Fruits and Nuts

Home Sweet Home!

I never thought a one-and-a-half room, tiny, cozy little cramped nook that I call home could feel like such a mansion!!! Oh the joy of having to pee and actually going without bringing a weapon and a hat and safety glasses to the porta-potty. Oh, and I'm wearing REAL CLOTHES!!! I just spent a month in Louisiana at beautiful (ahem, ha ha!!) Fort Polk doing a training exercise in preparation for our deployment to Iraq in June. It actually wasn't that bad. The only thing that truly sucked was missing Kevin, and I miss him really bad at home, too, so no change there. I ate tuna fish and crackers, lots of salad, and even choked down a few MREs when I had to. I lost a couple pounds, probably mostly due to the fact that there was no Starbucks with Mocha Frappucinos at our field site. It was actually a perfect opportunity to kick my coffee habit. From now on it'll just be a now and then thing. I did a lot of PT...ran alot and worked out on the stairs of the unused air traffic control tower that was next to the dirt landing strip on our base. I learned a lot about how stuff works on a deployment, although something tells me things will be a lot different over there.

I read three books: A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom, and Medic! The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War by Ben Sherman. All of which I HIGHLY recommend, especially Five People and Medic!. They both really affected me, I shed tears while reading both. I read them each in one day...both easy reads, but definitely very hard to put down. I also read a great National Geographic article about Ivory Poaching that still goes on in Nigeria, and a chilling Rolling Stone article about the corruption and murder that happened in a private contracting company in Iraq. Pretty crazy both of them.

I also watched the movie "Blood Diamond" about the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone in the 90s. Wow, hard to watch. Pretty decent film, but left nothing to the imagination when it came to depicting the brutal murder of thousands of civilians and refugees by child soldiers. Chilling.

Well the coming weeks will be extremely busy...pretty much packed until the day we leave. I have to pack my office and my personal stuff, go to Leadership school for two weeks, go home and visit family in three places for a couple weeks, come back to NC and see Kev for (I hope) a week at least, then it's off to the desert!! Looking forward to the challenge, but not looking forward to the stress headaches I know are coming!!!