Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! I hope you have a wonderful holiday. I got to sleep in this morning, a very rare treat. Then a group of us went on a "One Lap of VBC" sightseeing tour. We treated ourselves to some cappuccino and a little Cinnabon, paid homage to SFC Smith, who earned a Medal of Honor in a small courtyard near my old building, and visited Flintstone Village again. A few months ago, a group of soldiers worked with the Iraqi Boy Scouts and Girl Guides to paint over the graffiti in several of the rooms, but the graffiti is back in spades. We finished up with lunch at Sather Air Force Base, which is part of the Victory Base complex. In typical fashion, the Air Force has the best DFAC on the entire complex, at least in my opinion. I just went for a jog, and will do some painting here in a few minutes. This evening, the command is going to have a lamb roast outside. Should be a lot of fun.

Now I want you to give yourself a quiet Thanksgiving treat. Watch this video of an incredibly beautiful piece of music. The composition is "Il Silenzio", written by the Italian trumpet player Nini Rosso in 1965, based on "Taps". This particular performance took place in August, 2008, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The trumpet player is Melissa Venema, who was 13 years old at the time. I never knew a trumpet could be so beautiful.

A Bit of This and That

Things have settled down with me now. My little dog Soozee has responded very well to her medications and you would never know that a week and a half ago she nearly died. Her appetite is back, she's going on her walks every morning and evening (a full mile each time), and she's rambunctious around the house. One side effect of the steroid medication is that she has suddenly taken a great interest in humping her sister, Indy. And Indy has gotten sick of it. (Indy has also conveniently forgotten that, when she was first on the same meds 20 months ago, she did the same thing). So Soozee looks like she's going to continue to be a healthy, happy dog.

While Soozee's crisis was going on, life here in Baghdad continued. We're definitely getting into winter now. The temperatures have dropped, with highs in the 50's or low 60's. Definitely jacket weather. It's the rainy season, too, which is no fun at all. When it rains, everything turns to mud. It's a slippery, sticky mud. Most of it is pretty shallow, maybe an inch deep, with hard-packed dirt underneath and this slippery goop on top. The only shoes to wear in this mess are Army boots. You need something high-rise with deep chunky treads on the bottom, and Army boots are it.

This is the DFAC parking lot. Imagine having to shlep through this every time you wanted to go eat. And imagine having to walk a half mile along a busy, muddy road before getting to this parking lot. And then having to walk back. Sounds like fun, huh? It does? You're sick. We carpool.

And here's a typical Victory Base drive in the rain. This road may or may not be paved. Doesn't matter, it's got an inch of slippery mud on top regardless, plus big ol' puddles and potholes and ditches scattered randomly around.

I've made an interesting discovery about the military postal system. I've got a subscription to Time magazine, but over the past two months, I've only gotten about a third of them. Who knows where the rest go. But you know what does make it to me? Their renewal notices. Haven't missed a one.

We have the most complicated timesheets to fill out that I've ever seen. When I was in the Navy, of course, we didn't do it at all, but in the civilian world, you have to account for every minute. I don't know about you, but just filling out a basic timesheet makes me feel like I'm working at McDonald's as a shift worker. In my current job, it's even more complicated, because I have to account for the time spent on different projects so that my time can be billed against them. Very much like a lawyer's "billable hours", only lawyers aren't as high on the status ladder as McDonald's shift workers. But somebody here has a sense of humor. Our timesheets are called "Time and Attendance" reports, or T&A forms, for short. 'Nuff said.

Our internet has been really bad in the rooms lately. I keep hearing rumors that they're going to upgrade the servers and fix all the problems, but we'll see. We've been having issues in getting our computers, which we brought with us from our old office, to work with the systems here in this new office. Ever notice how IT techs always seem to hold all other IT techs in contempt? A typical conversation:

Me: "Well, the tech came by and said he saved the pst file to my hard drive."

Tech: (snort) "Who was it?"

Me: "Joe."

Tech: (eyes roll, disgusted tone in voice) "Oh, well, that explains it. WE do it the right way, those guys don't know what they're doing." And he proceeds to spend 10 minutes changing files around on my computer. He leaves, I reboot, and now my email doesn't work at all. It's Joe's fault, of course.

The Armed Forces Network shows news programs from all the reputable networks, plus Fox. I've noticed that CNN puts up the BREAKING NEWS banner at random intervals. Now BREAKING NEWS to me means that something big is happening, like Nancy Pelosi just got caught in bed with Rush Limbaugh. But no, evidently CNN thinks BREAKING NEWS applies to an Anderson Cooper interview with a B-list movie actor I never heard of. Most annoying - I get all excited thinking something important is going on, and it's just Anderson. Again.

Fox seems to have a policy that 75% of its anchors and reporters must be blonde babes. I don't complain too much, as long as the volume is turned off. But they have this need to justify the blonde babe's existence on the screen, besides just being eye candy, so they'll say something like "Jane Doe, PhD". Well, I can put a lot of letters behind my name, and as my wife will tell you, that doesn't mean squat. Why don't they just be honest? "Jane Doe, Hot Chick".

And that's the way it is, Tuesday, November 24th. Good night.

- Skip Rohde, CDR, USN (RET), CD PgM, BSME, MBA, BFA, SoB

Iraq Reconstruction

The New York Times has an excellent article today on reconstruction in Iraq. The article says that US officials fear that Iraqis will not maintain what we've built for them over the past six years with $53B. It goes on to cite several projects, including a $270M water treatment plant in Nasariyah, several hospitals including the Basrah Children's Hospital, and the Fallujah waste water treatment plant, among others. I highly recommend the article - well-written and pretty accurate. A friend of mine sent me a note about it today. I sent him a bit of a long response and decided that I'd post it here as well.


John -
I saw this article this morning. It is pretty accurate. I'm familiar with the Nasariyah water treatment plant. It was the single most expensive project we've done here. Within months of turning it over to them, it was running at 35% capacity. The reason is that the local government down there is run like a bunch of Tony Sopranos - they give the jobs to family and tribal members, not to engineers who know what they're doing. We (the US) went back in and spent a lotta money to fix it back up again. Haven't heard anything since we finished, but what do you want to bet that it's falling apart again?

Yes, we built a lot of Public Health Centers that were immediately shuttered because they didn't have the staff to run them. Most were connected to the power grid, water lines, and sewer lines, but there was an early agreement with the Ministry of Health that we'd only go so far outside the PHC to do the connections, and after that it was the Ministry's responsibility. To my knowledge, they never made any of those connections. Some PHC's have been repaired and opened (all of those with good results so far), some were never opened, some have probably been stripped, and some are probably being used for other purposes. Or various combinations of the above.

Because of the issues with project turnover, we started requiring Letters of Sustainment to be signed by the ministries or local officials before we'd start work. Basically, it says that they want the project and will take care of it once it's done. Probably not worth the paper it's printed on, but at least it makes them address how they're going to support the project.

The Basrah Children's Hospital is still a major issue. We turned over ownership back in February (I'm the one who put together the signing ceremony for the Ambassador and the Minister ... wrote about it in my blog). To my knowledge, the Ministry still has not budgeted a dime for support. At a lot of government agencies, the people working there are not getting paid, so Dr. Ahmed at the Basrah Children's Hospital (have been in several meetings with him) may very well have not been paid for months, if ever.

The NYT article is incorrect about the Fallujah project. It is not yet completed. My command is in charge of that project and right before I went on R&R, I was working on the way forward with it. This is something that should never have been built. It's Boeing 747 technology in a place that can't support a Piper Cub. But there it is. Two friends of mine were killed on a visit to this project on Memorial Day. I can't tell you if it will be completed by us - there are some serious issues that a lot of people are working their way through on the other side of this cubicle right now, but I can tell you that we are doing everything we possibly can to finish it and leave an operating system in that town.

Iraq is still facing a serious shortage of educated and trained people. That's why I'm so excited about the projects I'm working on. They're all designed to help the Iraqis take steps forward themselves: some are training programs to do things like run the PHC's and hospitals and schools. One is to bring a university's engineering curriculum up to western accreditation standards. Two are to develop master plans in places that badly need them - and to train the Iraqis in how to do planning, and how to implement the plans once they're done.

Will it answer all their problems? No, but it will answer some, and provide them with some tools to take the next steps themselves. They're so much to be done that, as this article indirectly noted, you can do $53 BILLION dollars' worth of work and people still think you didn't do anything. But we did - for example, just go visit Sadr City (umm, on second thought, don't) and you'll find several hundred thousand people who now have reasonably clean running water. Or towns where they now have a solidly built school instead of (literally) a mud hut.

Yeah, there was a lot of waste, but the great majority of projects were done and are being used. Just remember that journalists tend to overstate the negative and sensational because they wouldn't have a job otherwise.

Glad you saw this article.

All the best,
Skip

Soozee's Status Update

Our vet confirmed today that Soozee has Addison's disease. We were 95% sure that's what nearly killed her the other day, and now we know and can move forward with treatment. Addison's is never cured: with this condition, the adrenal glands just quit working and never start up again. But, as we have experienced for the past 20 months with her sister Indy, Addison's can be treated. Indy gets a cortisol shot every four weeks and takes Prednisone every day, and once we got her dosage levels figured out, she has been perfectly healthy. Soozee will probably follow almost the same regimen.

The reports from Soozee's RN (Janis) have been very positive over the past few days. Soozee is at home and resting comfortably most of the day. Her spirits are up and she is beginning to eat and drink on her own again. She's still very tired, but then, if you were in critical condition and on life support on Friday, you probably wouldn't be a bundle of energy, either. She finally had a nice poop on her own this morning, but you probably didn't need that level of detail.

Thanks to all who called and sent us notes of support. They were more important than you know. And many thanks to Jennifer and Darryl, our next-door neighbors, who jumped in and helped Janis out. And, as I said last time, Dr. Ryan Hammond at the Animal Hospital of Reems Creek was the one who pulled Soozee back from over the brink and saved her life.

I consider myself very blessed - I have two of the sweetest dogs in the world (who are both alive today because of Dr. Hammond), a wonderful wife who kept her head during this crisis, and friends and family who provided us with support. You can't ask for much more than that.

A Very Bad Scare

Yesterday, we very nearly lost the sweetest little dog in the world. Soozee has been sick since Tuesday, not eating anything, throwing up occasionally, and having less and less energy. Janis took her into the vet on Thursday. The vet thought that she may have pancreatitis. She was certainly dehydrated, so they gave her a subcutaneous injection that seemed to revive her. He also took some blood tests, but they wouldn't be back until the next day. Janis took Soozee home and kept an eye on her. Mostly, Soozee just slept.

Friday morning, she wouldn't, couldn't, move and lost control of her bowels. Janis took her in to the vet right as they opened, and as soon as they saw Soozee, they went into gear. Soozee was dehydrated again, her heart rate was very low, blood sugar was very low, her blood pressure was so low they couldn't get an IV into her, and her temperature was ten degrees below normal. The poor little dog's systems were shutting down and she was literally at death's door.

The vet gave her a shot of dextrose to get her blood sugar up and a shot of cortisone to get her system going again. She stabilized and then, slowly, started to come back. It took six hours for her blood pressure to come up enough for them to finally get an IV into her. A little later, Janis was able to see her and got a weak tail wag in response. By evening, she was looking better. Weak, but better.

Soozee spent last night in REACH, the emergency animal hospital in Asheville, still with an IV in her. By today, she was much better, jumping and licking Janis when she arrived, and very happy to see her sister Indy. She still won't eat anything, but I think that's because she's in a strange place and they want her to eat strange food from a strange bowl. Soozee is a piglet, but she's a very particular piglet. At this moment, she is still under observation at REACH, but may be able to go home soon.

We think that Soozee has Addison's disease. Her sister, Indy, came down with it in March '08 (see my entries here, here, and here). Addison's is not really a disease, it's a condition in which the adrenal glands quit working. Forever. It is deadly if not caught in time. We caught Indy's in time ... I thought her case was a close call, but then we damn near lost Soozee yesterday. But although Addison's can't be cured, it can be treated. Indy is on a regimen of a shot at the vet's every 26 days, plus half a prednisone pill every morning and evening. Once we finally found the right dosage, Indy's body chemistry settled down and she's been her normal self since then. The vet will give Soozee a specific test on Monday for Addison's, but since it's hereditary and Indy already has it, and the symptoms are much the same, we're pretty certain Soozee has Addison's, too.

Janis handled everything like a trooper. She was an emotional wreck but was still able to think things through and do what needed to be done. Me, I was a basket case. I was stuck here in Iraq, seven thousand miles away, and unable to do a thing to help. I've often said that if anything ever happened to one of my dogs, they'd have to put me down. Well, they almost had to last night. I was worried sick, shaking, unable to talk to anybody without breaking down. After all, this was my little girl who might die at any moment. It's an awful, gut-wrenching, unbearable feeling.

But she came through. She came through thanks to Dr. Ryan Hammond at the Animal Hospital of Reems Creek. This is the second time he's saved one of our dogs for us. The staff at REACH kept that momentum going. These are good doctors, good people, and I owe them.

I am not a religious kind of guy, but last night, I thanked God from the depths of my soul that He let my little girl live.

Just Stuff

I finally hit the gym last night. Between going home on R&R, and then having a cold, it's been a month since I last pushed some weights around. So I eased off some on both the weights and the reps. Good thing, too, because I'm sore today. Thighs are sore, abs are sore, chest is sore, arms are sore. Must've been a good workout!

Work is going pretty well. As I mentioned, I've got six big projects that I'm in charge of. Two of them have recently been started and the people we're doing them for are hounding me every day, asking about what's going on, and what's going to go on, and when, and why we aren't further along than we are, and they're going to sic their generals on us if they don't like what we're doing. And I'm thinking, dude, I've only had this job for two weeks, what the hell do you want?

The other four projects are still being developed so that I can get them onto a contract. I've never put a package together for a contract before, so I'm still on the steep side of the learning curve. And a couple of these projects are hideously complex, never-been-done-in-Iraq types of things that are confounding even our contracting experts. And, of course, the people we're doing them for are hounding me for progress reports. At least they're not threatening to sic their generals on me. Yet.

Still, I'm having a good time. These are very worthwhile projects and I'm just as qualified (or unqualified, depending on your viewpoint) to run them as anybody else is. My new bosses are very understanding and supportive, which is wonderful, and are letting me do the job however I think it needs to be done. So work is going well.

Way, way back when, I read the book All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum. It's a remarkable book. Robert has a knack for finding deep meanings in the simple, everyday experiences of life, and then writing about them in a way that expresses his fundamental joy in life. My sister pointed me toward his blog some time ago. Go take a look, you might enjoy it.

I finally got some mail today. It's been six weeks since anything arrived through the postal service. Back in September, we were given our new mailing address, and I dutifully sent it out to my magazines and family and friends. After I arrived here, I found out that they gave us the wrong one. Nothing like quality support from your command, huh? Fortunately, all those guys are now back in the States where they can't do any more damage here.

So now I have a newly opened back of Nature Valley Granola Nut Clusters that's sitting here on my desk, fresh from a box that arrived today. I better put it away before I eat the whole thing and undo all the benefits of yesterday's trip to the gym.

New Drawing

Ruined Guard Tower, Victory Base

Pencil on paper, 9"x12"

This afternoon was my weekend, all 5 hours of it. It was a beautiful day, absolutely perfect, clear skies, mid-70's. I took my iPod and a magazine outside and vegg'ed for a while. Later, I went out to sketch this guard tower. I've had my eye on it for several months - it's a perfect subject for a drawing or painting. So here's the drawing, but the painting may take a while.

Return to the Grind ... but it's a new grind ...

I've been down for the past week with a cold. Picked it up while at home on R&R, evidently, and it finally took off after I came back here. The medical center reassured my hypochondriac self that I didn't have pneumonia again (have had it three times in my life, no fun) and that I wasn't going to die anytime soon - at least, not from a cold. So they gave me lots of good drugs that made my sinuses drier than the Mojave Desert. Yesterday, my body told me that the virus was officially dead, so now I'm just getting over the residual symptoms.

As a result, I hit the treadmill tonight after work. It whipped my butt, but sure felt good to get moving again. Tomorrow: weight room.

I'm much happier at work these days. My little group of people has transferred into the Gulf Region District, so we have a new set of bosses who are still learning what we're all about, but they're very supportive. Most importantly, my job has completely changed. I was working on organizational issues and creating PowerPoint briefings for high mucky-mucks who didn't understand what we were telling them and didn't seem to care. Not a lot of job satisfaction there. Now, I'm running six programs with budgets of many millions of your taxpayer dollars. All of them are designed to help Iraqi provincial officials and people run their own country in a more effective manner. A chance like this is the reason I volunteered to come here, and I'm going to give all of these projects my best shot. It's a really tremendous opportunity.

In addition to the job being so good, life in our new location is better. I moved into our new office this past week. It's on the same compound where my barracks room is. So instead of having to take the special bus in to work, and being tied to the bus schedule, I now have a commute of (by actual measurement) 2 minutes 30 seconds from my room to my desk. Pretty cool. Okay, so it's about 45 minutes if you include the trip to the DFAC for breakfast, lunch, or dinner (10 minute walk each way down a dusty road heavily travelled by MRAPs, semi-trucks, Strykers, John Deere gators, and every variety of SUV and pickup in the world). The air in our office building seems to be much healthier than the old building, too. My eyes aren't bothering me like they did.

And if all this wasn't good news enough, this past week we won a painting from a dear friend of ours in a raffle. The artist is Genie Maples. Her studio is just down the hall from mine, and she paints wonderful, powerful abstracts. This one is particularly strong - you can read about it in her blog. Suffice it to say, it's about a lot more than you think.

So the next six months look like they're going to be an exciting time. Work is fun again!

Back in Baghdad Again

So now I'm back in Baghdad. The trip was a 48-hour marathon. Asheville to Charlotte, Charlotte to Dulles, Dulles to Kuwait on the first day. The flight to Kuwait was twelve hours. It always amazes me that a big honking piece of machinery with over a hundred people inside plus tons of fuel and luggage can get off the ground at all, much less stay in the air for half a day. But they do. So the takeoff roll for me is an exciting time: the noise, the gradual buildup of speed, the vibration and bouncing, then it rotates back and feels like it goes straight up. That's cool!

Kuwait wasn't. It was warm and muggy. There aren't any regularly scheduled flights to Baghdad on Wednesdays, but there are plenty of other planes going back and forth. I put my name on the list for anything Baghdad-bound and waited for my name to get called. There were about ten flights on the board between midnight and noon, so I was up all night, cat-napping in the world's most uncomfortable chairs, and my name was finally called about 11 a.m. for a flight that eventually left about 3 pm. Yes, MilAir is not your normal airline. We landed without incident in Baghdad and I was back in my barracks room by 5:30, just in time for dinner at the DFAC.

Everything at work is changing. Almost all the people who were making my life difficult over the past couple of months are now gone - they left when the organization was officially disestablished last week. There are just a few of us left rattling around in the huge building. But that'll change in the very near future. My group is moving over to our new command, which is where our barracks are. So in a week or two, my commute will shrink to about a two-minute walk.

In the meantime, I'm fighting a cold. It hit hard this afternoon and I'm feeling pretty miserable. Yuk. I'm hoping it clears up quickly - I don't have time to be sick!

While I was home, I met with Ted McIrvine in my studio. Ted writes an online arts column that focuses on the western North Carolina area. Frankly, his article just blew me away. You can read it here.

So. I'm off to bed, with a box of Kleenex and some NyQuil. Hopefully, I'll be feeling better the next time I post something.

R&R Wrapup

Tomorrow, I start my trip back to the sandbox. My R&R is just about over. Being home is pretty much indescribable after being in Iraq for so long. I've got a completely different attitude now about "home" and what it means. Things that I took for granted before are now things to be savored. Some highlights:

- sitting in my own chair watching a NASCAR race on the tube;

- going out to dinner and having a meal that was cooked just for me;

- listening to my dog softly snoring;

- talking with old friends;

- seeing real art and artists;

- just being in the same room as my wife again;

- experiencing autumn in the mountains;

- hopping into my own truck to go somewhere;

and many many more.

Experiences like this are not to be taken lightly. Not anymore.

Here are a few photos from my all-too-brief time at home -

We went to the opening of the new Echo Gallery in Biltmore Park. Most of the artists are friends of ours and it was wonderful to see them get this great opportunity to help establish a gallery in this new section of town.

Yes, I got to spend a lot of time with my two hairy little daughters.

Here's Janis with our anniversary present to ourselves, a painting by our friend Genie Maples. Genie is one of the artists in Echo Gallery.

Right at the end of my visit was the peak of fall colors. The maple tree in front of our house went from green to this beautiful gold in three days.

Here are some fall colors in my neighborhood.

Here's my sweet little Indy, ready for her afternoon nap on our bed.

We had some beautiful flowers around the house, too. Smelled wonderful, too.

A Good Read

David Rohde (no relation to me that I know of) is a journalist for the New York Times. Last year, he was taken hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan and held for seven months. The Times has just published his six-part story on his captivity. It is well-written, eye-opening, and harrowing. Go read it.

More on R&R

Tent City, oil on panel, 12"x17"

I'm thoroughly enjoying myself on this R&R break. My cousin came down from Baltimore for a visit and we had a great time playing tour guide around Asheville. I've spent some time in the studio ... my own studio ... doing some drawing, painting, and just messing around. Most of what I've done has been wiped out or tossed in the trash, and deservedly so, but I think this small panel titled Tent City is a keeper. Art is one of those things you have to really work at to keep the creative juices flowing. I've barely been able to keep the rust off, and haven't gotten the rhythm flowing yet, but in this short time I didn't expect to. It's just nice to know that the eye and instincts are still there, even though they're not fully warmed up.

It's been great to see a lot of old friends, too. I've caught up on events with friends in their studios, the grocery store, on the street, over dinner, in the coffee shop, even in the dentist's chair. Most everybody is doing fairly well. This recession is really clobbering some, particularly my artist and general contractor friends. How some of them are making it, I don't know. One friend has a daughter who's autistic, and because of that, no insurance company will cover her. None. The right has been railing about "rationed" health care under Democratic proposals, but we already have rationed care - only it's by insurance companies whose focus is on profits, not health care. And speaking of ripoffs, I see so many of my friends who are working their asses off trying to keep from going under, and at the same time there are billions of dollars going out in bonuses to Wall Street execs who are already making fortunes. Something is seriously wrong here. Those bonuses would cover a lot of health care for a lot of autistic children, for example ... a much better use of resources than buying a new Ferrari for somebody that already has three. And I say that as a guy who appreciates Ferraris.

As I was writing, my dogs finally got up. We have a routine here: we humans get up earlier in the morning and have our coffee and so forth while the dogs sleep in until 9 or so. Then they come out and we have a big fuss over them, with their tails wagging, lots of rubbing of hairy little bellies, and a quick trip outside to water the grass. Then - BOOM - time for a nap again. They're both down hard and they haven't even had a walk or anything yet.

So now it's time to get rolling. Got a lot to do today, friends to visit, and projects to accomplish. I hope your day goes as well as mine is going to.

Picture Time

While I've been gallivanting around the world, I've kept my camera with me to capture a few happy snaps here and there.

When you go through Ali Al Salem, here's the 5-star hotel that they put you up in. See my previous post for some words on the complete experience.

This gent was catching a few z's in the Dulles terminal.

Taking my two dogs for their twice-daily 1-mile walk is such a joy.

My cousin Bridget is visiting us ... finally ... only took her TEN YEARS to come down from Baltimore ... and yes, I'm giving you a hard time, Bridget!

The three of us went to the Southern Highlands Craft Guild show on Saturday. I spent some time talking with some artist friends of mine there, and also got to listen to some really good bluegrass/mountain music from these gents.

Today, I got to spend some time in the studio, working on some projects and knocking out a small painting on a panel. Life is good.

And Now for a Little R&R

Home. It sure is good to be home. I'm in my own house, sleeping in my own bed, being with my wife, playing with my dogs. Life is good.

Had a great welcome-home. When I arrived at the airport, Janis was waiting out in the parking lot with the dogs. The dogs didn't see me until I called out to them. Their two little heads snapped around, there was a split-second hesitation as if they were thinking, "Daddy? Really?" and then they came running at me full-bore, jumping and licking and wagging their whole bodies. Janis's welcome was a bit more subdued since we were in a public parking lot but she made up for it that evening ... (okay, that was TMI; I'll try to restrain myself).

Unlike some of my previous trips home, I don't really feel a culture shock. Rather, I feel a great appreciation for all the little details of home. It's cool here, very green, and the leaves are changing. I'm looking out at my back yard right now, at the trees and juniper and the wet grass. I'm sitting at our kitchen table with a cappuccino that I made from my own little espresso machine. Janis and the dogs aren't up yet, and the house is still and quiet. I feel whole, blessed, and relaxed.

Going out and about in town is quite a change. I can drive my own car without having to check it out from some admin wienie. There aren't any checkpoints on the roads. No armed guards. The roads are in good shape. I'm dodging 18-wheelers, not MRAPs.

We took a road trip on Tuesday over to Pigeon Forge. It's probably the tackiest town in North America, but it's a beautiful drive to get there, and we needed to do a little shopping at the outlet stores. It was so good to get started whenever we were ready, to cruise down the 2-lane highways over the mountains, and see whole hillsides with trees changing colors. What a great day.

Janis put me right to work with a honey-do list. I've knocked off about 2/3 of them and am making progress on the rest. Feels good to putter around the house, y'know? No stress - get 'em done whenever, and if I don't, I don't.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day in my studio. No, I wasn't painting, I was cleaning. The place is, to use a highly technical Navy phrase, a shithole. My studio is in a 110-year-old industrial building, meaning it has it's charms, but it also has industrial-strength dirt, spiders, and bug carcasses. And cobwebs that shame the ones in bad horror flicks: big, heavy, gray, nasty things that drape across all the places you want to walk. I share the studio with another painter, but she hasn't cleaned the place since I've been gone ... and I didn't clean it last time I was home, either ... so it has about a year's worth of accumulated dirt/grime/gunk/cobwebs. So I'm doing a bit of spring cleaning. I don't care - it was just good to spend time banging around the studio again. I'll do some paint-slinging in a few days.

It has been really good to see some old friends. Yesterday, some of them heard that I was around the studio and stopped in to say hello. Janis and I are going to have lunch with some more today. And there are more that I need to at least say hello to.

Now it's time to get moving. Got a lot of stuff to do today. And NONE of it is work!

Chilling at Ali Al Salem

I'm sitting in an internet cafe at Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait. This is the portal for all US troops going into and out of Iraq. I arrived here yesterday afternoon and will leave this evening. Not much to do here, which right now is fine with me. I'm decompressing.

Yesterday was the first leg of the trip home. They picked us up at 8:30 so we could check in at Sather (the USAF base at Baghdad Airport) at 9 a.m. Our flight didn't load up until 1:30 in the afternoon. Think about that the next time you gripe about having to arrive at the airport a half-hour early! I ran into two friends, one from the Embassy and one from my Corps training, who were also on their way out for R&R. You know you're getting to be an old-timer when you're running into friends at the airport, I don't care where you are.

The last time I flew on a C-130, I learned that you want to sit in the very front or the very back. The reason is that the passenger "seats" are really four rows of red canvas netting running fore-and-aft, with two rows facing each other on the right (starboard) side and two on the left (port) side. If you sit in the middle of these rows, you're jammed in with people on all sides of you and your knees and feet are sandwiched in between the knees and feet of whoever is sitting across from you. If you're in the very front or the back, you have a good chance at some leg room. So this time, I tried really hard to drag behind the others on the cattle-march out to the plane. It worked. I wound up sitting in the very back of a row, with nobody in front of me and nobody to one side. For a C-130 flight, this was heaven!

Previously, when flying in and out of Baghdad, it seemed like we taxiied to the Green Zone and back before our takeoff roll. This time I was ready for another long trek, but we made about two turns and off we went. The flight was smooth and uneventful (yay!) and we landed in Kuwait about an hour and a half later. Then there was the admin of checking in, turning in my helmet and body armor, and finding someplace to crash for the night.

Now, remember: this is a temporary military base. Accommodations are, to coin a phrase, "spartan". You're assigned to a tent and get to pick your own rack. Once you get to the tent, you'll find that it has 8 sets of bunkbeds. That's it. A concrete floor, a heavy canvas tent, an a/c system (more on that in a minute), and 8 sets of bunks. The bunkbeds, by the way, have a mattress with a heavy waterproof canvas cover. No sheets, pillows, blankets, or other sissy folderal. You're expected to sleep in your clothes, like God intended.

I was fortunate in that there were only 8 of us in there last night. And none of my seven new best friends snored. So it was quiet. It was also cold. Our a/c system cycled on and off between two settings: icy and frickin' frigid. It got so bad that sometime in the middle of the night I got up and went over to the terminal. They were showing the Yankees/Twins baseball game on the big screen all night long (it played three times that I know of), but the terminal has big black floppy armchairs and is a bit warmer than the tent, so I was able to doze. Got up sometime around sunrise, about the time they started calling all the flights and the noise factor went way up. After sleeping in the arm chair, my legs just didn't want to work right, and I must've been quite a sight as I staggered out the door like a drunk. Back to the tent, which was warming up a bit under the sun, and I slept another three hours.

Sometime around 9, I finally got moving. Wandered over to the Green Bean for a cappuccino and a really good Danish and read the Stars and Stripes newspaper cover to cover. Later, I found the gym and pushed some weights around. Felt like a new man after a shower and change of clothes. Had a long lunch at the DFAC and then came over here. Sounds pretty exciting, huh? The rest of my afternoon is going to be more of the same, at least until they take us over to the airport.

But for now, I'm a happy man. I'm unwinding, decompressing, and getting ready to go home. Nothin's better than that!

It's R&R Time!

FINALLY! I'm heading home in the morning! It's been six months since I've seen my wife and children (the two dogs). But tomorrow morning, I'm going over to the airport, and then sometime later (hey, it's military air: there are no schedules), I'll fly to Kuwait. And on Sunday I'll land in Asheville. HOME!

I haven't started packing yet, but what the heck, I'm just taking a carry-on and backpack. I figure, I've got clothes here, I've got clothes there, why do I need to take more clothes from place to place? A toothbrush, change of skivvies, and some entertainment (iPod, Kindle, computer), and I'm good to go. Oh, yeah: passport and orders, too.

I was getting a bit stressed out the past few days. I scheduled my trip for right after the new federal fiscal year. Not too swift, there, Skipper. What with all the financial confabulations going on with setting up the new FY accounts, I didn't get my orders until this morning. Still don't have confirmation that my airline ticket has been paid, but they assured me that it would be done today. And if it isn't? I've got American Express. Don't leave home without it. I'm goin' HOME, by damn!

'Nuff said. Got some packing to do. Next time I post, it won't be from here!

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!

Happy Birthday, Janis

Today is my wife Janis's birthday. No, I won't say her age - I value my life. We had our first date 18 years ago this very day, when we went out for dinner and a movie. (Pretty original, huh?) She's celebrating it in some unique ways: having some of the windows on our house replaced and simultaneously wheeling and dealing on eBay. Our neighbors are going to have her over for grilled hamburgers later on tonight. Wish I could be there!

I made my first deployment back in the Dark Ages. It was 1978, to be precise, and I went with my first ship on an Indian Ocean cruise. The only way we had to communicate with home was with hand-written letters. They could/did take weeks to make it to their destination. Mail was a high-priority item for the deployed fleet. It would come from the APO in San Francisco, then flown out via whatever route they chose to Diego Garcia, then flown again up to the aircraft carrier we were with. The guys on the carrier would sort it into bags that would be picked up by the daily helicopter runs and dropped off at each individual ship. A couple of hours later, we'd hear those words "Mail Call!" over the 1MC (loudspeaker to you non-Navy folk).

It's quite different now. This screen shot was taken just a few minutes ago when I was having a video chat with Janis. Being able to see and talk to her nearly every day (at least when our internet is up and running) is really a godsend. And, if nothing else, there's email. It all makes this deployment so much more tolerable.

One thing hasn't changed. Mail can STILL take weeks to get here. Go figure.

Anna Laube

I discovered a really good musician not too long ago. Anna Laube is a singer/songwriter. She has a bluesy, folksy quality and a beautiful voice. Her songs are stories ... and as an artist whose paintings tell stories, I have an appreciation for that. She has some videos on YouTube, although my favorite song of hers, "Goodbye Blue Monday", isn't there. Still, she's good, and definitely worth a listen.

Oh, and if you're wondering, I've had a couple of halfway-decent days since my last post, so I'm not nearly as tired and grumpy now as I was then, thank God!

... and then there was one

My friend Joe left Iraq today on his way home. His deployment here is over and he's on his way back to the real Navy, where the water is salty, ships are gray, and men don't wear cammie pajama outfits to work. Joe's the last of our little Band of Buddies to leave. Everybody else has gone home or been transferred to other bases in-country. There was Robert, who's home now - he was our absent-minded professor, always taking pictures of things he shouldn't and getting away with it ... usually because he was never aware that he wasn't even supposed to have a camera there! There was "Air Force Joe", a really smart guy who kept a tight rein on his projects. He went home, too. There was Eric, a scary-smart Air Force captain who is (literally) an astronautical engineer, who is now in Fallujah to work on a sewer project (aren't you impressed with the way the Army decides where to put people?). And Cody, another scary-smart Air Force guy with a PhD in aeronautical engineering, who's running construction projects down south. And now it's just me, the retired-Navy-guy-turned-artist, still working away here in Baghdad. Bummer.

I'm heading home in two weeks for some R&R. I need it. I am tired. Been here almost six months now and have had a total of two days off, not counting our Friday half-days. For most of that time, I've been working on one crisis or another, trying to plan this project or that transformation plan. Even when a plan gets accepted, it can be undermined almost immediately by some minion with an axe to grind. It happened again just a couple of days ago, where we were being directed to provide information that we already provided weeks or months ago. Don't you guys read your frickin' mail? It's getting old and I'm "crisis'd out". Getting an attitude - cranky and "who gives a shit" at the same time. I need a BREAK!

So in two weeks, I'll go home. See the wife, play with the dogs ... or see the dogs and play with the wife. Visit with friends. Take a nap on the couch. Go to a restaurant and have a dinner that was cooked just for me. Drive my truck around and not have to go through checkpoints. Mow the yard. Spend some time in the studio.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?