It's been a tumultuous couple of months for this household and animals. First, my buddy Banno passed away, then vivvianne1's boxer, Rocky, died less than two weeks later.

Not long after that, we got a seven month old chocolate lab named Serenity. Unfortunately, we found that she needed more training than we realized and were able to provide, given our collective schedules. We kept her crated when no one was home, but she managed to escape from the crate (a pretty decent sturdy one), not once but twice, and wreak havoc on vivvianne1's bedroom. We're going to have to replace the carpet and blinds in that room.

As much as it pained us, we had to find a new home for Serenity. Fortunately, a friend of vivvianne1's knew some people who might want her. It looks like she will be staying with a retired couple, I think, who have plenty of time and space to give her the attention she deserves.

After all this, we were probably going to take a break from animals, but then I got a call from kindlechan; apparently, a friend had a kitten who needed a home. It didn't take me long to convince myself.

So, needless to say, I now have a tiny little Persian-Siamese mix named Joy. She's about seven weeks old, very playful and adorable. I am ded of cute.

( Pictures! )

Hello folks! I decided it was about time I updated, so here goes. I suppose the biggest piece of news is that I am now a civilian, as of a couple weeks ago. After a total of nine years of active and reserve service, I decided it was time to leave the Army. It was the hardest decision I've ever made, even harder than the one to join in the first place (which was no small dilemma), and I came this → ← close to re-upping. Heck, I got teary-eyed when I left the armory for the last time; the military's been a part of my life ever since I graduated high school, and it's not an easy thing to walk away from. But I think I made the best decision for myself.

The remainder of this post is of far less significance.

• Every time I see ( this web clip on Gmail, ) I think it's one of thetaet's recipes. Though this might be because I've been perusing the KPS/Elf Spat Recipes page a bit recently.
   
  
• My cat's veterinarian is named Dr. Tran. (NSFW-L)
   
  
• Speaking of Banno, he's come down with a UTI. It sucks, but now I'm delving into the territory of blogging about my cat's illnesses, so it is time for me to tear away from Livejournal for another month or so.

My enlistment with the National Guard ends in November. For a long time, I had planned on reenlisting, but I had a change of heart earlier this year and have been dead-set on getting out since then. Now, though, I'm starting to feel tempted to sign back up. I'm not entirely sure what's inspired this, but I've spent the last few days trying to sort through it. This post is an attempt to get everything down, more for myself than anyone else, so it may come a bit jumbled. Feel free to pipe in, though.

The biggest hanging point, of course, is the prospect of another deployment. If I reenlist, it will probably be for three years. During that time, my unit is pretty much guaranteed to get mobilized. We're an attack aviation battalion, and for a while we've been transitioning to a different model of helicopter. Once that's done, the plan is to spend six months re-training at Fort Hood, then be put on the top of the list for an overseas deployment, probably directly from Hood. As things stand, it would be a twelve month deployment, so I'd face a year and a half away in total. Though that may seem like a deal-breaker at first, there are other factors.

As some of you know, I was originally a mechanic for the Army, and switched to a supply and logistics job a couple years ago, after coming home from Afghanistan. Being a mechanic never really meshed with me; I just never had the knack. I learned enough about it to be adequate, but I knew I could never excel. As a result, I was dissatisfied with my work for a long time. Now, I'm in a job that I'm damn good at, and that I am appreciated for. But I've never done it for more than two weeks at a stretch. On the two deployments I've been on, I've worked hard and pulled my weight, but I often felt like I could be more valuable. Part of me wants to see myself do this job in the "real world."

It's not a good time for me to be leaving from my unit's standpoint. For a long time, I was one of only two people doing this job in the unit. The other guy might be getting out or transferring soon, too. Three new people have joined us throughout the summer; one is a recruit, and the other two, though they have ostensibly held this position before, they've been doing other things. We've trained the new people as much as possible, but it's tough to really teach someone a job in two days a month, and I don't know if they're ready to run things on their own yet. Plus, we've been trying to organize some of the things that have so far defied organization, and I think we might finally have a system that works (I could go into this, but it would be a whole other post). It's going to take time to get the kinks worked out, though, and I'd like to see it through.

Both of my previous deployments, and in fact all of my time in the military, have been enriching experiences and I've grown a lot, and continue to. Now, though my rank doesn't reflect it, I hold a de facto position of leadership. I know that serving actively in that capacity would do me a lot of good.

Combat pay and tax exclusion ain't half bad, either.

Now, the other side of the coin. I probably don't have to tell you that being away from home for an extended time sucks. I've missed my friends, my family, my goddaughters, and the basic comforts of life on my deployments. Furthermore, the boredom can be a killer, the food sucks, and you see the same set of faces every single day. It's a drag.

There is, of course, the danger. Afghanistan has heated back up quite a bit since I left, and Iraq is, well, Iraq. I am fortunate enough to be in ground support for an aviation unit; we generally don't do the fighting, we send our officers to go do it. And wherever I go, I would be in an established base, and not leave it much if at all. I certainly wouldn't be on patrols. Of course, no one can be completely safe in a combat zone, even in a non-combat job (I do the exact same job that Jessica Lynch did, though the situation is a lot different now than it was then).

And finally, there's the career aspect. I'm 27 years old and just finished college and started working. I don't know if I want another year-and-a-half setback. If I'm still working for the same company I am now when I get deployed, there's no guarantee that I'll have a job when I get back, because the laws about that don't apply to very small companies. (I work for a pretty good guy, and I don't doubt he'd hire me back if he had a position, but there's no guarantee he would have one.) Most likely, I wouldn't have much of a problem finding a job and getting by in the meantime, but chances are I'll be thirty by then. Not a huge deal, I suppose, but I always thought I'd be further along by then.

Finally, there's a wild card that could go either way. Politics. Next year, we'll elect a new President. Depending on who it is, there's no telling how this will affect the length and frequency of deployments. I don't think they can get much worse than they already are, though, so I think this factor will either work in my favor or have no effect.

And assuming my unit goes to Iraq, there's the question of whether I want to be involved in it at all. I don't talk much about politics, on LJ or anywhere else, partly because I'm pretty much a centrist and have a hard time finding a common ground, but mostly because I'm no good at arguments and debates and hate getting into them. But here's my feelings in a nutshell, and you can take them or leave them. I supported the war in Iraq for a long time, and I definitely don't feel bad that we've taken down Saddam's government. The war was launched on bad information, but I place more blame for this on corrupt informants like Ahmed Chalabi than on the Bush administration. I do not think Bush is nearly as dumb as he looks (he's just a terrible public speaker), nor is he some caricature of a villain, twirling his mustache like Snidely Whiplash. He and his administration looked at the evidence with a skewed perspective, but they did what they thought was the right thing.

Unfortunately, they did it with no foresight for what would happen after the invasion. As a result, we've made a real mess of things. It's a mess that I feel we are responsible for ("we" as in all Americans, not just Bush, not even just his supporters. That's how democracy works: we're as responsible for our leaders as they are for us, perhaps more so). The problem is, I don't know how much we can really do to fix it anymore. It may be that we're still doing more harm than good by staying and trying to sort it out.

However, this really doesn't affect my decision much either way. Whatever happens will happen whether I am still in the military or not. Whatever decision I make, it will be for myself and for my unit, and not to make a political statement one way or the other.

I started a new job today, as an accountant for a small CPA firm in Raleigh. Small, as in five employees including myself. It deals mainly with other small businesses in the area, and has some individuals as clients as well.

Being with a company this side has its ups and downs. There's no benefits to speak of, so I'm going to have to look into buying my own med insurance. Also, I'll be working most of my projects solo, so there's not a lot of safety net if I mess things up (not that I expect to). But I'll learn a hell of a lot that way, and fast. I learn most things best by doing them under pressure.

The firm is on the top floor of a two-story building, which was built for offices but really looks more like a house. The only difference between it and a house is the lack of closets. The best part of this is that I get my own office. No cubicle farm for me!

My first day on the job, and they put me on the project that's the most muddled. I spent the day wading through and sorting several-years-old bank statements, payroll registers, and Burger King receipts, which were grouped seemingly at random into badly-labeled envelopes, then keying them on software that I'm learning to use as I go. Wheee!

After work, I met up with kindlechan, and we went to a delicious Ethiopian restaurant and played miniature golf and Star Trek arcade games. Because that's how we roll.

I have barely read any LiveJournal in the last couple of weeks! Of course, part of this is due to the end-of-the-semester rush, but to be honest, it hasn't been nearly as bad this semester as it usually is. I don't really know why I haven't been keeping up, I've just fallen behind.

So: here's a few random tidbits.

• I've been taking a lot of pictures lately. I've always enjoyed casual photography, but now it's turning into a full-blown hobby. Which is good, because I could use one. I'm posting most of my photos over on Flickr, if you want to keep up with them.
  
• Graduation is coming up, woohoo! Looks like I'm graduating magna cum laude, which sounds like a porn movie filmed inside a volcano. I really haven't been looking at jobs as actively as I ought to be; I really need to get on top of that! If it takes a while, I'm at least registered at AccounTemps to fill the gap.
  
• Quesadilla Experiment #2 is a success! Yesterday I had a scrambled egg, ham, and red bell pepper quesadilla for breakfast. Yummy!
  
• North Carolina license plates are switching from blue lettering to red. I hate that. So much. Well, at least they haven't revoked my plate yet.

All right, now it's your turn. What's new and exciting that I've missed lately?

Oh, and to make up for my absence, here's a little game of sorts. Tell me to take a picture of anything at all, and I'll post it. Within reason, please -- no one wants to see my naughty bits (right?), and my Learjet is on the fritz again, so no photos I have to travel a long way for. Pretty much anything else is fair game. Be as specific or vague as you like, though you might not get exactly what you expect.

Ready... break!

I am now Banno's daddy!

I went to the Fortress of Doom this evening and kindlechan and I gave him a bath, loaded him in a cat carrier, and brought him to his new home. Needless to say, he was traumatized, scared, and confused when he arrived, and cowered behind my toilet for the first couple of hours.

I'm trying to get him used to the apartment gradually; I've now let him out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, possibly sooner than I should have, and now he's hiding alternatively under the bed and behind my bookcase. Hopefully he'll be ready to roam the apartment in a few days...

I've moved into the new apartment. Slept my first night there last night. Granted, my room was full of boxes, so I just laid my mattress on the floor in the living room, but it still counts.

My feelings are mixed. I'm glad to be at the new place, and ready to get started on the next era, but I'm really going to miss the Fortress of Doom. The Foodening was a perfect experience to wrap up my year and a half there, for a number of reasons.

Where does this road lead to next? I suppose we'll see.....

YESS!!



We're signing the lease next Monday.

Wayland and I have decided on an apartment and applied for it, but we're still waiting for confirmation. It's a very nice-looking place, though we haven't seen the actual apartment, only the floorplans and the grounds. It's got plenty of room -- they actually call it a "cottage home" rather than an apartment, though it's connected to a building with smaller apartments (one on each end of the building). So Wayland's girls will have plenty of space to play in. And the place gets great reviews; much better than any of the other apartments we looked at.

It's in Wake Forest, a smaller town north of Raleigh, but it's right off of the main road that connects it to Raleigh, so the commute shouldn't be too bad if I can work around rush hour. This also means we have to buy water, power, etc. from the City of Wake Forest, which just buys it from Raleigh, so there's going to be a mark-up. Hopefully utilities won't be too bad, though.

And Grog and Kindlechan are giving me Banno, my best buddy on four legs! I just hope I can get the hang of cat care without too much trouble; I've never owned a pet before. But now both of my bodyguards will be living with me!

I've grown used to constant change in the seven years since I graduated high school. I've been in the Army and deployed twice, worked in an office for a year, been a college student, and moved at least once every year. Very soon, I will have lived in the Fortress of Doom longer than I've lived anywhere else since my parents' house. And now, I'm going to be moving again, in December -- merely a month after I pass that mark. But I'm coming to realize that this isn't just another in a string of moves.

I'm moving in with my friend Wayland. We've lived together before, but things were very different back then. It was Wayland, his wife, his infant daughter, me, and my then-girlfriend, all living together in a run-down two-bedroom apartment in Durham. It wasn't the ghetto, but it was close enough. We were both very different back then (though I think he's changed a great deal more than have I), and Wayland's life has just turned upside down with his separation from Bessie. So now it's going to be two 25-year-old bachelors, and two girls aged 2 and 4. Talk about sitcom material!

More than that, my ex-girlfriend who once lived with us, and who currently lives in the Fortess as well, is moving to Philly at the end of the month. I'm driving to Mississippi tomorrow morning for two weeks of Army job training, so I just saw her for the last time tonight. A very strange feeling, considering that we really haven't had a relationship of any kind in the last year and a half, despite being roomates.

The Fortress is emptying. Trichondris left nearly a month ago. It's absolutely bizarre.

I'm going to miss living here. There's a lot I won't miss, but the comraderie we've had was amazing.

In the futuristic space-year of 2000, I ran a rudimentary book drive in the memory of my friend, Cronan Thompson. Some of you who know me from Servo may remember this. Cronan died in 1999 of lymphoma cancer, and his only complaint about his long and frequent hospital stays was not the pain or the fear of death, but the boredom. Sitting in a hospital bed for a month, surprisingly, is excrutiatingly boring. He longed for books, particularly science fiction, which family and friends would bring him occasionally and he would quickly devour. The hospital kept a few books on hand, but not many, and almost no science fiction.

After his death, I decided to help out with this situation by donating books to the hospital he had frequented. I gathered about 40-50 of my own books, and put up a webpage soliciting more, posting notices to several Usenet groups that Cronan was a part of. I expected perhaps 100 or so more, and planned to donate whatever I collected on November 1, 2000, the first anniversary of Cronan's death.

However, the book drive took off way beyond my expectations. I soon found myself surrounded by more than a thousand books, plus over a hundred thick sci-fi magazines. The turnout was so overwhelming, that when it came time to donate the books, the hospital could not handle them. In fact, when I realized that the drive could benefit not just one, but many hospitals, I found that even all the major hospitals in the Raleigh-Durham area combined did not have the facilities for all these books. (Since I did not expect such a turnout, I never though to make arrangements with the hospital beforehand.)

So I donated what I could, and made more drops over time. Since hospitals usually just give books to patients, rather than expecting them to be returned, most of the hospitals gradually made room for more. I brought in a box or two whenever I was able.

Eventually other things began to get in the way. Work, then school, made it difficult to bring the books in during working hours. (All books were accepted by volunteer services departments, which generally work 9-to-5.) And then I was mobilized by my Guard unit, and was gone for a year and a half.

I managed to drop off a lot of the remaining books last summer, but still had a good few left over. When this semester began, I resolved to get rid of the last few boxes during spring break, which is this week. Finally, this afternoon, I dropped off the last boxes of books at a couple of hospitals.

These books have been sitting in my closet for so long, it feels strange to know that it's finally done with, I've donated them all. I originally planned for this to be an annual drive, but considering how long the first drive actually took, that's pretty much out of the question.

But if you have some books that you don't need any more, and want to get rid of them, your local hospitals could definately use them. Contact the volunteer department to find out if they are needed and how to donate them. Their patients will thank you.

I'm on drill this weekend, and I started training for a different job specialty today. The job is called "automated logistics specialist" -- basically, I'm still working in the motor pool, but I'm doing the logistics and administrative side of it. I'll be dispatching vehicles, licensing operators, ordering replacement parts and keeping an inventory of parts in stock, and keeping track of faults on the vehicles.

I've been wanting this job for a while now. I've never quite fit as a mechanic -- I learned to be adequate at my job, but I've never excelled at it. This is a job I can really be good at, because it's more in line with my natural talents (as an anal-retentive computer geek).

I asked for the job as a secondary back in '02, a while before we were mobilized, but schools are hard to come by on a Guard unit's budget. Now, though, we're losing all of our 92A's (the Army code for the job). Two are transferring, and one has been AWOL the last couple of drills. So I was the logical choice for a replacement. I still need the actual school to make it official, but I'm training on the job now. The school is, I think, a two week course at Ft. Bragg. It's possible that they'll schedule it during my next semester, which will cause some problems, but I think I'll be able to work it out with my professors. Besides, next year's annual training is scheduled for April, so I'll have to arrange things anyway. (If I get the school during this fiscal year, I can skip annual training and do the school in place of it.)

Movin' back out of my parents' house this weekend! I was planning to stay until school started this fall, but a room just opened up at the Fortress of Doom last week. So I'll be moving in with a bunch of friends, including kindlechan and nichya_ru.

Most likely, I'll still be moving into a dorm come fall, though.

I'm hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooome!

Brendan has me running his journal while he is away. So just to keep you with the up to the minute news...hmmm, I wonder if I should post my amazon wishlist...

Wayland


(Begin Brendan's Stuff Now)


As one of my colleagues said as our C-17 landed, "That's one hell of a commute. It took us six and a half months to get to work."

I finally arrived in Afghanistan on Wednesday. Our base camp is in a sort of geological bowl, and we're surrounded by mountains. Dingy, brown, ugly mountains. The airstrip is surrounded by the wrecked hulks of old Soviet aircraft and equipment.

The dust is unbelievable; it gets in your eyes, your nose, your teeth. The wind will blow your hat right off your head if you don't string it around your chin. In most areas, the ground is covered with gravel to reduce dust. (If this is reduced dust, I'd hate to see it at full strength.) In some places, many of the rocks are as big as a fist. It's tough to watch where you're going in these areas and still keep your footing.

We don't go by local time here (which is 8 1/2 hours ahead of EST). Instead, we use Zulu time, which is just a fancy name for Greenwich Mean Time, and is 4 hours ahead. So the sun sets in mid-afternoon and rises around midnight. We eat breakfast at two in the morning, lunch around 7:30, and dinner just after noon. No one knows why we use Zulu time, that's just the way things are set up here.

We live in semi-permanent tents, with wooden frames and floors and a thin carpet. The tents are air-conditioned and have electricity. We sleep on cots; I bought a foam cushion for my cot at the PX which is pretty comfortable.

We aren't getting heavily into work yet. The unit we're replacing won't go back to Fort Bragg for several weeks, so we're transitioning gradually. We only brought about half of our trucks, so the motor pool, at least, shouldn't be terribly busy.

The nights are pitch dark, with no city lights for miles and miles. The night sky is beautiful. I can see the Milky Way for the first time in my life.

The food's not bad, depending on what you get. The mess hall (as well as most of the base utilities) is run by Cheney's old buddies, Halliburton Brown & Root. On Fridays, they have steak and lobster tails for dinner. It's not exactly restaurant-quality, but it's still good.

My address here is:

[Edited out due to public-ization of entry. -BRD 3/20/04

I know people are going to ask me about care packages, so here's the deal: I don't care about getting snacks or other food in the mail. There's a PX here, I can get that stuff myself (unless I have a particular craving that's not available, then I'll ask someone for it). What I really need is stuff to pass the time. Books, especially science fiction. CDs. DVDs. Anything like that. If you need ideas, Bouncepogo made me start an Amazon.com wish list before Christmas, which I still maintain. It can be found at:

http://tinyurl.com/iscl

That's about all that's going on here. I hope everyone is doing well back home. I'll keep you guys informed if anything interesting happens.

That's right, folks. My National Guard unit has been mobilized. We're going overseas.

We leave for Fort Bragg, NC in a little over a week. Once there, we'll find out exactly where we're going (I know it'll be the Middle East, but don't know what country) and train for a couple weeks or so. Then, we go there.

But don't worry too much about me; I'm a mechanic (for wheeled vehicles) in a helicopter battalion. Ground support in an aviation unit should be pretty far removed from the heavy stuff.

I hope to have some limited form of internet access so that I can check my e-mail, but I probably won't have time to update my LJ. My e-mail address is antifrance@yahoo.com; e-mail me anytime. If I end up not having any internet access, I'll make sure that someone (probably terminalwriter or thetaet) gets my snail mail address and distributes it appropriately.

Her birth has already been announced by tyler1968 and thetaet; now here's the photos.

Well, it seems that I am now officially out of the closet. Something in my brane snapped and led me to start a gay LiveJournal. Why? The world may never know.

I am not going to announce this to Servo, because I figure that anyone there who cares at all will find me through others' LJs.

I'm not sure what I plan to do with this. There will probably be some "standard" entries, and other times I'll use it as an anti-boredom outlet and post random ramblings. We'll see.

Anyway, here it is.