Dust Devil

Another month draws to a close. Besides the imminent payday, it's exciting to know that I'm more than half way to my R&R leave! And as an added bonus, the weather is supposed to begin cooling down after the toasty hot July. August is only the second-hottest month over here. The weekend was actually reasonably cool (around 108) thanks to a lot of blowing dust that obscured the sunlight. Haze has its advantages, I guess. Although I'm seeming to think that the dust which seems to settle on everything around here is finding its way into my respiratory system. I am always clearing my throat and/or coughing. Speaking of dust, the petty officer who works with me and I have a new vehicle. He bumped into another humvee with the "Deathtrap" and broke off one of the turn signal lights. Rather than repair it, the motor pool just gave us another one. It is more like a pickup truck, having only two seats in the front and an open bed in back. A great advantage over the other one is that it is air conditioned! On the door, a tazmanian devil (from the cartoon strip) is painted along with the words "Dust Devil." Kind of reminds me of those small "Dirt Devil" vacuum cleaners... and makes the same noise sometimes too! Enjoy the rest of July. See you next month.

Microsoft Warrior

All right, I'll admit I frequently take my fair turn bashing the company everyone loves to hate, but can't live without. Anyone who has ever done any staff work in the military has learned to become familiar with Microsoft Office products. In spite of taking a lot of time off today, my work time was extremely productive, thanks to Bill Gates and his inventions. (And a nice assist from the folks at Adobe who make Acrobat!) I was able to put together a couple of well illustrated emails (in Microsoft Outlook, of course) including products from Excel and Power Point. And a few attachments in Word for references. I think I deserve some sort of badge for that! Speaking of rewards for computer work, some of the work I've done earlier has managed to attract the interest of a few more higher-ups, which translates to more work for me in the coming weeks. What's that they say about being careful what you ask for? At least it's the interesting, fun stuff that I've been doing that I'll perhaps be able to do more of.

Possession is nine tenths of the law

Unfortunately for me, the saying in the title of this post is accurate inasmuch as possession only goes 90% of the way. That leaves 10% available for people to snatch things right out of your hands. Or your office. You may remember my mentioning that there was a very large TV set in my office (although I admit I have only watched half of one movie on it in the 2 1/2 months I've had it). As my current battalion prepares to leave Iraq and return to Germany, they're tidying up the property books to make sure everything is accurately accounted for. And, in fact, I signed a "hand receipt" yesterday taking custody of that really nice TV, so it could be tracked when they left it behind. Alas! This morning I arrived to work and my TV was gone! Worse, I had just signed for it, so it was "mine" and I was financially responsible! Fortunately, I knew who had it (A master sergeant had told me a few days ago that he was going to take it, but thought maybe he had changed his mind!) and apparently he offered it to somewhere else where soldiers can actually make good use of it. And to prove that he's actually that big hearted, he gave away his own flat screen TV too. Now we are both staring at empty walls. At least I still have my own TV in my hooch. And AFN, too, so it's actually useful.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

TGIF! I decided to cap off the week by doing a little bit of analysis work in Excel. Simple stuff, really, and I spent more time typing up my results in Powerpoint than I did doing the analysis (thanks to a lot of up front work that I did a month ago). I surprised myself with the results. I had previously been making one recommendation just based on a gut feeling, but when I actually threw numbers at the problem, as my Operations Analysis training has shown me to do, I realized that things weren't quite as significant as I had expected, and I'm changing my recommendation. Amazing what a few cold, hard statistics can do. (I could have twisted the statistics to back up my recommendation if I had wanted, too! Math is fun that way!) Anyway, onward to a hopefully relaxing weekend.

Humor me

Today was a relaxing day. Surprisingly, I found enough to keep me just busy enough to pass the day but not too busy to be able to leave work early enough to attend the "Comics On Duty" performance this evening.

Comedy (especially when making the usual jokes about the usual stereotyped people) isn't exactly my favorite form of entertainment, but it was an amusing distraction from the routine, and most of the soldiers seemed to like it. Some of the most well received jokes were when some of the comedians made fun of how nice the Air Force people had it.

I had to leave the performance early to attend a video teleconference with the new folks coming in a few months to take over for the battalion I'm working with. The new battalion seemed in good spirits, probably because they're doing a lot of tedious training and want to get in the game. And the guys about to leave were obviously in good spirits, since they were talking to their ticket home. Me? I'm just calculating how much more work I'll have trying to get the new guys up to speed on the stuff I work with. Should be interesting.

Relativity

The good news is that today was a productive day. I managed to finish a few major tasks that have been taking a while. It was satisfying to mark "100% complete" on nearly my entire to-do list. Unfortunately, that leads to the bad news. I've finished everything. That means starting tomorrow I'm going to have to start seeking out new things to do. There are a few options of some things that need some attention, but I'm not sure how many cans of worms I want to start opening, when the pace of other work picks up again. We had an interesting conversation at lunch about all the places we could have been stationed, and how (other than the heat) this base isn't that much different than some places back home. (Assuming you can't leave base either.) Some of our work deals with an Army organization at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey and one of the officers joked that when he was first told of his assignment, he was told he might be going there. Another officer countered, "I'd rather be in Iraq." (Apologies to any New Jersey readers!)

Subject to change without notice

I'm not sure what I had planned to do today, but instead of whatever productive work could have been done, I spent the day acting and reacting to a series of schedule changes. A VIP (Army 2-star) was in the area visiting and his itinerary changed by-the-minute. I was one of the many links in a chain of phone calls/emails between those changing the schedule and those providing services at the various locations the general was visiting. It was frustrating to say the least. Near the end of the day, a visit to one location was cancelled, and I called off the soldiers prepared to provide assistance there. An hour later, that visit was turned back on again, or at least they attempted to. It's a lot easier to turn something off than back on. After a series of phone calls, it was back off again, but this time blaming me/us for not supporting, rather than blaming the person who told me that part was cancelled. ARRGH!! AFN is showing a movie tonight called Under the Tuscan Sun. I haven't watched much TV since actually getting one, but this movie looks neat... and Italy is on my list of places to visit someday. So I think I'll relax and de-stress.