in a row, I tend to categorize that as "busy". Not frenetic or frantic or panicky, just...busy. I'd like to write that I've finally rolled up all the training data we have from the last five months, everything's scanned and on CDs and ready to go. It is not. There is one small binder of rosters I forgot, and have to hit on Monday. No biggie, but it keeps me from brushing my hands off as if we don't have to track anything. Which we do, so it's not as if I'm out of a job.

Spent a lot of time on the phone this week with friends. One dear friend and I spoke, and he asked me how Kim and I are doing and how the process is going. This is a common question. Kim and I are doing better than we expected to be doing at this point. We're trying to keep life here at home pretty much the same as it has been, which is nice. Not knowing what's coming up or what to expect tends to cause some trouble for us, me being focused almost solely on the deployment causes some trouble for us, but otherwise, we're doing well. We've been married sixteen years, and have developed some great coping skills, and we have built up the habit of talking things through. So while we have occasional blow ups (more often now than normally thanks to the mobilization), we're good at talking through things. And the Battalion support group has done an excellent job of giving us information on what to expect relationally while we're going through this, which helps too.

How the deployment process is going...interesting question. Most of it is as smooth as is can be, given that about two to four dozen people are managing it all for the other 3900 of us (this is where Paul rolls his eyes and makes the claim of being able to do it better). The Army has outlined the process in general with a couple of manuals, no surprise there. The folks who are in charge of the process overall are also pretty good at keeping us informed about changes, products they need from us, that sort of thing. All that said, one would think it's a seamless process. I mean, we've done this before, right? It is not completely seamless. It's like playing a card game and the rules tend to change each time someone picks up or lays down a card. The big rules don't change, rather the little ones...like which card is wild, that sort of thing. All in all though, it's not as bad as it sounds. Not surprisingly, open communication is really the key to making it work as smoothly as possible. The mantra of "fluid is too rigid" continues to apply.

Today I have wine to bottle. Was going to do it last week, set everything up and realized I had no corks. Tough to bottle wine without corks. Granted, I could have used 12 ounce longnecks or Grolsch flip top bottles, but wine really needs wine bottles. Now I have corks and can bottle and label. We'll run some other errands today too, that sort of thing.

One quick note about Thanksgiving, since Aunt N was good enough to reply to the post! :) Everything went well. The guests were happy, the bread was great (I did three loaves of french bread) and visiting was mostly good. I did, indeed, overimbibe after the guests left, which I suppose is my right. Had to bite my tongue when someone likened Iraq to Vietnam, which is, in my opinion, completely untrue. The body count alone attests to this, along with the fact that the "insurgents" are mostly Iranian SF and Hezbollah trained Muslims from elsewhere in the Arabic world. Add to that, Iraqis have begun to point out the "insurgents" to coalition forces and I begin to wonder if the Iraqis really want us out of there. True story and all that information is open source...nothing CNN would publish, of course. Anyhow, I kept my peace.

Enjoy!