A short 14-hour day

When we finally finished with all our training and meetings at about 7:30pm today, I thought for a moment, "Wow, we're finishing early." I guess it's a relative term, since it's an hour earlier than last Tuesday, but after starting the day at 5:30, I guess it's not really that short of a day. We did a lot, though. In the morning we learned a lot about convoy operations, and I personally learned how hard it is to climb up into the back of a truck while wearing 50 pounds of armor. Twice. (Someone remarked in the afternoon that "we didn't do that much today, why am I so tired?") I guess the sore muscles are catching up with all of us. The resistance-training PT (learning how to use a workout buddy to simulate weights when none are available) also took many of us to "muscle exhaustion" so that's another contributor. After lunch we went out to the range to shoot heavy weapons. We aren't expected to have to shoot these, unless things go *really* wrong somewhere, but the brief familiarization makes me confident that were I the only one available to man one of these weapons as a last-ditch defense, I could at least do something. And, really, it was a lot of fun. As one of the reserve Captains in our group commented, "This is a lot more fun than getting paper cuts as Chief of Staff." We got back early enough... about 5pm... but a combination of meetings and dinner and more meetings kept us going a bit late. But I still had a few hours to myself at the end of the day, and that's enough for me. Tomorrow should be fun... we'll be getting lasers to attach to our weapons. No, not for warfare, for training. Ever heard of "laser tag"? We'll be having some fun with our last few training evolutions, I'm sure. I'm actually looking forward to the next few days of training. You might be able to see and/or read about that, too. Some members of the press are coming out over the next few days. We'll see if they find me interesting enough to interview, and if my evasive answers will be printable. :) It's not quite bedtime, but I'm worn out. More news tomorrow.