Spring in Kentucky was messy in 2009 – that’s when I realized that what I thought was a bad reaction to dust, was actually the beginnings of allergy hell.

Kentucky is bad for allergies. When I went in to have myself looked at, I was told that people who have never had issues with allergies before moving to Kentucky would normally end up with allergies within the first year. The explanation was that it’s situated right there in the middle of a large river valley – it’s humid, and festering with all kinds of bugs and weird trees and shrubs.

Texas wasn’t so bad on my allergies – except for the fact that my cats caused me to break out in some pretty bad hives. It got so bad that I literally looked like I was developing some kind of skin condition. It was alarming and uncontrollable. It was then that I discovered that I have allergies to cats, dogs, cows, and horses. (I didn’t even know those animals could be lumped into a category together other than the generic “animals”.)

Moving to Washington state seemed to be some kind of a godsend. It was going to be cool, rainy, mountainous, with a l’il sea breeze when I wanted it. We got here in August, as most of you might remember. So the chance for allergic reactions was minimal until now.

Spring is here, in the Pacific Northwest – finally. It only just started getting warmer within the last week or two and all the shrubbery has finally had the opportunity to spread their blossoming limbs. It wasn’t until halfway through a most miserable week that I realized the connection between my burning, tearing, itchy eyes, constant and very uncomfortable post-nasal drip (isn’t that one of the nicest ways to say I have icky stuff draining into the back of my throat from my sinuses? gag), and a voice that hovered between throaty and crusty.

Clearly, allergies are regional as well as seasonal. I feel a lot better these days, though I had to ask my doctor to run another allergy panel for me. I don’t trust those Texans too much where this is concerned. Mostly because they told me that if I had never had allergies before, I would certainly develop them in Texas.

Um … I hate to have to break it to them, but Texas allergies for me were a breeze compared to my experiences in Kentucky and Washington. Get in line!

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My best friend asked me recently how I did this MilSpouse thing, I’ve had a few other people tell me they don’t know how I do it and I know that other MilSpouses get the same comments and questions, too. It’s a tough gig, I’ll tell you that. The responses are many and varied and each of us does it differently. Yet we all have the same basic tools that we use and build on.

If you spend anytime at all trying to understand it for yourself, you’ll see that most articles and bloggers, other writers and advice columnists start off by telling you to “keep busy“. And at the core of dealing with military life, keeping busy is the single most important tool you have.

Some of us have jobs that keep us extremely busy and occupied, some have kids that keep them busy (and tired!) – others have their causes and hobbies, and still others have artistic ventures. There’s so many different ways to keep busy that it’s hard to pin point any one way.

For me … I have tons of interests and hobbies. For the year while he was down-range in Afghanistan, I had my job, I had my reading, my cats, I picked some TV show addictions. I had projects that I started – and most of them never finished. And I had sleep, lovely sleep. I learned a lot in that year; I read almost incessantly. And when I wasn’t reading or working, I was watching mindless TV or sleeping. I kept busy alright.

Oh don’t get me wrong!

You have moments when you feel you really, absolutely cannot go on. Those moments when the shit hits the fan and a big piece hits you in the face. You realize cleaning up would be so much easier if your other half was here. It’s a moment or two (or hundred) when you break and you fall on your ass on the floor and sob and blubber because at that moment, you are as alone as you have ever felt. And every time that moment happens, it’s worse than the last one. You literally break in half and settle into a puddle on the bedroom/bathroom/living room/kitchen floor. Pick one or all – it happens enough times for each floor to get it’s own special time with your face buried in it.

If you want to live, though … and you do because you know at some point your DH will be home and finding you on the floor in a puddle of unwashed, tearful misery is not the kind of image you want him (or her) to see … if you want to live, you will realize that food must be eaten, baths must be taken, bills must be paid, and work must be done. So you eventually pull yourself up from the puddle and wipe your face.

Then when you do that, you realize how positively septic you smell, and how ravenous you are and suddenly, the shit that hit the fan and how difficult it is going to be clean it up, is of far less importance than having a bath and eating some food. And in the eating of the food or the taking of the bath, you realize that the soap is almost done, or the towels need to be washed, but you’re out of laundry detergent… or curses! … you’re out of ice cream!

In short, you get past those moments of utter and complete despair and since life goes on whether you want it to or not, there are reminders that bring you back to the present and keep you busy again until the next break.

It’s a cycle. A long-time friend of mine once said to me that he savoured the emotional lows because they allowed him to really appreciate the highs. He wasn’t wrong… when you can survive through the lows, while you scrape the bottom and eat ice cream … then the highs are so much brighter and enjoyable.

It is being able to survive those lows that gives me my strength. I’ve survived some lows in my life. Oh boy! Some lows I thought I would never dig myself out of. Some lows where not even the brightness of the high was visible from that far down. Some lows where I didn’t know if I was going to make it through the next 5 minutes much less another few months. But I survived and I am here to tell you that the one thing that kept me going through a year of separation from DH … was the thought that one day he would hold me in his arms again.

And when he finally did …. it was absolutely the best thing in the whole world!

And oh yea – now that he’s here, I take every single opportunity to hug him … over and over and over again … because since the war isn’t over yet, I don’t know when he’ll be gone again and I want to make sure to store up as many of those hugs as I can for the days when I won’t be able to just take one.

You ask me how I do this? I do it because the alternative is inconceivable … now that I have found him, there is no way I am letting go of him. And when the army takes him away from me, I just think forward to when I get him back. And when he’s here, I make sure to maximise as many of the moments we have together as I can so that I have tons of memories and reminders to keep me going when he’s gone… and something to look forward to when he comes back.

And that is how I do it… because I can’t not. Simple – no?

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These days, I feel so far removed from military spouse life that I sometimes wonder if I was fooling myself into feeling a part of it in the first place. There is no avoiding the face that I am a military spouse. If the ACUs in the laundry hamper and the various items of other military gear lying around the house aren’t good reminders, then I have serious issues.

No, what has happened is that our life has become quite civilian, living out here in the so-called boonies.  I no longer hear the bugle calls, there are no unruly children running around in my front yard, every second person is not wearing some kind of military uniform and a trip to the supermarket does not mean I will be one civilian swimming amongst a sea of ACUs.

To be honest, I sometimes forget that we are military. It feels as if we have transitioned to civilian life and I suspect that is only because I was civilian for a lot longer than I have been military.

In some ways, I miss it. I felt safe living on-post in Texas and in Kentucky. I knew that no matter what, I was one amongst a community that would be taken care of in the event of something bad happening. It was an illusion, though; at least in Texas. When Maj. Hassan blew into work one morning and emptied his gun into a crowd of soldiers, all I officially knew about it was that we were to stay inside and keep our doors and windows locked and our air conditioning systems off. (Yes, our air conditioning units.)

A few months later, there was a flyer being placed on our front doors warning us to be on the alert for a man in uniform who was not a soldier but a sexual pervert who had assaulted at least two other women on post.

When they caught the guy driving a car full of explosives near the gate where we lived, we heard nothing about it until way after it happened.

Safe? Safety is an illusion in this crazy world. There are so many disillusioned and ignorant people around that I am beginning to feel safer trusting myself to the wild than to the wider community. I would rather be mauled by a bear in my backyard than come that close to a car full of explosives again.

Meh … I fear my misanthropy is showing again; and while that may be true, I have to say I like living out here in the boonies. I like the peaceful quiet of this neighborhood. I don’t know what I would do if I learned I had to leave.

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I am studying communications at the University of Phoenix Online and the course I am currently in is dealing with interpersonal communications. This week, we will be dealing specifically with cultural barriers to interpersonal communication. One of the week’s resources is to watch a series of interviews with people from different cultures talking about their integration into the community the now live in and how it differs from what they call “home” originally. One of those videos is the inspiration for my post today.

I posted this photo on my Google+ profile today. My post said that I’d forgotten what awesome photos I used to take and I said where this photo was taken. Years and what seems like a lifetime ago, I took this photograph on the coast of Jamaica, on the Palisadoes strip, just outside of the Norman Manley International Airport. The photo is from a different time in my life. I was my own woman then and no one else’s. I had already met hubby I think, but the relationship at that point was not yet formalized into anything other than a fascination. Neither of us had any clue we would end up where we are today.

The day I took the photo, I was out with friends on a fishing expedition. If I remember correctly, this was the day I caught my first fish. A tiny little thing that I threw back in almost immediately so that it would be able to breathe and continue to live. I was a hardcase. People called me “bitch”. But I could not catch a fish and let it die.

I worked in the corporate world and I earned enough to be comfortable on my own. Internet was a staple. I had ditched my TV cable service a couple of years before because I rarely watched TV and anything I wanted to watch I could get on disc and watch from my player. Or just watch on my computer.

There was no such thing as worrying about credit ratings. You paid your bills so that you would not have a disruption of service. You tried not to get into too much debt because banks charged exorbitant interest rates on credit cards. Debit cards had recently (within the previous 10 years, that is) become the latest convenience yet quite a few merchants still did not accept your debit card for purchases.

Cell phones plans could be had on a prepaid basis and all cell phones available were sold at a subsidized rate. Phones were “locked” to a network because that network had possibly invested money in importing your phone and wanted to ensure they got your money from calls as well as. “Unlocking” of phones was possible, but only if you wanted to travel abroad and slip a foreign carrier’s SIM card into your phone whilst you were abroad.

The beach was taken for granted. It would always be there, so I didn’t feel the need to visit it that often. Every chance I got, however, I drove north out of the city just for the hell of it. There was nothing I loved more than a road trip to the countryside – especially if it took me into the cool interior of the country.

Coconut water was most certainly not taken for granted. I would order a gallon a week and it would be finished in a matter of days.

Life was good. I wasn’t happy, but I was satisfied.

Fast forward 6 years. I am sitting in my “office” – the middle bedroom of a 3 bedroom house – in Olympia, Washington. It’s freezing outside. We had some snow today – the kind that is really just frozen rain but it looks white. Hubby lit the wood stove twice today but the house is still cold. I am wrapped in a blanket, doing schoolwork at 4am and writing – something I would never have dared to do in Jamaica since Monday morning meant work at 8am. Now, to go to work, I simply have to open a browser window.

We are bound by the military. Well hubby is. I can leave for Jamaica anytime I want; hubby can’t. Even if he could, it just isn’t in the budget. Contrary to popular belief, money does not grow on trees here – much to my consternation.

There is no coconut water. Well, none like I have ever tasted anyway. The ones I have sampled are bland and tasteless and no matter how good it is for my now soaring blood pressure, I refuse to drink them.

There is no beach of the likes we have in Jamaica. No such thing as gentle surf, white sands, coconut water and blue waters. Here, the beaches are grey and rough and freezing cold.

Here you pay your bills or you’ll never get another credit card, loan, or checking account ever again.

Cell phones are subsidized so long as you commit to 2 year agreements to continue service with the carrier … otherwise you pay an exorbitant amount of money to go somewhere else.

I am ecstatically happy but life is much different from it was in Jamaica; more restrictive.

Americans don’t know how to make you feel at home in their country. There are constant reminders that I am not from here and while I could care less about those who choose to hold that against me, it is still something you will never have to encounter as a Jamaican in Jamaica. I tell everyone the reason why I love Washington so much, and in particular the Seattle/Tacoma area, is that I feel less out-of-place here than I have felt in any other place in the United States – and I have been to many places in New York, D.C., Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Maryland. Here, I feel less like a black girl married to a white man and more like Camille than I have since I left my home in Jamaica.

‘Farin’ not so wonderful unless you can find that one thing (or person) who makes you happy. If it weren’t for hubby, I think I’d be on the first plane back home to Jamaica. I hate the heat, but I hate feeling out-of-place more.

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It’s probably a good thing that hubby and I have some experience with basic home plumbing. And while the extent of our experience is simply watching and assisting Dad while he fixed the leaky faucets, it was thankfully enough to help us figure out how to handle our kitchen sink leak over the last 24 hours or so.

…

Grocery shopping for one is largely different from grocery shopping for two. After our trip on Sunday, we ran out of supplies on Thursday. So on Friday afternoon, once I had gotten my errant headache under some semblance of control, we hit the road for lunch and groceries. There’s nothing much to be said about a trip to the grocery store, other than it happened. Especially when the most important part of this story happened upon returning with said groceries.

While I unpacked the bags, I stepped into a puddle of water on the floor in the kitchen. It was odd because I couldn’t figure out where that amount of water might have come from. So I stepped back to the sink and looked … and ‘lo, there was water coming from the cupboard under the sink. I opened it and … well, it would probably be a overly dramatic to say water gushed out as if a dam had broken. Overly dramatic and untrue. But, there was enough water under there to soak through 3 kitchen towels, 3 times over.

I called hubby and we did some troubleshooting. We figured that it was the inlet pipe to the kitchen faucet that was leaking – well, one of them at any rate. There are at least 3 down there (I am guessing it’s 4, 2 for the sink and 2 for the dishwasher). We panicked a little, looking for the main shutoff location. I went outside and walked around the house twice trying to find it. There was a huge iron pipe looking thing in the back that I at first thought was the shutoff, then I realized that an iron pipe probably meant waste and not fresh water.

Meanwhile, hubby was playing with it some and eventually revealed that the water was hot which meant it was the hot water pipe that we were working with. This meant we could turn off the water to the water heater and stop the ever-increasing flow of water. That worked, but it meant we had no hot water and hubby had to work today – so showers were almost impossible to avoid. He came up with a strategy. He’d stand poised to jump into the shower, yell to me to turn the water on. I’d position the empty bucket under the leaky pipe and turn on the hot water to the heater for him. He’d shower while I watched the bucket to ensure it wouldn’t overflow.

As it turns out, none of those dramatics were necessary because as bad as the leak was, the bucket wasn’t even at halfway when he was done. I got a shower while he monitored the bucket and we both brushed our teeth. Then he turned off the tap and we proceeded to de-stress by playing some WoW.

I should note that all this started about 2:30 in the afternoon, at which time I called the property managers. They remarked that they could do nothing before calling the owner. Considering I know how unreliable they are (another story for another blog post), I told hubby we’d better call him and make sure he got the messages.

By 10:30 we had gotten the situation under control and the owner called me back to determine the level of emergency and make plans for getting it sorted out … thankfully. He was here early this morning to sort it out. And I thought it was all done with – I did a little WoW’ing myself. I finally decided to be responsible and get the kitchen cleaned up and put stuff back where they belonged. I rinsed out the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Then opened the cupboard to put some stuff back and encountered yet another puddle of water.

To cut an already too-long story short, one of the guys had bounced the drainage pipe out of kilter so most of the dish rinsing I was doing before loading the dishwasher was ending up on the bottom of the cupboard. And here is where my little experiences holding the flashlight for Dad while he fixed leaks comes in: I figured out how to fix the drain pipe!!! Yay me.

So now our plumbing worries are really all over with… or they better be unless I am going to run away with my Ironman Druid and never come back.

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