Almost Done.....

Here we are still deployed. Life is OK here, just day by day dealing with deployment. Can't wait to be home. The end is near however and I'll be back in Oklahoma soon. I look back on this deployment and I have to say that I was not very productive. Sure I did my job here and whatever but any other improvement was limited. I lost some weight and shaved time off my run until I hurt my back in December. Then my weight loss leveled off and I'm ending the deployment around 205, which is around 20 lbs lighter than when I started so I guess that's better than nothing. Because of the awful internet access here I only took one class so not much on the school front either. I tried to get a new Army job but found it difficult to get anything done in the austere environment I'm deployed to. Oh well at least I'm in one piece and I'll be home soon.

Back on the diet.

OK after being a lazy-pile since R&R leave for Christmas I've decided to get back on the horse and lose the last 15 pounds to get down to my goal weight of 185 lbs. Unfortunately stepping on the scale gave me the ugly result of 211 lbs. Great I gained 11 pounds since December 19th? In one month? I think I need a second opinion. Oh well if it's true I lost it once and I'll loose it again.

It's incredibly windy here today. The DFAC is a tent and it's threatening to blow away. The dust is covering every surface, including the lappy. My keyboard is not fairing too well and as of right now the 'c' key is refusing to work most of the time. This results in massive spell checking. (I was 1 for 2 on that word)Had to go outside and secure the stakes again getting my skin exfoliated by blowing dust. What a wonderful place to live. Oh and the wind blew my favorite shitter over and of course as usual it was very full.

Still Deployed

Here I sit in the dark, dank MWR tent sucking up free WiFi. Hey deployment could be much worse, right? The weather was beautiful today for a foobit like me and I had to whole day to myself. Great except I'm going to another sandy country for the remaining months of deployment and I've already shipped everything but the lappy, my nook and a uniform. So basically it's been me and my thoughts all day, which is dangerous on deployment. I have not had a day off in a long time and all I did was wander around camp looking lost. I did my errands this morning (haircut, laundry etc) and was done bu 1000. Great, now what? I'm taking a course and so far so good. It's a history course, US History to be precise so I'm hoping for a good grade, my GPA is suckin' pretty hard right now.

The MWR tent also doubles as the gym so I get to watch people work out which is very entertaining. During the day it's usually Navy guys as the Army is at work right now. The Navy guys like to do "smart" stuff while working out. Calisthenics, crossfit, watching a P90X video, stuff like that. The Army guys like lifting things, push-ups and wrestling for exercise. the Navy guys are doing refined gentlemanly exercising while the Army guys basically break rocks for fun and exercise. The Air Force? Well they don't exercise, have you seen most of them? Mostly the Navy guys are all officers, I don't think they have much of a PT standard. At night this place becomes a Navy officer hang out with textbooks and thick manuals laid out. Very impressive until you take a peek at the computer screen and it's Facebook, it's always Facebook.

Well I leave soon for the other sandy place mentioned above, hopefully I'll be able to sneak some pics.

11 September 2010

Every year I reflect on the tragic events of that day nine years ago. What I was doing that day, where I was living, my personal relationships and my thoughts during that day. I also think how much I have changed in the years since. I was newly divorced form my first wife (anniversary 11 Sep 1999) and had been thinking about what went wrong and where I was to go from there. I was happy to be dating a couple women casually and one seriously, my now wife Chanda. I was sitting at work which was at the time as a mechanical designer for Comau-Pico in Plymouth, Michigan near Detroit. My job used to be to design automated tooling that welding car bodies together. I'd be given a task (weld these two parts to the body here) and some parameters (don't go over here or here you'll run into your neighbor) and told to design a machine to do the task. It was practical, artistic at the same time. I enjoyed it but hated working in an office, indoors all day. They ran the place like a sweatshop. If I took too long in the latrine then they'd be looking for me. The job I had on that day was a little different than what I was doing and I hated it. My task was to take all the other tools that everyone else had designed and fit them all into whatever building they where supposed to build this car at. It involved basically placing furniture around a plant. You couldn't change anything really because it was already drawn and completed and in most cases already built. It was boring and full of meetings with fat-asses FoMoCo engineers. I spent most of my day moving shit around the plant on some manager's whim and making copy after copy for the endless meetings. My board was in front of a small television that we used to play tapes (remember those?) of robotics and systems we where working on as a reference. I listened to the radio all day with headphones to drown out the horrible easy listening piped in and the disgusting noises made by 30+ middle-aged men with horrible diets. The news reported the first plane's impact and almost at the same time everyone turned and looked at each other. The TV soon went on and with the help of some tinfoil and stereo wire we had a picture. Suddenly my bad personal day became a national tragedy. They closed the building and I spent the rest of my day with my girlfriend and roommate watching the reports on TV. I knew my life would never be the same. I almost enlisted the next day but decided against it after I told my parents and brother. My brother got upset and thought I was going off to my death. Several years later I did enlist, mostly for the job but there was some patriotism there as well. Now I'm deployed and wondering all these years later where have we gone and where are we going? Our President has pledged to pull us out of both conflicts in 2011. Sounds good but why now? It seems politically motivated to me. Is either place better now than before we came? we never did find WMD, we never did find Osama. So what did we do? What did we accomplish? what did my friends die for? As much as I want those answers I may have to wait until the 20th anniversary of 9/11 before they are answered.

Another strange place I find myself in.

Here we are on another deployment. I'm in an undisclosed country in SW Asia. My duties are fairly light and it's quit boring here. I'm having to interact with the locals way more than I ever have before, so that is a nice change. I work with sailors and airmen so it's great to have a new perspective on the other branches of service. I'm using my time to take some more classes and get my run times back up to post-surgery times. It's very hot and humid here with temperatures above 120. I spend as much time as possible indoors. There is not many services on the camp I'm at and there is not much to do, so it's a little boring. But, I am as safe as one can get in this part of the world. Here's a few pictures of my living conditions here, they are a little spartan.

Surgery update

I can tuck in my own shirt and raise my hand so we are on the mend.

Surgery update

Feeling pretty good now. Started therapy twice a week. Pretty much out of the damn sling, I still use it in public. If I'm sitting on the couch or whatever I don't. Thankfully I don't need to sleep with it anymore. Can't really raise my arm or do anything with it yet. The doc says around 4-5 months. We'll see how it turns out. I have been enjoying my leave however. Not really doing much just getting caught up on sleep and reading. Wish I could do some stuff around the house though.