Milestones...or Has It Really Been That Long??

Hello everybody! This has been a tough week. One of the soldiers in the section helped me out by giving me a cold, so I've had the sniffles all week. Today is the first day it seems to be lifting. Between Airborne (excellent stuff, by the way), more Sudafed and literally drowning the cold (no shortage of free bottled water), it seems to be working. And today is Friday, which means one more week is close to being done. As much as I'd like to truly enjoy the journey, the cold, hard fact is that I miss being home and hanging out with my wife.

On to the milestones. Yesterday was the 10th, which officially is the 7th month of the deployment. Pretty cool. Five to go. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm kind of stoked about that. Milestones...let's see, it's 3 weeks and 3 days until my anniversary. That's right, we'll have been married 17 years come August (I'm pretty sure my math is right on that one). I figured this one out the other day and keep thinking, "wow, Kim's put up with me for a long time!"

Thanks go out to lots of folks right now too! The Third Reformed Church's 3rd - 6th grade class, you guys are awesome!! Thanks for the pictures and letters, I owe you a real written response! Be warned, my handwriting is marginally better than my father's....but not by much. The Shaker Messenger Store, thanks for the soups. I'm more than a little nonplussed, as I have access to legitimately great bread, and can scare up a hotplate, but I'm short on the appropriate sized kettle. However, I see this as a challenge. I figure, once September or October hit, I'll be jonesin' for some decent soup and so I have a few months to scrounge said kettle. Good thing I know the Turkish Godfather. Last milestone: according to this, it's eight weeks until the Boilermakers take the field again. Now, for those who know me, this is an odd statement. Everybody knows I don't follow sports. Being over here, it's almost as if anything that reminds of home or good memories becomes something we latch onto, and so for me it's the whole college football thing. Who knows, I might actually follow the season this year. Here's the evil plan: get a TV, have it in the office, hook it up to one of the several AFN satellites on the rooftop and viola, college football Saturdays in the comfort of the office! Or even better, since we're eight hours behind on some of that stuff, I can very likely watch it on Sundays, which means NO INTERRUPTIONS! See, this gets better all the time! Nothing like a late Sunday morning, some nonalcoholic Bitburger Pils and a college football game.

For those of you who might be wondering, I do find it interesting that the Iraqi government is calling for a timetable on withdrawal of US forces here. Honestly, I'm not so sure the GOI understands how really fragile the current level of stability really is. My very limited perception on this whole scenario is that the GOI is like a 16 year old kid asking for the keys to the family car in the middle winter in Michigan (read, "deep snow") and saying something like, "no honestly, I know exactly how to drive in snow." NB: I believe both Paul and I have used this line in the same circumstance. Between an overconfident GOI and possibility of a Democrat in the White House in 2009, I can see this region descending back into the chaos it knew in the past, once we begin to significantly pull out of Iraq. It is what it is. Before we descend into arguments over politics, let me make my position clear: I am in 100% agreement with the philosophy outlined by Robert Heinlein in his book, Starship Troopers (awful film, excellent book, he'd never have approved that film were he alive..here's a very good treatment of that whole philosophy). I am under the impression that Obama Barack has never served in the military. If that's true, in my opinion, he has no business being President of the United States. Period. I fail to see how he can better show that he is able to place duty and honor and country before himself outside of military service. That, dear readers, is the distilled essence of my political views. I realize they are unreasonably narrow in some cases, I'm willing to accept that limitation.

That's about it for now. Coming out of the head cold tailspin is nice, needless to say. I could write about all the stuff here on my desk, but why? That's boring.

Enjoy!