Still Surviving

We arrived at work yesterday to a rather frightening sight. Thick smoke was billowing up from someplace very close to our building. The closer we got, the worse it looked. I went down to a guard tower and took this picture. The actual fire was about a quarter of a mile away, right at the entrance to the base. We thought that a suicide bomber had struck. Today, we heard the rather mundane news. It was apparently started accidently by the driver, who had squatted underneath his gasoline tanker trailer to cook his breakfast. Yes. Cook his breakfast. Nobody was hurt, but there was one helluva big load of dishes to clean up.

I haven't made any posts in a while because my blasted internet connection has rarely been up. It's going now, but I'm typing like a mad man, trying to get this post in so that all my fans (all three of you) know that I'm still alive and well.

Our hectic pace at work continues. Our Exalted Leaders are still revisiting the how and why of reorganization. I'm pretty frustrated - we're three weeks into the implementation phase of our transformation, and they're still trying to figure out what we're going to transform into. Meanwhile, I have stacks of real work on my desk: new projects that need to be started, questions from the field to be answered, one major set of decisions to be negotiated with one of our primary clients. And what am I told to do? Make colorful flow charts of our processes. The very same processes that we're not doing because of all this transformation stuff.

If I ever say I'm going to work for the Corps of Engineers, or the Army, again, will somebody please just shoot me?

On the positive side: The weather here is cooling down. The middle of the day is just warm, say in the lower 90's, and morning and evening are pretty much perfect. There have been no more sudden squalls and only a few very minor dust storms. Good jogging weather. I'd be outside running, if it didn't mean getting up at 5 a.m. I don't do 5 a.m. For anybody. Sorry.

And on the really, really positive side: in four days I'll be heading home on R&R. I am way past excited. It's been six months since I've been home and that's too long. So any time I get stressed in the office, I just shut my eyes for a second and think, "there's no place like home ... there's no place like home ..." Clicking my heels together in patent red leather pumps doesn't do the trick though - I still have to get on that C-130.

Soon!