A lot closer

Hard to believe it's my final week here at Eggers... then again, everyone else that I've been hanging out with has already left! Here's a quick picture of me and Dan as he was getting ready to leave. Dan is headed back to civilian life - best of luck!


I had the good luck to be invited to an Army promotion ceremony this week - yep, they do things a little differently. I don't recall pushups being involved in any promotion ceremony I've ever been to. :) Chelsea is a 2006 graduate of West Point, and continually gave our Navy divers fits during her time there. She was promoted to Captain (a Navy lieutenant equivalent) and was lucky enough to be joined by her husband, who's deployed to another Afghanistan base. Don't they just look like newlyweds? :)


I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to remember from this tour, and have actually come up with a couple of lists. First up is what I will and what I won't miss about being here...

What I will miss:
- Not doing my own laundry. :) Other than ruining my sports bras, the laundry service here has been really good.
- Travel. Ok, we don't get to do a lot of this, but even in the little bit we have been able to do it's easy to see that this country really does have a beauty all its own.
- The roses. They're everywhere! I have yet another picture at the end of today's entry...
- Independent operations. We really have a lot of freedom here to craft the job that we have, and we've been privileged to take advantage of that freedom.
- Uniforms. Ok, they're not the most stylish in the world - but you have to love wash-and-wear that feel like pajamas after a while. :)
- Cell phone battery life - I'm not sure how it works so well, but I only have to charge my phone here every 1-2 weeks or so - and I use it all the time! Now if only my iPhone would last that long...
- The commute. I'm pretty sure that no other time in my career will I be able to leave "home" and get to work in less than five minutes with no car involved.
- The people. Of course the people. The Afghans that work in our shop are young, idealistic, smart people who really believe they can help their country. Even on days that weren't going so well, their attitude was really refreshing. They look forward to coming to work, and that makes the job here so much more rewarding.

What I won't miss:
- The smell of the sewage truck in the morning. And at lunch, usually right outside the DFAC. Oh, and just about every other time I walk outside. Really, really not going to miss that one at all...
- Sharing bathrooms and showers with 31 other women...
- Having a roommate. No offense to mine, because I've been really lucky, but I prefer choosing who I live with!
- Eating every meal in the DFAC with plastic utensils. Real silverware, here I come!
- The Army culture. It's not for everyone. This experience has made me really, really glad I chose Navy.
- Ridiculously slow internet in exchange for way too much money.
- Carrying weapons wherever I go.
- "Suiting up" with body armor whenever we leave the base. That stuff is heavy and uncomfortable! I have a whole new respect for the guys out in the field.
- AFN commercials. AFN is the Armed Forces Network, and it's how we receive TV shows out here. AFN gets programming for the military for little to no cost, but the tradeoff is that they can't show commercials (nope, not even during the Super Bowl!). So they fill the commercial time with public service announcements, weather spots, news updates, etc. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't running a lot of the same commercials as they were running when we left Japan - in August of 2006!

OK, enough for tonight. I have one more list - things I'm looking forward to and things that I'm not - I'll try to post soon. Until then, I leave you with yet another rose picture. :)