It’s Yule!

What’s that, you say?

It’s the Winter Solstice; the shortest day in the year, the day that signals the return of the sun to the northern hemisphere; the day that pagans celebrate with light and cheer and that was used to pattern some Christmas celebratory symbolism – the tree, the yule log, hot apple cider, lights, gift-giving, family gatherings, and egg nog.

I am a simple being. I despise pomp and circumstance, drama, and excessiveness. I don’t like the limelight (odd, I know; being that I am a Leo) and I don’t like expending more energy on time on things than are necessary. One of the reasons I strayed away from your typical church-going is that for me, 6 hours at church on a Sunday morning just doesn’t seem to me the best way to show your faith, commitment, or loyalty. I’d rather live that faith, commitment, and loyalty all day, every day of my life instead.

This morning, I lit 3 candles and a pine incense cone, then I lit a fire and spent a few moments thinking about the sun and it’s warmth and the coming year. And then I lit the house and started my day. The candles will burn all day – until sundown – and I shall spend this day doing what I would normally be doing were it yesterday or tomorrow.

Regardless of what you believe, or how you practice your beliefs, I am wishing everyone a warm and bright Yule. I hope that warmth and brightness carries you through the next year and helps you keep your truth.

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I haven’t written in forever.

I haven’t done much of anything in forever except the bare minimum necessary to stay sane.

I get up in the mornings, work almost all day until about 4ish when I cuddle on the recliner with the cats until about 10ish when I attempt to go to bed. It hasn’t been working very well – the sleep attempts – since here I am in Jamaica and am sleeping as if I haven’t slept in 8 months. Well … I’ll tell you I feel so tired as if I haven’t slept in 8 months – so that may not be too surprising.

Yes. I am here in Jamaica. All the things that used to annoy the HELL out of me are faint irritations now; the street noises, the heat, the mosquitoes, the constantly ringing phone in my parents house, the barking dogs in the neighbourhood, and the hovering my parents are doing … all of it a wonderful welcome. I feel like I was missing out.

It’s good being here.  I am indulging in a good deal of decadence – I had bun and cheese for breakfast and dinner yesterday and that’s in addition to the patty for lunch and curry chicken and breadfruit for supper. Plenty of fruits – Dad sourced ortaniques for me and coconut water has been rolling in by the quart.

I am in Jamaican food heaven.

Christmas feels burdensome to me, though. I really am just hoping it comes and goes without so much as a peep. I’d rather get to the other end of this holiday as fast as I can manage it. It is just WAY too empty without hubby by my side – whether we would be here in Jamaica enjoying the Christmas breeze, or in Michigan up to our thighs in snow. It wouldn’t have mattered so long as I could have had him with me.

The luck of the draw precludes that from happening … and so here I am in Jamaica attempting to obliterate that empty hole in my life with as much of the familiar from my old life as I can find. So far, it’s working. I am not thinking about it as much as I probably would be had I stayed in Texas alone.

However, it seems as if I am fighting some kind of bug – I am tired all the time and today I literally feel ill. So some reading for the rest of the day and some sleep too maybe.

All in all, it’s been a good week or 2.

I have so much more to write about – but I’ll try and get all that in after I get back to Texas. For the time being, I am all about soaking up as much of this as I can – maybe it’ll be enough to carry me through these next 4 months or so until hubby comes home.

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I was gone for a long time, wasn’t I? Something like 3 weeks? If I keep doing that, I suspect I will lost ALL my readers completely. I gotta apologize and beg your collective pardon. Things are a bit crazy here these last few weeks.

But for today, I’m just gonna tell you all about the last 2 weeks.

See, last 2 weeks was “block leave” – which just means that everybody was on vacation for 2 weeks. Company offices were empty. Usually, the army does leave the usual way – someone has to stay back and cover while others get the chance to go on vacation. Block leave comes just before the deployment and is normally supposed to used to spend time with family and friends before the big day.

Of course, we headed to Michigan. But before we did that …

drum roll

On Saturday, we had lunch with friends and then we decided we were going to have a look see at the Jeep vehicles since hubby and I had been considering getting one. I said to him “Hon?Let’s go look at Jeeps – I wanna test drive a couple – see how I like ‘em… see if I agree that’s what we’re getting next.”

And there it is. We are now a one-car family! Both the truck and the car are a-gone! And lemme tell ya … we both are happier than pigs in shit! That little baby right there is suhweeeeeeeet! Rides nice, drives nice, feels nice, sounds nice, smells nice …. /sigh

So, we had that baby for the drive to Michigan – which was fortunate in some ways … not so fortunate in others. We had wanted to register it there since that’s really our home of record for the time being … but they want us to pay a crap load of tax on top of what we’ve already paid … so that’s moot. The good news is that I am now a Michigan resident myself. Thanks to the new bill that passed, I can take and keep hubby’s home of record. I shouldn’t have to change my state residency again. Which is one less headache for PCS moves I shall have to medicate for.

So anyway – I had planned (and packed) for snow this MI visit. Especially since there has been so much all round this winter. Just my luck it all melted a week or so before we got there and never got cold (or precipitous) enough while we were there for more. Best we had was a little rain activity one night .. maybe 2. The coldest it got was about 40 degrees. The day of the picture above, it got up into the small 60s. Disappointment is an understatement.

We had a good time, as usual… and I’ve been thoroughly recruited into the whole idea of trading card games – started with Magic The Gathering and hopefully ends with World of Warcraft TCG. It’s an expensive hobby. Lot more so than WoW itself. But I am still trying to get that spectral mount.

Speaking of WoW, turns out we have a cousin who plays… on none other than my heroine’s server Mug’thol as a Tauren Druid (cat). Imagine my glee to find out that we could switch factions AND transfer servers all in one day. I live in hope that I shall see my heroine and be able to kneel before her and say “You’re my hero!” Frankly, I think I won’t be playing any other character after this … least ways not much. I’ve come to learn that no matter how much you THINK you already know, there is always one more thing you can learn about your character … and I think that for once and all I am going to actually stick to the one I currently play. To ensure this, the only other character I intend to transfer is my alchemist and what I call my “I-don’t-wanna-heal-anymore-right-now” character – the ever lovable warlock.

So anyway, to get back to the Jeep (and the vacation), it seems as if all I needed for extended drives was a car I was comfortable with and could control.  My boss at Digicel had once said to me that once you go SUV you can’t really go back to a car. I hate to admit it, but she was right. The car was VERY uncomfortable for me to drive and the truck was kinda too big. The Jeep is “just my size”

Hence …

I drove almost the entire way back from Michigan … sans maybe 2 or 3 hours when the hubby took over and gave me a break. I enjoyed like I have never enjoyed driving before.  Of course, it can’t be ALL good – the heater broke on us on Wednesday night … turns out there seems to be a problem known with them … something about an additive that doesn’t agree with the heater core? I dunno … mech talk. bah! Should have it taken care of by Thursday evening – all things remaining equal.

Let me leave you with one more image ….

Ain’t she a beaut?

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Lawd whoee – what a stress!

I’ll tell you this, it’s heartening to know that SO many people want to be an authority on the fyr … I’m famous! Wewt!

I apologize to those who might have been working up the courage to comment (again?) and found that comments are now closed here – the reason is a sudden upsurge in the bitch content of my life which I am trying valiantly to quell and exterminate. So far, it seems to be working, but these things take a while – weeks, sometimes months. So please bear with me whilst I call in the exterminators.

In the meantime, here’s what my weekend looked like:

In true army style, we were summoned post haste to a married couples retreat of unknown content and to an unknown location for an unknown rendezvous time.  Oh yea, I was gearing up to REALLY not enjoy the weekend.

But it was a REAL NICE SURPRISE (THANK YOU CHAPLAIN ADAMS!) that greeted us on Friday afternoon. While it was called a “married couples retreat” the idea wasn’t to fix anything that was wrong, or help anybody with marital problems. In fact, the theme of the weekend was “Strengthening the bonds” and the idea was to equip us with the tools and tips to handle this deployment like pros.

I won’t go into the specifics of the weekend because … well, that’s kinda private smacks hand away but I will tell you this, the emphasis was on clear and genuine communication of feelings and expectations from this point onward. We got a list of things to discuss and a few things to think about and a few areas to work on. We got some ideas for communication while our soldiers are down-range and we got some stories about those have already been here. We got some tips on what’s the best way to deal with R&R and with homecoming … and while none of this is an exact science, I certainly feel FAR better prepared to manage this deployment.

The one down side to the weekend was suddenly realizing that “Hey! Block leave is already here and you haven’t done squat to prepare for it … DUDETTE!”

True to my organizer breeding, I wrote up my little month-long calendar we have on the wall by our desks and started to hatch out a plan on how to manage the week. I needed some comfy clothes for MI (post-surgery and all that jazz), I needed to get Nala’s rabies shot done and her fecal test and feline distemper registered on-post, I needed to find a sitter or a boarding house, I needed to organize what would happen with the mail …. you get the picture.

Thankfully, the shopping and organizing Nala’s shots and test results were knocked off in high organizational fashion on Monday thanks to a fellow-spouse who agreed to accompany my righteously indignant mug around town. She also helped reinforce to me what a downright waste of time it was mourning “the catastrophe” … “I don’t know you all that well, but that doesn’t sound anything LIKE you.“

And to top it all off, hubby comes home and says “Ooh – FRG leader has a pet sitter name for us – she’ll email you tonite”.

Long and short of it … I now have a potential kitteh sitter who will care for Nala whilst we are in MI and get our mail and watch the house to make sure it doesn’t get stoned, or egged or tomatoed by the bully-defense-patrol.

I’m all set – or am I?

Damn – I still have to pack, don’t I?

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The holidays were pretty weird for me. Especially considering what the 2 previous years have been like. What it boils down to, however, is that this Christmas and New Year’s is the last one the hubby and I have before he deploys. And we chose to spend it with each other doing what WE wanted to do. It sounds selfish, doesn’t it? I imagine a number of people might think:

What about the rest of his family – don’t you think they wanted to spend his last Christmas stateside before a deployment with him as well? Especially since you will have him for the whole time until the actual day.

The thing is this – from here on out, he will be stressed, exhausted, gone for days and weeks on end, irritable maybe, certainly under a lot of pressure. I won’t “have him” at all. He will have me. As for the rest of his family – that is what “block leave” is for come the last 2 weeks before “the actual day”. “Block leave” is when the entire unit goes off on vacation at the same time. And our plan is to head to Michigan so that the rest of his family can have him before he leaves. Christmas and New Year’s was for me.

I know a few couples might do it the other way around, and maybe the interests of tradition are better served by that strategy. And frankly, chances are if circumstances had lined up perfectly, we might have ended up doing it that way as well. It just didn’t work out that way. Besides, it allowed us to do some things we needed to do here that we would not have been able to do had we driven to Michigan instead.

Speaking of Michigan – I miss snow! I missed having a white Christmas. And I certainly missed the small-town Christmas. I have to say that every day there is a new reason (or a reminder of an old one) to despise this big army city of Fort Hood. Traffic, crime levels (can you believe that the have to lock up the baby formula and pregnancy tests at the nearby Walgreens?), noise and density of people and buildings …

Last night, the temperature hovered at mid-40F but the windchill made it feel more like 20F and I was cold, in pain, tired and dying to get home – yet we spent 2 hours at Walgreens attempting to get a prescription filled that my doctor wanted me to have to take immediately. There might have been other faster options, but Walgreens was our only one last night for the simple reason that my refill prescription – also due – is at Walgreens and they don’t rewrite “scrips” in this country apparently – they just keep the refills “on file”. All this after finding out that there “may be some auto-immune-thing going on with you that we have to check out” from the doctor and an exorbitant dental work estimate.

On a lighter note, I went to my first yoga class yesterday. I am so badly out of shape that I couldn’t keep up with the class – although I know part of that was (a) I hadn’t had anything at all to eat or drink other than a cup of tea before the dentist at 6am and (b) I need to pay more attention to hydration. It felt good, though, to actively be trying to be fit and healthy and I think I will keep this up. Also helps to know that someone I know attends the evening classes too – assuming she is empathetic, I might just find a “partner” to help motivate me in her.

The year hasn’t been off to an awesome start thus far … more challenging and encouraging than just plain “awesome”. I appreciate it, and I am lapping it up. I am ready for “twenty-ten” (wink-wink at Jo). In spite of what it will bring for me in the way of “most challenging life event for me evar”, I am ready. I am gathering my own personal army and arsenal and I am going to charge this year head-on.

How about you? You ready for what “twenty-ten” is going to bring?

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