Post then bed...but wait, first I need to...

Looking at my track record, I was so proud to figure out how to beat the NIPR firewalls and post from the office, but still average a post a week. I should be ashamed of myself. And I am. I feel pretty bad about it. You're not buying that, are you?

Didn't think so.

So, I spent an hour on the phone with Kim as she's driving north to visit my parents. That is one tough lady. She won't claim that, but she is. She has this cold and is still making the 8 hour trek northwards. She also has the bone marrow transplant, the voluntary career change and a couple college degrees under her belt. AND she puts up with me. That's tough. That's double tough.

A quick update and then I must get some sleep. Tomorrow is a run day, and I honestly want to run. The experiment I'm kind of doing here is to find out if I can adequately prepare for (at least) the APFT's 2 mile run just on a treadmill. Last APFT I ran was last month, here, with nothing but treadmill runs and hit 16:33. Now, for a 39 year old, that's not bad. Cool thing would be to break 16 minutes, which I think is attainable. I know it's boring. But hey, they're "good enough" for world class marathoners, so they might be good enough for me. Add to that, I don't want to spend hours running outside. Outside around here is not nice - it's hot, dusty, dry and seriously lacks non-gravel covered surfaces. I would say people shoot at us, but when I run, the habibs tend not to fire rockets - too early in the morning (going back to a basic tenet of mine: the "insurgents" are human, all humans have patterns, it follows then that the insurgents operate in patterns).

Today I spent in meetings, which means I walked a lot. Don't mind walking, as it keeps me from sitting on my butt all day. It also means I deal with all the aforementioned annoyances. It is what it is. The meetings were productive. I should be able to add something to my continuation binder as a result and make life that much easier for my successor. It's all about coming to a consensus and documenting it.

I was asked what I'd do if I were king for a day. One thing is replace the Regimental CSM with someone who isn't bipolar. Honestly, it feels as if we spend too much time cleaning up after he kicks this or that vendor/random local national off the FOB. I can say nothing nice about the man, so I won't say anything. The other thing I'd do is give us joes here a means to have an adult beverage once in a while. Ration card it, something. A glass of wine every so often would be nice, and would give this place that much more of a civilized air.

I'm just about halfway done with phase two of three for ILE, which is CGSC with a twist (read COIN and COE and Joint Forces stuff). Plan is to blast through phase two this month. That'll set me up well to be done with this whole ILE nonsense by the end of August. As someone who is a professional educator, I like their distance learning approach, but their assessments are amateurish at best. It is painfully obvious to me these assessments were designed by people who have NO background in education, let alone tests and measurements. I mean they're awful. CLOZE exercises and simple fact regurgitation to assess understanding of some truly complex theories. I'm just really disappointed. Not too badly disappointed, of course, as this makes it easier for me to get ILE done with. Since I need to graduate from ILE to be elligible for LTC, it's all good. Disappointing, but good.

Not much new going on here. Dane Cook is supposed to perform here tomorrow, so I'm definitely going to that (shoes? F*** shoes!). That'll be cool. Oh, it's June, which means May is over. Which means we're halfway done with the deployment overall. and I'm that much closer to leave.

Again, not much new happening. Thank you again for the prayers! Keep 'em coming. And call Kim. :)

Enjoy!