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!

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

Random Thought #1: Oh dear… I must be an utter, benighted nerd! (I store file records chronologically using YYYYMMDD and then a description, so that I can find all my stuff based on when I was working with it. Something I create today, for instance, might be called “20080626 blog snippets” and so on.)

Random Thought #2: Can’t write creatively on the computer? This blogger talks about how her poetry disappeared when she tried to compose it online… I’ve noticed that all my fiction and story thoughts get swept aside in a digital medium. There are too many other distractions; I don’t go into that world inside my head that I need to inhabit in order to tell a story. But writing longhand seems ridiculously slow and stilted; I wonder if there’s an easy compromise?

Personally, I find that I write outlines and bullet points much more easily on a computer than full sentences in paragraph form, at least when I’m writing “officially”. If I’m able to adapt a conversational tone, I write as a substitute for talking… it’s pretty much what I would say if I could sit down and plan out what I was going to talk about ahead of time. Interestingly, I find the conversational tone that I take in blogs and emails is increasingly pervading all my writing–it’s been more and more difficult to pull myself out of it and revert to “speaking from on high” in the way that you tend to do in formal essays and such things. I wonder if that will be another side effect of the rampant use of instant-access text tech?

Random Thought #3: Oooh! And (not being a complete tech geek) I just heard about Google’s Android phone system today… Wow, is that ever cool! I hope by the time I get back to the States (next summer), I’ll be able to buy a smartphone that conveniently uses it! I know that in some circles Google is the Big Bad Wolf, but I like their approach to things. (Hmmm, they’ve got a rep for approaching things in the math-nerdy way… maybe it’s like calling to like? Sigh.)

Random Thought #4: Last, I read all about our emerging hive mind(s?) today… I am quite fascinated that we individual humans may be unwittingly creating Borg-like collective intelligences out of ourselves just by banding together to solve frivolous puzzles. It’s interesting, though, because the common refrain that I see among the producers of this sort of entertainment is “we keep underestimating their capabilities!”. I’ve noticed that this adds to increasing complexity (and thus interest) in more traditional media–TV shows, for instance, have taken to having increasingly complex and intertwined story arcs over whole seasons or multiple seasons, and we keep crying for more… What an interesting time and place to be living in!

I found a terribly interesting essay about the way that the internet is shaping our social environment, and it’s been taking over my life for the past couple days…

Here’s a slice from the article in question:

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This solitary voice was speaking my language… Someone who sees the trends in our technology and relates them to social phenomena… More and more I’m seeing the digital revolution as something on the scale of the introduction of the printing press… it seemed just a convenient invention at first, but the change that it wrought at a societal level brought down seemingly invincible power-institutions of the day. See this essay.

It seems very clear to me now that we’re seeing the beginning stages of a major transformation. Like any change, this will be very painful for lots of people, and may include some unpleasant upheavals as a result. I bet that many institutions will feel the pinch before this change is complete… newspapers and the music industry are among the first hit, and others are in process… I actually find myself wondering if Big Business and Big Government (of which I am a part, as a military member) will survive the transformation intact. It seems to me that the kind of huge, top-down, centralized organizations that came about with the Industrial Revolution may become outmoded. The next set of cultural heavyweights may well be the Googles and Microsofts and Facebooks of the world… or their next-gen equivalents.

Anyway, after reading Clay Shirky’s blog and several other spin-offs, and subscribing to several science and tech news feeds, I feel like, for the first time in a while, I’m seeing the shape of the future. My vision isn’t complete, but I feel like I’ve got the edges of it, and boy, are we in for a wild ride! For instance, I would not be at all surprised if in the next century the notion of the nation-state becomes completely outmoded. After all, why define identity by the silly matter of where you are physically placed, if all or most of your meaningful interaction happens in a virtual, international setting? I think that the boundaries that may matter more are ideological ones, religious ones, and things like that.

For instance, I remember reading an article about how a lot of Europeans are very concerned about the upcoming elections… it is disturbing to them that a person with the kind of political and international clout of the United States President is chosen by a nation of often ignorant, isolationist boors. And just recently I visited the website for petitions to the UK Prime Minister, and it struck me how it seems almost… artifical… to require that a person be a UK resident to sign a petition.

Granted, it’s going to take a while for this changeover to take place. I’m not sure what government would have to look like on a worldwide scale… it’s pretty evident that the current experiments in international governmental institutions we have can be hijacked by people with agendas that aren’t in the interests of all humanity. Power corrupts, and power on a global scale would be HIGHLY tempting to the worst sort of people. But perhaps if a good system of checks and balances was in place, a truly worldwide government could work? I have no idea… but I bet it’s coming down the pike!

I even read an article today that suggested that postmodernism is outmoded. We’re into a new era, post-postmodernism, this philosopher argued! After all, all the relevant texts of postmodernism were written decades ago, and the only place where we see postmodern thought (self-conscious irony, etc.) reliably displayed in pop culture is in irreverent cartoons aimed at the K-6 set. (And their parents.) When any movement has been that thoroughly digested by the culture at large, you know it’s not cutting-edge anymore. Just like when the women’s department at Wal-Mart starts selling a style to the masses in middle America, you know that it’s out of date!

I know I’ll always err on the side of the future. I like thinking about what’s coming next, and what might happen. I always hoped that one of the Star Trek vessels would come by someday to “beam me up” and let me explore the galaxy and the future…

Now the process of waiting for some of the things to actually happen is going to be one of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling frustration! We still have most of the adult population who’s barely digested the notion of email, let alone social networking, wikis and the thought of collective intelligence… Getting to the next phase is going to be a combination of waiting for the old guard to retire, and the slow and torturous process of retraining people who are fairly happy to be set in their ways. But by the time that the people my age are in their 80’s, we’ll probably be seeing a fairly substantial change in world order! Of course at that point I’ll be too old and crotchety to enjoy it, but maybe I can point to stuff I wrote in the dark ages of blogging and say, “See, I KNEW it was going to happen!”

I found this article about the rise in the American practice of the “gap year”… a year between high school and college that young people take to gain life experience away from school. I started to scroll through the comments but they could be summarized as either “gosh, I wish I had a gap year! It helps you focus!” or “That’s a wussy idea for namby-pamby elitists who waste their entire college time on drinking and partying!”

Personally, I’ve come to think that taking a year… maybe even a couple… between high school and college might not be a bad idea in the abstract. My own personal experience of college was that it was an extension of high school, only with more fun living conditions (no parents!) and the ability to choose your classes (somewhat). I had very little sense of college as a privilege, as a time in my life that was unique and worth being appreciated for its uniqueness. Instead, with the callow self-centeredness of youth, I spent a large part of my time feeling victimized and oppressed because anyone (professors, parents, etc.) expected anything of me.

It only took me a few months out in the real world to realize my mistake. No more guaranteed summer breaks. No more choice of how you spend your time each day. No more setting up all your classes to be after noon or concentrated in two days, leaving the other days free. You can’t afford a nice room like the one in your dorm… you end up living in the seediest circumstances you’ve seen in your life, or with more roommates than you’ve ever been willing to consider before. Or (horrors!) back at home with your parents. It doesn’t take long to realize that you had it REALLY good when you were in college.

That’s why I favor the notion of a gap year. I think it would have helped me to appreciate my collegiate experience as the gift that it was, if I’d had to deal with some of the realities of life past school… before I started those last four years of formal education…

But I’m romanticizing, here. I used to think that, before I went back to graduate school full time. At least during grad school I knew I had a good deal going on (full salary plus tuition covered…), but I quickly reverted to my old practices, sleeping in whenever I had a chance, procrastinating par excellence, and otherwise not being tremendously responsible with my time. Granted, a full decade had gone by since my bachelor’s degree, so I had more maturity to bring into the game, and I studied hard when necessary, but I wasn’t the driven workaholic that (in my dreams) I should have been.

So… gap year or no? I don’t know. I have a growing uneasiness with the length of time that we’re prolonging adolescence in our culture. I understand that life expectancies are greatly improved, but it seems strange to me that so many people are facing the “I have to grow up and be responsible” milestone around their 30th birthday… that’s a full three decades of irresponsibility! Think of all the man-years of potential productivity that we’re wasting! (ha ha–should that be called “person-years”?)

Personally, I think that joining the military, getting in a couple years of enlisted service, and then going to college–something that the military very much encourages its junior members to do–is a really good way to build life experience, responsibility, character, and a sense of knowing who you are and what you want before you commit to a major. Every person that I’ve seen who’s taken this route is the better and the richer for it… and each one of them valued their college education in a way that the clueless 17-year-old that I was when I started school could never have imagined.

Yesterday was a rough day for me. I got an email early in the day, telling me I was a “no-show” for mandatory training. I was able to truthfully respond that this was the first I’d heard of it, and (I hope) deflected the bad karma to the people who should have been keeping me in the loop… but I was still mad about it, because I like to do things right and not mess up.

However, in the course of the crisis cleanup phone call, I managed to get the name of someone who actually knew the details of where I’m going to be working when I’m in Baghdad. After a rather absurd follow-the-trail phone calling game, I have by this afternoon exchanged several emails with the person that I’ll be replacing, my soon-to-be section chief, and a couple other people I’ll be working with over there. All courtesy of a “bad girl” notice that I was hoping not to receive. So sometimes good truly comes out of less-than-ideal circumstances, I guess!

I will say… it’s awfully nice going into this knowing approximately what to expect. The details of what I’ll be working with are different, but it’ll be the same tools and I’ll be producing similar types of products. I’m familiar with the databases they work with, and I know a little bit about the layout of the camp where I’ll be stationed, all due to a one-day conference that I attended during my previous deployment to the other side of Baghdad. I will say that I have my doubts about whether the “powers that be” can actually get me there on time… they’re optimistically scheduling me within a very tight 5-day window to get all the way from home to Baghdad–having watched this process, I think they’re not leaving much room for the inevitable hiccups that occur… but they act supremely confident, so who am I to question?

So, my optimism is restored today, after having been rather knocked around yesterday. I was as close to a pre-deployment meltdown yesterday evening as I’ve been so far… I hope there aren’t too many more days like that between now and the time that I get to Baghdad! It’s all very well and good to go into the process knowing it’s going to be painfully confusing and slow… I completely intended to be calm and zen-like about the whole thing and think “what happens, happens… I’m going to get there one way or another,” but when the inevitable happens I still get frustrated!