Back home, and Thanksgiving

[aadler]

I’ve actually been home from Fort Polk for four days now. I’m working at getting back into the swing of things, with varying levels of difficulty.

Things went downhill in a number of ways while I was gone. Bills unpaid (I had to get our phones and water switched back on upon my return, because Susan had just let them lapse), two flat tires on my car (slow leaks that had developed just before I left, and I came home to find the vehicle had been sitting on the rims for a month), laundry undone and trash heaped up … I’m not happy about the intimation that things fall apart while I’m away, I want to believe that my wife can do okay when I’m gone and better when we’re together. I’ve caught up on some things, but others still await resolution. Plus the matter of setting systems into place so that I don’t face the same result the next time I have to leave home for any significant period of time.

My daughter is away with her Irish fiancé, visiting friends in another state. They’ll probably be returning sometime within the next few days, a week at most.

Susan and I spent Thanksgiving with her favorite niece and the in-laws. Turkey and dressing and trimmings and company without having to do the actual work.

While I was at Fort Polk, I did good enough work that both senior NCOs I worked with, plus the civilian contractor I worked alongside, agreed to act as referrals for a job application I put in. Doing the same things I’d been doing — plus a variety of even more interesting things — in the same place, but for a somewhat better level of pay. The downside? it’s a part-time position, so I’ll have to find out 1) how often I’d be working and 2) what would be the pay-scale, before I can ascertain whether I could afford to take such a job in Louisiana while Susan remained at her current job. (My perspective is that this wouldn’t be any more stressful than if I was away on deployment, except that we’d get to see each other more often.) Still waiting to hear so I can make a decision.

In other developments, a couple of months ago I got word that — due to issues about which I can’t be more explicit because of security concerns — I won’t be eligible to deploy with my unit on the schedule we had previously planned. I am not, however, ineligible to deploy per se, so I’m working on finding another unit I can accompany on such a trip before my time runs out. If I can set it up, I’ll be able to extend my enlistment for a year and get go out one last time before mandatory retirement; if not, I may very well be out of the Army within ten months. I knew it had to come, but I really wanted to stretch it out a little while longer.

I didn’t get any further writing done while I was at Fort Polk. I could have, if I’d been willing to genuinely push, but the time and the mood just weren’t right. Maybe, now that I’m outside that milieu, I’ll be able to do a bit more. I think I can confidently predict, however, that I’ll not be meeting my earlier hope of completing a dozen stories — one for each month — of 2011. I’m almost to the end of Month 11, but only Story 5. (It’ll be 6 if sroni does her segments of the joint story we’d been working on, but that’s outside my control.) Even with one or two more, even three, in the remaining month, I’ll still come up short. Oh, well.

I’m not entirely satisfied with my life. But I can work with it.

PS: Our son called from China this morning to wish us Happy Thanksgiving. That was nice.