A Time For Change

I meant to write on Saturday, but you know how it is...now it's Monday and I have got to keep this short. My mother came to pick me up from the airport on Thursday and we went to pack up all of my remaining belongings to drive back to Illinois. If you would like to keep count, this is 10 hours total on the road for my mom Thursday/Friday. On Saturday we got a huge chunk of work done on packing my room and had 4 plastic totes full of things to take to Goodwill. Saturday night was my 5 year class reunion...augh.

I started out excited for this class reunion. Yeah! It'll be great to see all of my old friends, and catch up with their lives! Only, about 7 minutes before it was going to 'start' I was having dinner with my Mom & Grammy and I realized that--this is really going to suck! So I went with the intention of staying an hour, and then was going to go to run. About 40 minutes into the damn thing it started to rain. No, POUR! It was raining harder than I've seen in a long time. There was no way I was going to go out to my car, so I texted mom that I was going to stay until the rain passed. Finally the rain stopped, but I was too busy finding out about people's enthralling lives to go home. It was a depressing night--people were still the same old 'fake' that they had been...only some of the guys were really nice, and easy to talk to. Okay..so there were just a few bitchy females here and there, but it was SO annoying! I just wanted to scream at everybody to get a life!! :) Naw, I'd never do something like that! So, I ended up going home around 11:30, thoroughly satisfied with the evening.

Yesterday, my mom and I made the trek back to Kansas and back again today (chalk up 10 more hours for mom on the road for me...that's 20 total in the period of 5 days~! What an angel!) to get the remaining belongings, go to a Dr appointment, and see Clare--maybe for one last time before I leave on this deployment.

Also, today was the funeral of a local hero from my town SSG Matthew Weichart was buried today in Jacksonville Illinois and guess what rumor I heard about from the deli lady at Walmart tonight?! The ass from Topeka who protests funerals decided to show his ugly face. All of the town lined Morton St. in honor of him, and two fire trucks fully extended their buckets and dropped the American flag over the road...from what I hear, it was an amazing sight to see. Pictures will be in the paper tomorrow. The other rumor I heard was that some Jacksonville people gave the 'preacher man' quite a tongue lashing. I hope there's a story about that in the paper!!

R.I.P, Soldier--you served your country well.

The problem with time...eventually, time runs out.

I am sitting here looking at the calender that I had made that shows me how much free time I have left to spend so that I can more easily budget it. That time is slowly running out. No, not slowly at all. Its racing. I can't slow it down no matter how hard I try. There will not be enough time to spend with my loved ones.

As of right now, I have July 25th-August 4th ( 11 days) and August 24th-September 8th (16 days) So, 27 days of freedom left. What do I do with it?

I HAVE to go see my little brother and sister--I haven't seen them all summer.
I need to spend some time with my mom one-on-one.
I need to visit with my Grammy.
I would like to go out to California to visit my aunt (but that is unlikely with the way my life is changing so much)
I want to spend as much time as I can with Clare before I go.
And of course time with my friends in the KC area.
Not to mention all the time that I need to clear out my room and move my stuff around to get organized.

It'll all work out. And the time I have left with people will be awesome! Like today, I get to see my other best friend and spend the next 5/6 days with her :)

Dear John,

So I arrived in Colorado today. I caught a flight early this morning and spent the day with one of my best friends from college. I met her daughter, Anni-2 months old, as we caught up from the last time I came to visit. We did the usual girly things as we ate chocolate and talked about the old college days and how we wished we had back our girlish figures and then we all took a much needed nap.

The day was perfect, I couldn't have asked for anything more--see, the thing that means the most to me is people. My friends, family, co-workers, colleagues, pretty much anyone that crosses my path and is a good person. The only problem is, I am bad at goodbyes and a goodbye that is going to last over a year is scary.

I'm not scared of going overseas. I'm not scared of the heat. I'm not scared of getting along with all the other soldiers. I'm not even scared of getting shot at, or having to be in a fire fight. I'm scared of the unknown...I'm scared that I won't be as organized as I need to be in preparation to ship out. I'm scared that I don't know where I will be living, or who I will be riding with, or how long we will be on the road, or what our missions will be like. I know I will be fine. I know I will adapt and overcome any obstacle that is put in my path. That's just what I do. And I do it well.

We ended the evening with a delicious home cooked dinner of beef and noodles and a movie. Dear John. Hence, the inspiration for this post. Things will be fine. Things will be great. There's just that unknown factor that I can't plan for. But I am in love with the Army and it will treat me well.

Figurin' this out

So, I'm new to this whole new blogging thing--but I feel that it suits me pretty well. And...since I will soon be gone for what we think is 400 days with limited communication, I figured this would be a good idea to keep y'all up to date. I really don't have much to say right now, as I am in Colorado hanging out with my two best friends for a week, but maybe we will have some eventful things go on that I just NEED to tell you all about! Ha ha. Keep up with me!!