He's alive!

As you can no doubt infer from my lack of posts these last three days, I've been in recovery mode. I really haven't been in a chatty mood (whether via blog or in person). As head colds go, that was one of the less severe I've had. However, having not been sick in over 5 years, it seemed worse.  In any case, I'm not quite dead yet.

The worst part of being sick this particular time is that it's thrown me a few days behind in preparation to go. For the first time since the UDM issued me all my shtuff, I finally went through it yesterday to see what I still needed to buy. For everything that I'm not required to take with me, I have to ask myself, "Do I really need this?" On the one hand, there's the urge to take as much as will fit in my allotted 4 bags. The idea being, "It's better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it." Well, that's fine if you're going camping for the weekend and can pack the car right there in your garage, then retrieve things from the car as you need them. But for a deployment, you have to tote everything while en route, so the flip side of the coin is: more shtuff means more weight. In engineer parlance, this becomes an optimization problem.  Maximize utility while minimizing weight. For me, a card-carrying member of the National Packrat Society, this is a tall ask. I fully expect to arrive in Baghdad and rhetorically ask, "What the hell was I thinking bringing all this shtuff?" I suppose the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.

This morning, I'm going to church where--rumor has it--they're going to do some sort of send-off for me. Tonight we have a few friends over for hot dogs. Memorial Day tomorrow will be my day to really hit the packing hard. This Memorial Day, like no other before, has the most meaning to me (including all those during my 26 years in the Air Force). Yes, I'm going downrange in a few weeks, but there are plenty of men and women (many barely so), who have it much worse than I will. It's my only hope that my contribution will, in some small measure, improve their circumstances, and, most importantly, help to bring them all home alive.