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…