R&R: An update

Hello from the United States! I’m in the Pacific Northwest, wrapping up my 15-day R&R vacation… I thought I’d put in a brief update of what’s happening and where I am.

Work in Baghdad since August has been a matter of getting used to the things I do, and getting better at the job over time. This time through, I’m working with violence data (how many attacks, how many casualties have occurred–that kind of thing), tracking the trends and some of the “special” modes of attack that the people in charge keep an eye on (suicide bombings, for instance).

It’s all fairly interesting stuff, and I’ve found that after 8 months of working on it I’ve got a good head for what’s happening in the country of Iraq, as a whole. As time has gone on I’ve become the person with the longest memory in our office for what has happened before and what we’ve done about it (this is because over time all the people there redeploy, so eventually a year deployer is going to have “seniority”). I find myself fielding a lot of questions from the newer people and telling them, “Oh yeah, we did that three months ago–here’s how we got our answer then.” I like being an expert, so it’s kind of fun to be in that position.

But on a personal note–wow, only 3 more months until I’m going to be redeploying! My replacement is coming into Baghdad around the end of July, and I should be out of there by the first week or so of August.

And then on to… grad school! During my time incommunicado, I’ve been accepted for the Air Force Institute of Technology’s faculty pipeline program. This means that after getting a PhD, I’ll go back to AFIT to teach statistics. They’ve approved me to get a doctorate from a civilian institution (though of course they only gave me the approved 3 years in which to do it–I know it can be done but it always makes professors and other grad students pause and shake their heads mournfully saying, “that’s going to be a LOT of work”). My front-runners are the University of Washington and the University of Colorado, and since I’m up here anyway, I was able to visit the UW yesterday and meet their faculty and hear about what’s going on there. It was a lot at once… but a very pleasant time, too. I kept thinking that I just can’t wait to get finished with the deployment so that I can move on to this. (Besides, living in a pleasant climate would be a nice change…)

Anything else? Not really, since I last checked in. I have a few pictures of my life in Baghdad and such but they’re not here with me and I’ll put those together when I get back at the end of the summer.

Oh–I do have a link for you, if you’re interested in keeping up with me:

My Google Reader shared page

These are articles and items I’ve read that intrigue me in some way–I usually try to put little comments on them about what struck me.

I miss being an active part of the blogosphere! However, I think this time will have allowed me to store up lots of blogworthy ideas to write about over the next year or so.

With that said, I’ll see you again in August sometime!

Good Morning Baghdad!

Final Post — For Now

Well, for those of you who’ve been following my progress to Iraq for a second time, I’ve made it! It was a long and arduous trip, marked by travel difficulties, poison oak contracted during my week of training in Texas, long, hot, humid days (in Texas and Qatar), and long, hot, dusty days (now that I’m here in Baghdad).

Now that I’m living in Camp Victory (along with far, far too much stuff–I’m going to have to go through it and send some back home to family), I can see why the people from this side of Baghdad always called the International Zone, where I was before, “Club Med”. Certain things I took for granted, like private bathrooms, TVs, internet access, phones that call home, and easy access to work are not part of the package here! While I did a fair amount of email whining about this for my first couple days, I’m getting used to the long walk to the bathrooms and the fact that the only internet I get is (defense filtered) work internet. Never mind–I’m going to be busy around here, and busy with interesting work!

Baghdad is very different–in a good way–than the way it was when I left a year and a half ago. Things have quieted down greatly, the Iraqis themselves are in charge of lots more stuff than they were before, and the main complaint the powers-that-be are making about security is that military personnel are getting too “complacent” because things have been quiet for so long. And all in all, that’s not a bad problem to have–it means that life is starting to feel semi-normal to even the troops out here. It requires correction, of course–it’s not like everything is golden yet–but it’s also not the razor’s edge that it was here a year ago.

However, my lack of unrestricted internet access, along with the Army’s policy of requiring blog registration and monitoring, combines to make it too difficult for me to continue blogging, at least for now. I’ve been having some “blogger burnout” lately anyway, so maybe it’s all for the best. Should my circumstances change (I hear that there may be some wireless coming my way in the future), I may well be back, but for now, this is goodbye. Even this I had to send back to the States for someone to post it for me.

I’ve enjoyed keeping up with all of you here, and I’m going to miss hearing from you in the comments. I hope I’m going to be able to return to you at some future date! Good luck, and I’ll talk to you later (I hope!).

*****End of post********

Airports ‘R Us

Or should I just say, “Airports are my life?” Anyway, I’m sitting in an airport at the moment, as I have been doing for the majority of the day, and expect to continue doing for the next half-dozen or more hours! Ah well, it’s all part of the process, right?

So, let’s see… Busy life makes for little blogging, and there’s a lot that has been happening over the past couple weeks. When I last checked in, I’d just done my continental road trip and then managed the moving-out process. I hopped on a plane last Sunday (see why “Airports are my life” works as a catchphrase?) that took me out to San Antonio (TX) and I spent a lovely week tromping in the South Texas sun in full gear (flak vest, helmet, automatic weapon, etc.) through underbrush, woods, and fire ant hills… (Our squad’s navigator liked the straight line approach over the following roads approach.)

Anyhow, I learned how to do all sorts of great things like fighting with a rifle, land navigation, challenging an unknown person… The point of this training is for Air Force people who are going to support the Army to get at least an initial introduction into the kinds of things that you might need to know. Of course, no one really takes into account what sort of job you will have, supporting the Army… but at least they’re trying, right?

The accommodations were… semi-primitive. We had tents, about 8 people in cots, but AF standard air-conditioned tents (thank goodness). We used port-a-potties all week. Not fun, particularly when they’ve been baking in the midday heat! We all got used to being soaked all the way through with sweat, after working hard outside. It’s probably a fairly good representation of being busy with that kind of job in a place like Iraq, though (thank goodness!) I’ve ended up staying in trailers and working in converted palaces and having access to real bathroom facilities. It’s funny how a flush toilet really does feel like the lap of luxury when you’ve been away from one for a week!

Anyway, I’m glad all of that is over–though I did make some AF-style “insta-friends” that I will (as usual) miss seeing. However, many of them will be coming through the airport in Baghdad, so I guess I’ll probably get a chance to see them if I know when they’re coming through.

Well, I would write more, but I’m amazingly tired and not really capable of much clever wordsmithing at the moment–there’s something about a week sleeping in cots combined with a wakeup time of 3 a.m. that’ll do that to you!!!

In the airport this morning!

Full Circle

After four nights of sleeping on the floor in an empty apartment, I finally turned in my keys and checked into a hotel tonight. I am homeless now! Though of course with a rented car and a hotel room, it’s not really like that… I’m just rootless. It’s so interesting–I’m staying in the very hotel that I stayed in when I came down to Alabama in April 2006 to house-hunt… and here I am again, post-apartment.

I was dreading this week. I got on the plane from Sea-Tac last weekend and felt a total sense of being overwhelmed… I had two days of moving (packers Monday, movers Tuesday), then all the rest of the tasks that make up “outprocessing” before a deployment. But like anything stressful, while it took all my energy and effort, it also made the time go by really quickly. Before I knew it, this morning arrived, the final walk-through of my apartment occurred (being at this point more ready to throw money than effort at a problem, I paid up rather than doing the stove-oven-refrigerator cleaning that I probably should have done), and I was completely rootless here in my formerly home city. I suppose it’ll be a home again, but probably not for too long. Maybe not even long enough to rent another apartment.

And it’s all downhill from here! Well, not really–training next week will be, I’m sure, strenuous and hot, and I’ll emerge bruised and exhausted, but at least from the time I check in with them, someone else will be making all the important decisions. After the decision saturation of this week, I’m ready to be told what to do for a while. (And yes, I’m quite aware that I’ll get sick of this all too soon–I remember it being one of my complaints about deployment last time, that I didn’t feel like I was an adult capable of making my own decisions…)

Ahhhh… so luxurious to have a real mattress and easy computer access once more! I really missed both this week.

I’d like to write more–I thought of so many interesting things I wanted to say over the week while I didn’t have access to the internet–but it’s hard to focus and I shouldn’t wait too long before getting to sleep. I’ll check in again as soon as I have a chance…

Mid-transition update

Well, after a week (and a day) of car travel, whirlwind visits in Ohio and Washington State, and far less time to see people than I would have preferred, I’m back at home (with a rented car, for the remaining time) and trying desperately to get my house in order, quite literally, for the movers who are coming in on Monday and Tuesday. I made sure I got home with at least one extra day so that I could sort through things… they’re not going to see a precisely clean and well-ordered abode, of course, but at least I’ll have the stuff I need to bring with me separate from the stuff that will sit in storage for a year. I’m actually rather glad that I never got around to making the big Goodwill trip that I’ve been meaning to for a while… it means that for the remainder of my time here, I can stay at home camping out on the futon mattress that I don’t want to keep, and I won’t have to live in a hotel room as well as drive a rented car!

All things considered, though, I would really rather just sort of fast forward through the next week or so. There’s a lot to do and very little time in which to do it. Sigh.

I’ve got all sorts of fun pictures from my road trip that I’ve been meaning to post… I suspect I won’t have the time to do it right away, but stay tuned!

Juggling

I can tell I have too many things going on–now I’m forgetting the important pieces of them! I realized, today, as I was packing my stuff for my impending road trip, that I have apparently left my directions at work. Sigh. I did look for them at work, but when they weren’t immediately evident, I figured that they were either in my car or at home. But, alas, they are in neither place, and after quite a bit of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to stop by the office to pick them up before I can leave tomorrow morning. How annoying! However, not all is lost because work is right on the way–I’ll probably only lose a half hour or so, total.

Last time I did this, I forgot food for my kitties, and ended up having to buy it at a gas station along the way. They survived, but I’d prefer not to do that again! (Your options at a gas station are limited, naturally.)

On the up side of all this, I’ve been trying to do so much at the same time–coordinate a move, a deployment, and a long road trip–that packing for just one of them seemed disturbingly easy. Disturbing, of course, because I’m sure I’m forgetting several essentials and I’ll think of them when it’s too late. However, perhaps this is a good sign: I’ve done the heavy lifting already and the rest of it is ready to fall into place when the time is right. I hope this is the case!

Anyhow, this will be a short post because my head isn’t “all there” right now–it’s hard to focus. At the moment, I’m just trying to while away a couple hours until I can go to bed early in order to get up early and do the final things (packing the car, etc.) before I go. I’m attempting to relax, though we all know how easy it is to relax when you’re consciously trying to do so!

I may be sporadic with the blogging for a week or so: there’s a lot going on and I may not have consistent internet access. Bear with me: by mid-August I’ll be in place in my Baghdad home base, and should have a schedule again. (A schedule being all-important for me to get ordinary things, like blogging, done on a regular basis.) Until then it’ll be touch and go for a while… at least I know how it works this time. It’s helping with the stress.

Spinning

Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round on YouTube

This is an apt description of my relationship with deployment at the moment…

We got a four-day weekend for the Fourth of July (thus no posting), and even though this was my Last Holiday (for a year, anyway), I ended up spending most of it going through my stuff. Packing, sorting, working through piles and piles of Stuff… the stuff that I’ve been saying for years that I needed to go through, that I just kind of managed to avoid… and the most irritating thing about this process is that it is never-ending; the mess seems worse now than it did when I started. However, that might be because I now have piles: Salvation Army, Trash, Storage, Deployment Bags (carried), Ship to Myself for Winter, Take with Me on My Roadtrip, etc. Hard to keep it all in my head at once!

However, even though the mess seems hard to negotiate, things are getting done. I’m close to the point where I won’t be utterly ashamed of myself when the movers come in to pack away my things. Last time, I was… they just went into my rooms and packed the piles, as they stood, into boxes (which led to my mess becoming the unmanageable thing that I am dealing with now… I should learn from my past!).

At work, it’s getting crazy. I have all of 2 unbooked work days before I’m leaving for my en-route training; the rest is taken up with appointments, training, and such. I still don’t have orders (though my fingers are crossed that I’ll have them tomorrow), and I need orders to do the stuff like, say, scheduling the movers to come and take away all my stuff. Oh, and to schedule my flight out to Iraq, too. Oh well… these minor annoyances are to be expected in the process. I will be glad, though, when I am safely on the way, and whatever is left done or undone is a matter that is solidly behind me.

Next memorable landmark: my cross-country roadtrip, where I abandon my most precious things (cars and cat) to the care of family for the time that I’m gone. Last time, this roadtrip took me two days. This year, it’ll be four. Oh, with a jog to visit a good friend of mine in Ohio (I discovered that this only increased my drive by 4 hours, and it took a night of hotels off the book!).

Isn’t it a truly great thing to be taking a four-day roadtrip in the midst of the highest gas prices ever? I’m quite thrilled to consider the extra cash I’ll be shelling out. Sigh.

So, there is what has been keeping my mind spinning over the past week or so. My suspicion is that it’s going to keep going until I’m out of the country! (So by this time next month, my nerves will be terribly frayed in consequence.)

Timesink

I was going to write tonight, really I was… Alas, instead:

This is the makeover site to end all makeover sites! It’s hard to see in the small size, but I could change everything from skin tone to eye color, along with the obvious hair stuff… Ahhh, too much fun. I spent simply HOURS working on this. I am (slightly) ashamed.

Harbinger?

If the night before the first of a month is a portent of what is to come for the rest of the month, I think I’m in trouble. Last night, out of the blue, I woke to a horrible, ear-bleeding inducing siren sound. It took me a few horrified groggy minutes to figure out it was a smoke detector, and that there was no smoke anywhere to be causing it to go off. Add to this the fact that the sound of it was echoing around the apartment and I wasn’t sure if it was the smoke detector in my bedroom or the one in the living room that I was hearing.

Having eventually determined that it was in my bedroom (actually, I groggily figured I’d do that one first and get to the other one next, as I recall), I found a chair to stand on, stood on it, and realized that the ceiling was too high and the smoke detector was still out of reach. This took several more minutes… but I finally managed to pile some stuff on the chair, and balance on my tiptoes to reach the smoke detector. Then, since I’d never touched the thing before and my sleep-addled eyes couldn’t focus on the teensy-tiny writing on the buttons, I managed to turn off the alarm, then turn it back on again, off and on once more, until it was finally off. Well, that was probably because it was dangling by its wires from the ceiling now and I’d pulled the battery out of it. But then it started an intermittent piercing beeping, spaced just far enough apart to rouse a person from a deathlike slumber. Definitely no way I could sleep through that.

At this point I tried to determine if I could pull the smoke detector completely off the ceiling, but it looked like it was hard-wired in. (Granted, I didn’t have a very good line-of-sight because it was up so high and I was perched so precariously.) I determined later–talking to people at work–that I could actually have unplugged it from the electricity completely, to stop the horrendous beeping. Oh well.

So my next recourse was (logically… ?) the circuit box. I went over to it and started flipping switches, but nothing was wired to the smoke detectors, apparently. It would appear that the smoke-detectors-of-death-shrieks have a special undead current of their own that isn’t wired into the apartment’s circuit breaker. So I flipped all the circuits back on and tried to think of something else to do. At this point it was approximately 2:15 a.m.

Eventually, I decided that I should swap the offending battery with one of the (apparently working, from the silence of the other smoke detectors) working batteries elsewhere in the house–if I had to sleep through the high-decibel “chirps,” at least I’d be doing it from the opposite end of the apartment. I determined this after rifling through all my junk drawers wondering if I’d ever accidentally bought a 9 v. battery and tucked it conveniently away. No such luck.

More drama ensued–the chair setup I was using would have been too obnoxious to carry from one end of the apartment to the other. I finally settled on upending a trunk and gingerly placing my weight along the load-bearing edges of it. With the extra foot and a half that this provided me, I could actually see what I was doing to extract the new battery. Of course, the old battery didn’t want to wedge itself into the spare bedroom detector, and now I had two scream-chirping smoke detectors enlivening my apartment in the wee hours of the morning.

However, I’d by this time extracted the (presumably good) battery, so I shooed the cats out of the guest room (where they were curiously investigating what I was doing with my new nocturnal habit), closed the door behind me to muffle the beeping, and carried the savior battery back with me. I reestablished my chair setup and managed… more out of stubbornness than skill… to muscle the new battery into the detector. It promptly went off again, but this time it actually stopped shrieking when I pressed the “stop” button (now that I finally knew how to operate it). After a long, tense pause, I determined that my bedroom would be quiet once more (I was attempting to ignore the not-very-muffled beeping from the other end of the apartment), and went back to bed. Only to get up 10 minutes later to turn on the lights, herd the cats back into my room from the hallway, and shut my bedroom door in an attempt to put two closed doors between me and the ongoing guest-room smoke detector beeps.

Of course, this morning I was awakened at ~5 a.m. by–what else?–the smoke detector in my bedroom going off again. I managed to turn it off with no extreme measures, headed back to the guest room and, in better light and with a couple hours of sleep to my name, managed to shove that battery into its place. Naturally, at that point both detectors stopped beeping entirely, and now that I was too awake to go back to bed, I had a quiet house once more.

Grrr. Any thoughts on what makes a smoke detector go off when it’s been well-behaved for two years, even in the presence of blown-out candles, stovetop accidents, and so on? My guess is that it’s either dust or an insect that made it to precisely the wrong spot.

Anyway, I wanted to record my midnight misadventures, because even in the midst of them (when I was distractedly screaming, “I hate you!” at the smoke detector–I’d gotten to the end of a very frayed rope), I was somewhat incredulous that I hadn’t made the whole thing up. Then again, maybe my sleep deprivation is making me delusional?

Demographics

An article I read today has been causing some comment among the blogs I read… The article talks about the population decline in Europe, and what it comes from, and what it might mean.

I thought this section was interesting, talking about how cities could plan for shrinkage over time:

According to some, a declining population presents certain opportunities: to increase efficiency and livability, to change lifestyle and environment for the better. The plan that Akbar’s team came up with was for 18 cities in the region (two cities now share one government) to submit to an exhaustive process of review and soul-searching under the direction of Bauhaus planners and, by the year 2010, to come up with long-term redevelopment strategies appropriate to each – to find a way for each city to shrink constructively.

Dessau itself, Akbar said, had two distinctive features. One, as Karl Gröger indicated from the sausage-factory lookout, is that it is surrounded by protected national forest. The other is that it has no historic town center (80 percent of the city was destroyed in World War II) and thus no core. The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature on the periphery into the center: to create “urban islands set in a landscaped zone,” as Sonja Beeck, a Bauhaus planner, told me. “That will make the remaining urban areas denser and more alive.” The city has lost 25 percent of its population in recent years. “That means it is 25 percent too big,” Gröger said. “So far we have erased 2,500 flats from the map, and we have 8,000 more to go.” Beeck and Gröger walked with me through an area where a whole street had been turned into a grassy sward. Many residents were dubious at first, they told me, but as we walked, a woman recognized the government official and marched up to chat about when promised trees and flowers would be planted in front of her building.

Eisleben, another of the cities in the consortium, has a picture-perfect 16th-century downtown but is losing people fast, and many of its historic buildings have been long unused and uninhabitable. Eisleben’s shrinkage strategy centers on history: it happens to be the birthplace of Martin Luther. The city is laying out a tourist route – from the house in which Luther was born to his first church to the church in which he gave the last sermon before he died – that shows off its old center and turns its many derelict buildings and empty lots into art installations related to the father of Protestantism. The idea is to attract more tourists and money and build up the locals’ pride in their history. There is a certain paradox here: thanks to its Communist heritage, this part of Germany has the distinction of being one of the least religious places on earth. Eisleben gets 100,000 religious pilgrims a year, but only 14 percent of its population are churchgoers, and hardly anybody expects a turnaround.

Interestingly, I think that the declining birthrate is linked to the falling societal status of parents and parenting, which, in turn, can be linked to the free-falling status of teachers and the teaching profession. (No; not so much professors at the university level, but teachers, associated with mandated K-12 education in the U.S.) I keep reading editorials about the sad decline of the teaching profession, the need for more and better teachers, the need for math and science teachers… Attempts have been made to pay teachers more, to reward them in various other ways, but I think at its heart is the fact that teaching is not considered a status job. Teachers are providers of a service, and, consequently, part of the “service tier” in our cultural status hierarchy. We may or may not be polite and kind to them, depending on the day and our mood, but we don’t revere them. At times I suspect we don’t even respect them. (And yes, I spent a short while as a high school teacher–some of this comes from first-hand experience.)

I think something similar is happening to the status of parents, culturally. Having children has lost its cachet as a milestone–one’s real entry into the adult world. As this article points out, a culture hypervigilant and paranoid about child rearing has made the costs of parenting skyrocket–both in terms of money and also less quantifiable ways–and childlessness has moved from being a regrettable state to one that we expect from some of the highest-status members of our society. Exceptionally large families are viewed with derision, contempt, and sometimes outright hostility. (Check out some of the message boards about the Duggars, a family with 17 children that has filmed a series of TV programs for TLC. Granted, much of the hostility seems to be toward their rather off-the-norm version of Christianity, but then, that’s why they’ve had so many kids in the first place.)

We’ve moved to being a nation full of nosy neighbors and nanny-staters. Charges of neglect and/or abuse for quite normal behaviors seem ever-more prevalent. I remember from teaching the dictate that one was not allowed to touch a student… it could be construed as either inappropriate touching or as an assault. When you hamstring people into operating by a set of legalistic, abstract rules such as we’ve developed over the past few decades, it’s hard to get the practical work of dealing with children actually accomplished–be it teaching or parenting. Despite the Rousseaunian ideals of the elites who champion the nanny-state (or is it we, the children who want Mama Government to take away all our problems, who’ve created this Frankenstein?), kids don’t mold like plastic into model citizens, and they’re not always going to like the process of being shaped into adults. We’ve created an unsustainable societal model.

Wow. Listen to me ramble on! Me, who as a single childless person really has an outsider’s perspective. I do know that, after watching my friends and family with children, and watching them deal with some of these very issues, I am more hesitant about having children myself some day. It’s hard enough without the government and every other interested party breathing down your neck, waiting for you to make just one false move. No one’s perfect… so why are we acting as though only perfection is acceptable? I just don’t get it.

As far as the wider issue, that of declining population… I wonder what this means for the world as a whole, that global growth rates are slowing so much? It spelled doom for the Roman Empire… Like a tree rotten at the core, they eventually fell to outside forces. What happens if that happens on a global scale? Do we descend into a global Dark Ages? Interesting questions.