Kings Dominion and New Tires

Time continues to tick away. I've finished my time in my office at the Pentagon. My last day was this past Friday. I'm taking a week of leave to spend as much time as I can with my family - and tie up as many loose ends as I can before I leave. After this week, I'll be reporting to the JIEDDO. I'll have to do some inprocessing with them - administrative stuff - and then I'll get the indoctrination briefings and hopefully some insight into what they want me to do in Iraq. After a week and a half at JIEDDO headquarters, I'll head off to Fort Benning. I think 5 or 6 of us from my earlier pre-deployment training are heading there together. That should be an interesting week of training, not because of any great things we'll learn, but because I've never had any training at an Army base before. Even the Army guys say it will be an experience.

So what does a person do in the last couple weeks at home before deploying? I continue to work on the list of things to get done around the house - the garage is still a mess - and we try to have as much fun as a family as we can. We had a great day yesterday at Kings Dominion. I recommend that park to anyone in the D.C. area. In my opinion it's much better than Six Flags. The kids both start school next week. At least I'll be here for my son's first day of kindergarten. I was also lucky enough to be here for him losing his first tooth yesterday. The importance of things like that moves to a higher level when you have to think about how much of a 5 and 7 year old's life you'll miss by being gone for a year - especially when I've already missed close to 500 days of their lives. While that sounds like a lot, and it certainly feels like a lot to me, I never forget there are many people who have missed much more time than that.

Mundane tasks interlaced with as much family fun as possible - that about captures what happens in the weeks leading up to a deployment. I also continue to mentally move towards Iraq - I'm writing this at 1:00 am - not because I'm intentionally trying to adjust to what the new time zone will be, I just can't sleep with so much stuff running through my mind. I guess I should try to go to sleep - I have a big day tomorrow. I'm getting new tires put on the car so I don't have to worry about that while I'm gone. Ahhh... the glamorous and exciting life of an Air Force officer.