Coming to a Milestone

My group of friends is about to break up. No, we're not at each other's throats, quite the contrary. It's the drawdown, the move, and the restructuring that's causing the changes. Two of our guys are leaving our headquarters unit and going out to work in the field. They're both energetic, ambitious, smart young guys, and they need to be out in the field doing military junior officer kinds of things, and not stuck in headquarters revising Powerpoint charts. Another guy is leaving - his 6-month tour is up and he's heading home. I'll be going on R&R in a couple of weeks, and when I come back, we'll be just about to put all our restructuring plans into place.

So tonight we celebrated. We went out to our secret DFAC that makes the killer hamburgers. We haven't been in a while because our movements have been very restricted. But tonight we finagled a vehicle and off we went. As always, the burgers were fabulous! After resting up for an hour, some of us went over to the gym at Liberty and pretended to work out. Difficult to do on a fully tummy.

Our move is well underway. Big parts of our buildings are empty - you could play basketball in some rooms, where a month ago they were jammed with desks and people. Yesterday, they shut down the laundry service, the self-serve laundry, and the gym. And the TV service, too, although that seems to have been quite by accident. Our Green Bean coffee shop will close its doors tomorrow. I, for one, will sorely miss it! Nothing like a fine cappuccino in the early afternoon to get you going again after lunch.

For me, the past week or so has been a wild ride, like being strapped to a rocket with no tail fins. I've been part of a group working on future plans for our organization. I had to prepare two decision briefs for the General and the Ambassador. As I was prepping them, the ground rules kept changing - first I had to prepare it with one set of assumptions, then the next day the assumptions were completely different. As we got down to the time for the Big Meeting yesterday afternoon, the pace of change became manic. But both my briefs seem to have been well received, although I don't have a clue what they've decided to do. During this time, I'd also wound up helping an officemate who had two very high-priority tasks and got way too far behind in one of them. His briefs turned out very well; again, we don't know what the final decisions will be. Supposedly, the decisions were made yesterday, but if they were, nobody's gotten around to telling us.

By contrast, today was slow. No pending meetings. No briefs to prepare. Just a few nitnoid questions to answer. A nice change. It won't stay that way, so we'll enjoy it while we can. Meanwhile, our shipmates are getting ready to depart, so we have other things on our minds.