Day 156

And the time goes by ...

Its strange how fast sometimes. You look at the days ahead and think that there is no way that youll ever get from point A to point B. And then suddenly you look up ... and its 3 months later and you're left scratching your head wondering where all that time you thought you had went.

So thats possibly why I havent blogged in a few days. But Ive learned some things in the last few days .... lets see if I cant remember some of the highlights ...

• The way to ace your first "grown up" interview is NOT, in fact, to come in and answer (to the very innocent question of "how are you?") .... loudly ... "IM ALL WET!". Yes, I just came in from the rain (we do live in WASHINGTON), however the attorney looked at me as if I had just screamed out "THATS WHAT SHE SAID!" Although in all fairness, had I been around friends and NOT at an interview, that is exactly what would have been said next.

• Lights are tricky. To elaborate:

As we all know I drive like an Asian ("Which one, a man or a woman?" .."Whichever one is worse!"). So not having a car right now, Williams was nice enough to let me take hers for my day full of classes and interviews. I get out of the car and see that the lights are still on. So I go back in and check to make sure I turned them off. It said I had, so I get back out.

Lights still on.

So I get back in and press all the buttons I can find, sort of like you did when you used to play Mortal Kombat on Sega? (Im convinced NO ONE ever knew how to actually play that game. We all just mashed a bunch of button combinations until you KO'ed the dude).

Get out. Lights still on.

So I repeat this process about three times. As Im starting to get REALLY strange looks from people, I finally realize that maybe ... they shut themselves off ....

Get out. Lights still on.

Wait 30 seconds.

Lights go off.

Feel very ashamed of myself.

• A real text exchange from today:

E: Im about to go out for midnight shopping! I hope I can get a good deal for his gift!

Me: Please wear a helmet. True story, someone once got knifed for a Tickle Me Elmo. I really hope thats not your husbands gift!

• This got brought up the other day:

One time when a friend and I were at the zoo, we were handed one of the maps of the entire zoo. We were studying it for a moment, and then I finally asked "Where is the 'you are here' X to let you know where we are in relation to this?"

He looked at me with very big eyes and said .... "This is a MAP. It walks WITH US."

Best blonde moment ever.

• Followed a close second by baby registering with Williams. She pointed at the toothbrushes and said "How do I know what kind of toothbrush hell need when hes born?"

I looked at her, with what I can only assume was the same stare that I was given all those years ago and said "Jess ... he isnt born with TEETH"

Jess "Oh! Good to know ....."

• And the true "You know you're a military wife when ...." moment:

Me: You know, for people who arent getting any, we sure do talk about sex a LOT. Maybe we need sex rehab with Dr. Drew.

M: You cant go on that show ... you arent getting any.

Me: True. And Id probably just end up trying to sleep with Dr. Drew anyways.

• Or the real "you know youre husband is deployed when ...."

Me:What are you doing?

J:Nothing much. Watching a Dolly Parton Christmas special and eating brownies with cookies in them.

Anyways. All of this convinces me that time does go by .... and you can even fit a few laughs in along the way.

Since today is Thanksgiving, Ill end here that Im grateful for my life. Even though this is the hardest thing Ive ever gone through, I cant help but be thankful for the love of a soldier, who is so far away. The family that was brought together by a job, but joined together by love. And for good food, laughter, and the close of one more day that brings me that much closer to you.

I love you baby. Now, forever, and no matter what.

Day 152

Is the day after the day that you cant quite remember.

Let me tell you something about Army Wives.

We may be housewives, moms, care package makers, endless support systems, ect.

But Ill be damned if we dont know how to party.

I wish I could explain last night in detail. However after the champagne was uncorked and flowing .... it all gets a little fuzzy.

Hands down my favorite part of the night (besides the part where I got to meet some fantastic new people!) was figuring out the next day all the things that happened when you were too involved with your drink to pay attention.

As detailed in this text conversation from this morning:

Me: Thats pretty amazing. I woke up this morning and had nooooo idea how I got home

R:Didnt Jessica take you?

Me: Thats what I hear. I cant confirm or deny that.

R: I should stop fibbing when I drink. I told thse girls that I was out of jail on probabtion for assault and they better watch out.

Me: What girls????

R:The ones who took pictures of us and wouldnt stop saying they were going to tell the commander what we were doing. So I told her that I didnt give a shit who she was, and to get her own rank and to stop wearing her husbands.

R: I also offered to introduce her face to the pavement.

Me: Holy shit! I missed all of this!

R: Then she told the bartender and got me into trouble. I called her a tattletale and said that if I saw her in the streets Id run her over.

R: Yeah I was pissed. I felt like Brad on RR/RW. I was "flexing down".

R: I should have known better than to drink whiskey. So from now on Im sticking to vodka. The soviets had it right.

The night consisted of a lot of (really terrible, at least in my case) drunken kareoke, running through the bar as if we ran that shit (oh wait ... we did), and I do believe that on the way out I hugged about 14 people. That I didnt know.

Im a super happy drunk.

The rest of this is not meant for the faint of heart, nor is it meant for my mother, God Forbid shell ever read this.

So anyways. I come home and let the dogs out. I apparently decide that this is as good of a time as any to have a little .... quality time with myself, lets say.

I dont know what the hell happened, because I woke up the next morning with my "quality time instrument" no where to be found, no pants on, and the dogs (who had apparently gotten fed up with my bullshit and put themselves to bed beside me) both looking at me with more doggie disgust than I had ever seen.

It took a good five minutes to figure out A) where I was (home! Yay me!), B) How I got there (apparently, Slago. But this is all hearsay), and C) Where all my shit was (in the next room, and nothing seemed to be missing. Another major score!).

Later today, I limped out to the car .... a result of one too many lunges. Not, as the Jessica's helpfully suggested, the aftermath of me being too drunk to figure out what hole to put it in.

Bitches.

Also, this is a joke, so dont take it to heart ...

But 151 days with no sex can make you think funny things ...





Like in New Moon, when the shirtless "wolf pack" all appeared on the screen ...

And I turn to Krista and say ...

"Wow. Have you ever WANTED to get gang banged before?"

Please hurry home honey :)

(And fuck you guys if you cant take a joke)

Day 151 - not one of the funny ones

And Id just like to say ... watch your left hand turns.

Don't you love how everything seems to go wrong when they're away?

Well - lets be real. I was thinking about this earlier, and even IF something were to go wrong when my husband was home, Id STILL be the one to fix it. But Allen is at least really great at playing nursemaid ..... and after the accident I was in 2 days ago, even though I may have had to direct him through every step of the insurance process, and who to call and when, he still would have been very good about changing the DVD out for me while I laid on the couch with some Starbucks (that he had fetched, don't get it twisted).

Instead, after the crash, I got on the phone with the insurance, then proceeded to work on my internship. And then cleaned the house. There was no sitting around trying to "rest" or "relax". That may be for the better, but let me tell you civilian ladies something - when you sit around and bitch about your husbands or boyfriends, there are reasons why those of us whose husbands are deployed will say " And the big deal is????? Because I don't get it.".

Anyways, these things really never happen when the guys are home. Its like there is someone up there, possibly the Patron Saint of Military Wives who take every potential catastrophe, including:

• The mortgage company not receiving payment and trying to foreclose on your house when you SWEAR TO GOD you paid the right person 40 times(Basic '07)

• Packing up your entire house when you've only been married for 2 months and having to sort through years of someones idea of packing being "stick it in bags in the garage and Ill deal with it when I eventually marry some poor sucker who will do it for me" (AIT '07)

• Being stuck at the airport because your ride flaked and you don't know that many people where you are stationed yet to call for a ride (Trojan Training '08)

• Your husbands car window being smashed, his GPS being stolen (Mirror Image '08)

• Catching your husbands best friends wife faking a miscarriage to the pregnancy she also made up (Brigade FTX '08)

• Getting caught in a months worth of snow when you are FROM THE SOUTH and drive a TINY CAR. Ending up stranded most of the month (DIA Training, '08)

• Finding out that deployment is in 3 months .... from the NEWS ... while you cant talk to them for 2 weeks .... (NTC '09)

And please let those only serve as very loose examples of things that can go wrong.

So anyways, this Patron Saint obviously takes every bad and terrible thing that you could have to deal with, and puts them off however many months until your husband is gone again.

This will inevitably lead you to, for just one moment, anger at him. Even if its not fair, there is still a part of you that wonders why "everyone else" has someone to lean on or to fall back on, and you don't (which is one great thing about being in this community for the duration of deployment - because everyone is in the same boat, and you don't ever feel like you are the only one ...).

Then it leads you to being sad. Most of us get through the day by pushing our anger, sadness, loneliness to the side, so that we can go on. Someone asked me the other day if I thought it was bad that she didn't think about her husband being in a combat zone. I said absolutely not! Us worrying over here and falling apart certainly doesn't do our husbands any good. But some days, like when you are standing in the pouring rain next to a smashed up car, you might have more trouble than before pushing all the bad thoughts out of your head. For about ten seconds I wanted to put my arms across my chest, stomp my foot, and say "I want my husband. NOW".

If I thought for one second that it would work ... I would have done it.

And then its not like you can just call them up and say ... "hey honey ... you know how you always say I drive about as well as an Asian woman? Well .....". Instead you have to wait for them to call. So you walk around for about 8 hours going "Hes gonna kill me, hes gonna kill me, hes gonna kill me".

So then when the MP has to take his information down ("His work number?" "He doesn't have one" "EVERYONE has a work number" "Hes in Afghanistan. Do you want to call there? Please feel free to call the switchboard, I'm positive they'll direct you right to him"), I told him to put a little star on the side.

"For what?"
"Because when my husband inevitably kills me for smashing our new car, you'll already have the suspects description"

This guy really had no sense of humor. At all. Because that? Was funny.

But then you get surprised sometimes. Because deployments really put into perspective whats important. And after Allen made sure that I was okay, he said he could honestly care less about the car, or the money. That the only thing that would ever affect him is losing me in his life, and anything else was just not worth worrying over.

I guess deployment isn't all bad .... though CPT Bell tried to insist that I should go to the doctor anyways.

I told Allen to tell him that I said "not to confuse his rank with my authority".

Day 148

Earlier today we were engaged in what I believe is WWIII. I'm not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan (lets not get me started on those anyhow ....).

No, this war was closer to the Cone household.

The representatives of what I like to call the "Dogs Union" were engaged in Day 2 of a battle that started yesterday and shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Sammy "I wont eat anything but people food" Cone, and Duke "Duke / Big Dummy" Cone officially declared war on the construction workers across the street and two blocks down.

The standoff started when Duke picked up on a guy standing on a roof NO WHERE near his own house. In fact, the guy in question was so small that I couldn't even see what all the fuss was about until I pressed my nose to the bay window and looked to the right.

Apparently my dogs have a built in Google Map, with pin points to anyone who may be within a one mile radius.

The war tactics of the dogs are questionable, at best. Mostly this includes each dog taking up a post at either end of the dining room table, which also coincides with the each end of the bay window. Whenever any of the construction workers (who, unfortunately haven't received the memo entitled "This Means War", with a paw print signature) dares to move into either dogs line of vision, they launch into an offensive that I haven't quite figured out, but seems perfectly orchestrated, so they must have put some thought into it.

At this point I can only assume that they use the time that I keep them in their crates to go over things like strategic placement and counter offenses.

At the first sign of movement, this is what happens. Its the same thing every single time, so at this point I could join them, if I so chose:

Sammy will start whining in a very high pitched cry. She then proceeds to walk one half circle around the table, stop, bark, and walk back to her original position, where she barks again.

Duke cries, rockets himself OFF the window over to the couch, where I have usually taken up residence with the laptop. He then stops, spreads out on all fours, and stares me in the eye as if to say "Woman! Put your gear on and lets get to this!", before rocketing back off the couch into his original position and whining one more time.

This goes on usually at 5 minute intervals until I get tired of the whole thing and tell them to go back to the cage for a better plan of attack.

Today, the construction workers obviously sent out recon. It came in the form of a lady with a baby carriage who WALKED BY THE HOUSE.

This maneuver caused the dogs to launch into code red, where they each ran around the room, howling at the top of their lungs and at one point, the dumb one ran into the wall because he cant howl with his fucking eyes forward.

I called an end to the day shortly after this. I assume that tomorrow, unless that roof is blessedly fixed, the battle will rage forward.

On a side note, when Allen was informed of the war, he says: "Why don't you just close the blinds?"

Huh. I guess Military Intelligence isn't an oxymoron after all.

I finally realized ...

That the only thing left to do was to blog.

Starting on Day 1 I swore that I would chronicle this journey, in massive detail, so that one day I would look back and understand how I got from Day 1 to Day 365.

I suppose its a decent sign that time is passing quickly being that its Day 147 and Im just now getting around to it.

I wish I would have started this before. There are so many things that Im going to be leaving out. Like how it feels to be the only one to have seen the "baby junk" of a close friend (yes, a story for another day). Or what it means to be LT drunk. Or ... what happens in Portland.

Come to think of it, scratch that. What happens in Portland really ought to stay in Portland.

It seems that I just tend to have a lot of thoughts. This may or may not be nice -speak for "I have a fuck load of opinions and I think that Im always right". Whatever the case, I figure there are a million d-bags out there that write in blogs every single day. If they can do it, then hell, so can I.

Id like to start by saying that deployments are a lot funnier than I ever realized. Not the deployment itself. But imagine my suprise when I realized that you can still have a good, deep in your soul laugh even when the world ought to be falling all around you. Maybe its just me ... maybe I dont take anything as seriously as I should. But then again, I figure the worlds got to keep on spinning, husband or no husband. And my world is funny. Thats just the way it is, and thats the way its going to be.

Take this 2012 thing, for example. Let me backstory this by explaining to you that in my top ten fears (yes there are more than ten, which allows for a TOP list), is the "end of the world" senario. I dont know what about it, exactly, pisses me off. Probably that everyone around me is going to take off to kick back on some beach in heaven and Im going to be stuck here having to learn how to shoot a gun and fend off zombies, or possibly tsunamis, I havent figured out which yet.

Keeping this fear in mind, many many months ago I woke up early to get ready for class. On my way out the door, I pause to check my myspace (this was in a time before everyone apparently got the memo that Facebook is way better than Myspace. I assume that somewhere the infamous Tom is crying into his keyboard ... and why doesnt Facebook have a "representative" .....???). On the top of my 'space is one of those goofy advertisments. Usually I pay no attention to such things, but this one caught my eye.

Its a big flash player that in big bold letters says "What will the United States government do to save 6.1 billion people?" .

.... now theyve got me. I asked myself ... "I dont know Myspace ... what WILL they do?"

It flashes to "the answer is ..."

... okay my eyes are really big now. I NEED to know this answer ...

"Nothing"

Holy shit. Thats just what I THOUGHT they would do. How do I find out more?

"Click here to find out what you can do to save yourself"

Well you're fucking right Im going to click. If by some chance Tom and the Myspace gang have tapped into some top secret files and they are exposing them via the 'space, Im damn sure going to see what they have to say.

I always knew my myspace addiction was going to pay off some day. In YOUR face, all you people who said I should seek help.

So I am directed to this website for the Institute of Human Continuity. And IN this site are about 4 different senarios in which the world is going to end in 2012, detailed by what is hands down the creepiest narrator Ive ever heard. I mean, someone spent some TIME on this shit. There are several "disaster senarios" that you can play out, including how solar flares are going to burn us all alive, how "planet X" will crash into our asses, and how earthquakes are going to start a shitstorm of crazy crap thats going to make us all wish wed gone to church a lot more.

You guys seriously. As I write this in the here and now I feel like I should google this site for a refresher, but I cant. Im too scared. If you want to google it, go ahead. But I dont ever want to see it again.

So going back to this day, my jaw is on the desk and I honest to God missed class that morning. NO WHERE on this site does it give ANY indication that it may be some sort of hoax ...

OR ... a teaser site for a new movie that is coming out called 2012.

Sure, you can laugh it up now. But honest to God, for about an hour until I googled 2012 and realized that it was indeed part of the studios ploy to generate interest in their film, I thought that I had woken up to hear that the world as we know it was kaput, and the only way to save yourself was to enter the "lottery" to get selected for some sort of spaceship and / or submarine that the government was building (turns out when you entered the lottery you didnt get a ticket to save yourself, you got email updates on the film instead .... THAT would have been good to know beforehand).

So okay, we can fast forward about 8 months to the film premiere. I drag Krista with me because I am convinced that Im going to walk out of the theater KNOWING how to prepare for the inevitable end of the world.

WHen I told Allen where I was going, his only response was: "This is going to put you in therapy, isnt it?". What can I say ... he knows me ....

Id like to say here that yes, I DID believe that the world would end on Y2K. And I thought I had SARS.

And the swine flu. But thats not the point.

I wont spoil the movie for those of you who havent seen it yet. But suffice to say, I was right. I DID walk out of the theater knowing how to face the end of mankind.

The answer is ....

Nothing.

Listen, its a LOT of work to keep running from this stuff. As the movie wore on, I got really tired just thinking about it. And youd have to be REALLY fit to pull some of that shit off. And I hate the gym. So instead of arming myself with guns and a wetsuit, Ive moved onto plan B which entails getting the best seat in the house as this stuff goes down, and praying that Jesus really will forgive a multitude of sins and a terrible Rock of Love addiction.

Do I really think the world is going to end in 2012? I dont know one way or the other. Probably not. But come about December 1st 2012, I reserve the right to start stockpiling things and to make some sort of fort out of pillows and to put a rubber boat on top of the Mercedes.

But seriously ... if the worst DOES happen .... all you people who are breaking my balls CANT get on the boat.