Wow–it’s been a while. I’d intended to keep up writing while I was on vacation, but somehow family visits don’t lend themselves easily to keeping up with correspondence, etc. I even got a couple calls from friends but didn’t have time to return them while I was up in Washington State. I’ve got a ton of pictures–mostly friends and family–which I’ll be uploading to my Flickr site soon . . . once I get them down to a manageable size and decide which ones I should post and which I don’t need to.
I’ve finally got a definite date for my deployment! I got a call yesterday (my last day of leave) while I was in the craft store, picking out yarn for a new knitting project, and heard that I’m scheduled to be in place in Baghdad on October 24th! So between now and then it’ll be a veritable whirlwind of training and appointments as I prepare . . . with odd down times in between, I guess.
Washington State was lovely, as it usually is at this time of year. Blue, blue skies (except for a couple grey days), temperatures in the low 80’s, humidity negligible . . . what a change from Alabama in August! I realized, while I was there, why it is that I was able to go barefoot all summer long during the years that we lived there when I was growing up–it’s never hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, the way it is just about everywhere else. As I’ve been moving around from place to place these past . . . dozen or more years, I’ve wondered how I was able to be barefoot in the summer. When I attempt it now it feels like I’m losing skin off the soles of my feet. Did I really have feet that calloused? Well, now I know–it was a factor of the place. One mystery solved!
I got to see all my friends who live out there, and family friends, and so on. The thing that was really odd for me was seeing all the children. Everyone I knew, it seems like, got married about five or six years ago, and then they all had children, so now they’ve all got kids (usually plural). I spent time around more children than I’ve encountered for any length of time, probably, in the past decade! What a strange thing to realize how very much my married friends’ lives and my own life have diverged over the past few years . . .
Much to my relief, no children stiffened up in panic at my mere presence, and most of them seemed to view me as an interesting oddity, perhaps because of the overly cautious way in which I would approach them.
It’s been three or four years–and counting–since I’ve seen most of the people I saw out there, so it was good to reconnect. I spent a lot of time telling people about my upcoming deployment, what job I’ll be doing, and things like that. And then fielding questions about whether I’m going to make the military a career (short answer: It depends) and where I’ll be going next (don’t know) and if I’m ever going to head back to Washington anytime soon, since the rest of my immediate family is moving back up there in the next year or so (I won’t be there as long as I’m in the AF, because they don’t have jobs for my career field at McChord). It was nice, but exhausting, because I am a private person and interacting with other people takes a lot of energy. I was thoroughly drained by the time I returned on Sunday.
Let me tell you, though–it was weird to disembark the plane in Montgomery on Sunday night. I got a whiff of that scented, heavy air of a Southern night, and it made me just feel–happy, peaceful, pleased–and I came skipping down the stairs of the commuter plane so quickly that one of the airline employees at the base of them thought I was falling down and reached out to steady me. Then these past two days (Monday and Tuesday) I had taken off because I knew I’d need to refresh my energy. And it was good that I did–though of course a part of me still wants to be off work and sleeping in (since I’m still on Pacific time).
Now it’s just a matter of getting caught back up on world events, the news, and the rest of the world, as I tend to lose track of such things while I’m on leave. I’ll be writing more later–once I have something other than “what I did on my summer vacation” to write about!
Posted by Kjirstin 
