Coming up to date

[aadler]

 
Things happened. Then more things happened.

First Cut: (Semi-)Military Issues

For the past month, I’ve been planning for a trip out of the country. There’s a joint exercise scheduled in a non-American country later this year, and I was to attend a one-week planning meeting. It’s gone back and forth for the longest time: not whether I would go, but the logistics of putting things together so that I would go. To an unprecedented extent, I was having to communicate back with the people whose job it was to make this happen: usually, you get orders, travel arrangements are made, you’re notified, and your job is to show up and carry through. This time, it felt like nothing was really coming together without interminable prompting from me.

Yesterday, I finally got my itinerary. To travel on the 16th, which gave me several days to make arrangements that would actually require only a few hours. So, fine. Then, later in the day, I received an e-mail with a new itinerary (and “please disregard previous”), that would have had me leaving today. Fine: still plenty of notice when all I had to do was pack a few things. Then, this morning, a NEW e-mail, essentially reinstating the original itinerary. I was actually communicating with my upper echelons by phone while on the way to the airport … and the eventual word was, stand down. Someone without the authority to do so had kept changing my itinerary, and proceeding at this point would risk snarling things to my detriment (as in, owe thousands on my government travel card when my authorization to travel in the first place couldn’t be confirmed), and there was already an officer on the way so I could just let him bring back any necessary information while we prepare for the exercise itself.

Close cut

Second Cut: Family Issues

No big deal, but annoying and anticlimactic. Especially since, on the assurance that I would be gone for a week, my wife lent her car to our daughter (the irrepressible sroni) and her Irish fiancé to make a trip west. Since I’ll be here instead, that will call for some juggling that we hadn’t known would be necessary.

One of our dogs — the little rat terrier — is accompanying them on the trip west, which is good for reasons I’ll line out as follows. My wife is a complete soft touch when it comes to animals; she’ll take them in until she can find homes for them, and occasionally they’ll wind up having our home as theirs. So, with two cats and never less than three dogs (occasionally six or seven), things stay busy. One of the dogs, the one I called Gordie in a previous post, had been missing for months, and in that time his teeth had gone bad and eventually had to be pulled. Which put him about on par with one of the cats, who had been declawed by a previous owner. So, when yet another canine guest took up residence, it was disconcerting and entertaining to watch the toothless dog and the clawless cat trying to boss around the pit bull.

At least, it was funny until the pit bull killed both cats.

Okay, we don’t know it was him. (He’s amiable and good-natured, and has never been a problem when we were present.) Still, when we come home and find one of the cats has been mauled to death in our absence — and then it happens AGAIN before the week is out — and the other dogs have been coexisting with the same cats for years … well, it excites suspicion. And it makes us wonder who else might be a chewed-up corpse the next time we leave the animals alone. So, we’d been locking the rat terrier in a back bathroom whenever we left … and, believing I myself would be absent for a week, we were really in favor of the smallest dog going along on a nice, safe road trip.

There is, of course, a heightened drive to find a good home for the pit bull. Hopefully without other (competing?) pets.

Close cut

And, that’ll do it for now.