About 6 weeks ago, my blog crapped out on me. One day, poof, all by itself, it lost a bunch of data without explanation. I run everything from my own server, and I’d set WordPress to email me regular backups of the database, so I wasn’t too worried about it — other than not having the time to go in and fix it, and wanting better bandwidth to use in fixing it. Well, I had both tonight. Welcome back, Mr. Blog.
I am home in HI. Iraq is done. It was nice, but I so much prefer to be at home. I had the honor of being in charge of getting 94 soldiers home, which was an adventure. After some initial delays in Tikrit, due to rain of all things, we rushed from there to Kuwait, through Customs, and onto a North American Airlines charter flight. Similar to when I came home (covertly) this summer, we went through Leipzig to Bangor, Maine, before stopping in Sacramento on the way to Oahu. It was a long, long 36 hours. For me, the saving grace was that, as the guy in charge, I got to sit in the comfy sets at the front of the plane. Still, though — that’s a lot of miles to cover. And really, when the wife and kids are waiting on the other end, the miles seem to take that much longer.
Now that I’m home, I’m really doing three things:
1. Hanging out with the wife and kids.
2. Working on the honey-do list.
3. Running.
The hanging out part is pretty easy. My temperament seems to be a lot better than it has been after other deployments. I am much slower to be irked – which was not always the case after other trips.
I’m doing my best with the honey-do’s. Today, I spent a good amount of time tinkering with our TiVo. With Galleon, VisualHub, and websites like this, I figured out how to add video to our TiVo (when normally it just has the things that it records). Now, I can add programs to it, for us to watch — I can go someplace like this, download a movie like the original Street Fighter, when load it on the TiVo for us to watch later. Not have to do, just nice to do.
And yes, running. Always with the running, even while in the process of staging to move from Iraq to Hawai’i. At the airport in Tikrit, while we waiting for the weather to improve, I did three runs that totaled almost 18 miles. On Sunday, about 14 hours after I got home, I did a 12 mile run through the pineapple fields. Iraq was flat; I am having to adjust both to the lack of flat running, as well as the humidity. This weekend, I am suppose to run something around 18 miles for my long run — I’ll need a plan for water and maybe food along the way.
So, yeah. It’s good to be home.
