I am so full of thanks...

Ok, it's been a while but I thought here was a fitting reminder of not only our nation's heritage/history, but also an encouragement to continue a most worthy tradition of thankfulness for all our great blessings:

by the President of the United States of America (1863)

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful years and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the Source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the field of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than theretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

In testimony wherof I have herunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

[Signed]
A. Lincoln

Awesomeness

Ok...this is going to be a short blog but here are a few of the awesome things I have done in the past week:
1) Went to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Hugh Jackman, albeit missing his trademark hairdo, was very enjoyable to watch ;-)
2) Got a haircut/color - curly, layered, angled bob of sorts...with sideswept bangs. I definitely look younger, perhaps around the late teens/early 20s mark again, which was proved as I got carded at a martini bar tonight. Awesome!
3) Started using Proactiv face cleaning system, to see if it lived up to all the hype. My face reacted badly to something in Kyrgyzstan, and I wanted to stop looking like my face had been chewed up by a wild animal. So far, a week in, I am seeing marked improvement!
4) Ran the Spokane Bloomsday 2009 12K race...well, ran/walked - and despite all the unexpected issues with cramping achilles tendons and a sore right knee, we still managed to finish 5 minutes faster than last year! Now to start training for a half marathon, wait I have to find out where/when there is going to be a half marathon...
5) Demonstrated to Ben that although a long way away from winning, I am well on my way to learning to eat sensibly - not eating so much that I feel sick afterwards, and earn stupified looks from family and friends as they don't understand where I put it all...so yay for portion control!
6) Bought a new sofa - dark brown leather with a left-facing chaise! We have been looking for a while, and saw this one a week or so ago. We were going to wait but it was on a really good sale this weekend, we figured we can better afford it now rather than later when we have kids, and it's a leather sofa! :-D It should get delivered next week...
7) Went to see Star Trek - AWESOMELY AWESOME!! So good...and fun to see such a great cast of actors - the guy who played the villain on Heroes as Spock, Eric Bana as the villain Nero, Karl Urban as Dr McCoy, and Simon Pegg as Scotty (my favorite bit of casting!). Definitely will be looking to buy it when it comes out on dvd. Don't think I'll ever be a Trekky though...

And that's about all I can think of to write about right now. Other than that we're having to discuss options on how to deal with Maggie, our cat, who has, in the past few days, decided to start peeing everywhere but the litter box - first in one of our houseplants, then on one of our recliner chairs, then just tonight on the carpet by one of the windows. I don't get it...we haven't changed anything around the house (added a new pet, moved furniture, etc), and she only started doing this a few days ago. I don't think she has a bladder infection because its like she is deliberately choosing where to pee. I don't want to make her an outside cat because Frankie (our other cat) will lose his buddy, she is declawed and won't be able to defend herself, and will get dirty and I will miss her. But I don't know how to modify her behavior or figure out what she's doing...cats are notoriously difficult to train and we're baffled as to why this has happened all of a sudden.

But I will end there for tonight...

Live long and prosper!!

There's No Place Like Home...

Good morning all,

Firstly I'd like to apologize for not updating this while I was deployed, the internet connection was patchy at best and every time I tried logging in it either wouldn't let me or every website I tried getting onto was in Russian or Dutch.

But anyway, I am home now...I got home yesterday around noon. I left Manas AB, Kyrgyzstan on Sunday (Central Asia time), made an overnight stop in England, and landed at Fairchild AFB Washington yesterday. (For those of you who didn't know, I was deployed to Manas AB, Kyrgyz Republic, outside of the capital Bishkek). It was the best first deployment you could ask for...I went with an awesome team of aircraft maintainers, and learned so much about maintenance, about managing people (including having to administer discipline - NOT fun), and about life in general. I refocused my life on living to glorify God and honor my husband, worked out a lot (although not as much as I was hoping to), worked on conquering my compulsive snacking problem, and drank gallons of coffee so strong you could float a fork in it.

But with all that said, I am very glad to be home! I'm pretty sure Ben is too...the house was filled with flowers and as a welcome home present he got me the first two seasons of MacGuyver on dvd! I also had, as my first dinner back, the food I've been craving and even dreaming about for over a month - Papa Murphy's Gourmet Classic Italian pizza and a cheesy bread!

Well I think I am going to sign off for now, but promise to post again soon...hopefully with a few pictures. My love to you all!!

Time To Go

Ok, I don't have a lot of time to write as I'm heading out the door in about 5-10 minutes to head to base to head off on my deployment to Central Asia. But I wanted to say hi again, hopefully reminding you to keep in touch while I'm gone, and to post some pictures I've been promising to post for the past week.

So PLEASE stay in touch! It hasn't really hit me yet that I'm going to be gone for several months, Ben is surprised that I'm handling it so well emotionally...but the tears will probably hit after I'm in the air and it really hits me that this is it, I'm gone. I'm also excited about it and also really tired so all of that together is a potent emotional brew waiting to boil over. Prayers are appreciated! :)

OK, so here are the pictures I promised:

Decorating Christmas Cookies
White Christmas - With A Vengeance!
View From our Dining Room - Narnia-esque, I think
Partridge in a Pear Tree...well, more like a wild turkey!

Thank you to all who called and were able to catch up a little before I left, I really appreciated it! Hope you all had a wonderfully Happy Christmas and will have a Joyous and Blessed New Year!

The Picture At The Top of My Blog

In case anyone was wondering, the picture at the top of my blog is of Ben (who loves backpacking and keeps trying to get me to go on more and more hikes - part of the whole "I'm trying to be more adventurous" part of my profile!) on our hike in Hell's Canyon State Park in Idaho this summer. As you can see, it was beautiful! Except for the part where we woke up in the middle of the night (it was raining) and SOMETHING was moving outside our tent! We're pretty sure it was a skunk (although there are wolves in that area and to be honest I'm not sure if I would prefer a skunk over a wolf!), but all we had to defend ourselves with were our matching hatchets (sadly, not engraved yet). I think at one point it was almost pressing up against the side of our little 2-person tent. We just lay there until we couldn't hear it anymore and then Ben went out to look. Sure enough, something had chewed through my pack (we should have hung them up but had put them under the rain fly to protect them from the weather) to get at our trail mix. So my (up til then) nice new pack now has a small hole in it to remind us how fortunate we were and how stupid not to hang our packs up high where nothing could reach them - and just cover them with trash bags or something. Oh, and we've also bought a small (sub-compact) handgun for such trips as a little added protection.

So there's a little story about something that happened a while ago...but I really liked the picture and thought it fit the quote right below it!

Here are a couple other pictures from that trip:

More Scenery

Scene of the attack
Ben enjoying his hiking hammock
Camp Coffee (or as I like to think of it, Delicious Caffeinated Sludge)

Everything's Under Control

Ok well I realize that my last post was both incredibly long (with no pictures to make it interesting) and also maudlin-ly overemotional and rather ridiculous...so I will attempt to restore your interest in this blog, or at least put your fears at rest. I'm not going crazy...I promise.

I'm already crazy! Or at least Ben is pretty convinced...

And that fog really did annoy me!

But today I am just going to say that everything's under control...not mine, but God's...and Ben ended up getting home the next day around noon, so it all worked out. And I could have saved myself so much frustration and heartache if I would have just trusted the Lord in the first place, as trust him or no he's still going to work his will.

Anyway, here are a couple cute pictures we took of Sir Francis Drake The Pirate wearing reindeer antlers and Baroness Margaret Thatcher playing in Ben's desert camo in the laundry basket!

An Unwilling Sacrifice

I will try to be careful how I write here, as I am currently overwrought with emotion and don't want to sound like I'm complaining/ranting too much...

And I know that I'm supposed to live one day at a time, submitting my life and everything to the Lord, and stop trying to control my own life...and in a lot of ways in the past couple weeks as I've made this conscious decision over and over and over each day, it has really helped me feel lighter, more at peace, and (once) almost a trace of serenity...and has also made me a less aggressive driver.

But tonight I am not serene - not even close. I am too frustrated and angry and panicky-feeling that Reason's knock on the door can't be heard over the cacophony in my heart. To put it lightly, I am perturbed! And why, you may ask?

Because of some fog. Some thick, low-lying, near zero-visibility fog that prevented Ben's plane from landing after an absence of almost 2 weeks. Instead, he was re-routed to Seattle (what was the point, I ask, of even leaving Las Vegas in the first place?) and may or may not make it back tomorrow, as there is a major winter snowstorm supposed to blow in tomorrow afternoon!

Your hypothetical self may be wondering at this point why I am so upset if he's only been gone 2 weeks and may be delayed only a day or so longer? Because like I posted earlier, I am deploying very soon...I leave in 2 weeks, and want as much time as possible to spend with him before I'm gone for 4+ months in a foreign land.

I guess this is just the straw that broke the camel's back...the bricks the camel is already carrying are that since Ben got back from his deployment at the end of April this year, he and I have been in the same place on the same schedule for only about 3 weeks out of the past 7 months. As soon as he got back, he was put on swing shift, which means he typically works 2-11pm, so he gets to work before I leave, and gets home after I'm in bed asleep. I tried for a while to shift my sleep schedule so that I would go to bed as soon as I got home (say around 5-6pm), then wake up at midnight or so to hang out with him until he went to bed and I went to work around 6:30am-ish. But I quickly found out that shifting my schedule like that had a highly detrimental effect to my health, exacerbating problems I've been going through for a while (I guess the past couple years you could say I've been pretty sickly). So while he's on swings I pretty much only see him on the weekends for a few hours. On top of that, he and I have both been tasked several times in the past few months to leave Spokane for training or TDY (temp duty somewhere else), or have worked through multiple weekends on opposite shifts during a base exercise. The long and the short of it is, I hardly feel like I have a husband anymore. I mean, his pictures are on the walls in the house, and I talk with him on the phone almost every day, but I feel like I'm married to the Air Force.

Now don't misunderstand me...I love my job (aircraft maintenance on the sweetest flying gas station ever made! NKAWTG!) and I am very, very excited about this deployment and the development opportunities (character, leadership, etc. as well as lots of time to work out!) and I am very grateful to the AF for funding my education and helping me find my husband...

But I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. I mean, I knew back while I was in ROTC that being a military member required certain sacrifices of you, particularly if you are a dual-military family, but I was not nearly as emotionally prepared as I was mentally (and even my mental preparation wasn't complete). This is getting so hard. I recently read "John Adams" by David MacCullogh (fantastic, I highly recommend it!) and really came to admire and respect his wife Abigail for the sacrifices she made, the years they spent apart, and how although she loved him and wanted to be with him, she put her young country's needs ahead of her own. In many ways, I desire to model myself after her. But even with such a great example to follow, the sacrifice is hard. And I'm struggling to calm down, quiet my soul, and make my purpose as a wife to help my husband succeed. In this case that would mean not freaking out when he can't make it home when he thought he would, and letting him know I've got things under control here on the home front so he doesn't have to get distracted from his important job of training and being ready to support and defend our nation and its people. I really want to do that...but I think it's going to take a few hours of sitting on the couch eating yet another Lean Cuisine (because who wants to cook for just themselves after working 50+ hours a week?) and holding my kitten-child (Frankie, the one in the picture with me), and just taking time to breathe.

Ok I realize I'm writing all of these posts in advance of anyone knowing about my blog, but wanted to get these thoughts out of my head, and keep you up to date on what's going on in my life.

I really can't wait til I am an Air Force wife and mother! But that's quite a few months/years down the road, and I need to just focus on tomorrow...