And I must leave. And I must leave fast.

Five weeks until I get to come home!! I'm beginning to plan a list of things to do, not the least of which includes trying to catch a Dylan concert. After looking at the dates, he's playing in New York in early October, and I think it would be easy enough to make it to Rochester, Syracuse or Albany. Of course, there's also rumor of him coming as close as Columbus, so if he hits there, I'm definitely going. I also am going to eat a lot. My palate, at this point, would prefer sandpaper drenched in motor oil over Army food. At least it would have some distinguishable flavors. That's a diatribe better reserved for another time, though.
In other news, the weather over here is slowly starting to become more tolerable. The nighttime lows are dipping into the low eighties, which makes for a remarkably pleasant evening, to say the least.
Well, sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I've been kind of busy. I've been taking on some additional duty since a lot of people are on leave right now, and it's been busy as of late. A whole lot of units are redeploying right now, which means they get to go home. Soon enough, that will be us! We still haven't heard any dates for when we get to leave, but we're hoping it is in either December or early January. I've heard rumor that we'll be home by the Super Bowl, which is the first week in February. That would put us out of the US for about a solid year, since we left Hood on Feruary 5.
We have about three weeks until GEN Petraeus has to submit his "progress report" on the surge. That shoudl be interesting, and also to see how the pundits on Capitol Hill react to it. My guess is that it will feature largely ambiguous writing, and there will be little of real value in it. It will make news for about two days, then it will fade away and we'll be back to the same old rhetoric. I read an article the other day that said politics eclipsed Iraq as the top news in 2007 so far, and that's a sad testament to where we're at as a country right now. We've become so disillusioned and disenfranchised with this war that it seems commonplace. That's not entirely unexpected, since we've been living with this conflict longer than any single conflict of the 20th Century, save Vietnam. We'll see.


Album of the week: "The Life Pursuit" by Belle & Sebastian

My dogs are barking, there must be someone around

Well, It's mid-August, and we're well into the dog days of summer. Daytime highs in Baghdad have been reaching a modest 120 to 125 degrees, and, of course, with lots of sweltering summertime sunshine. On the upside, the nights have been getting cooler, dropping to the eighties or so. It's funny, thinking that the mid-to-high eighties would be considered exceedingly "pleasant."
In other news, I think my leave is going to begin on or around the thirtieth of September. That's a little later then I would have initially liked, but there's always an upside. I'll be gone for the better part of October, and when I get back, I'll get infected with a severe case of short-timeritis. Fortunately, it's rarely fatal, and the best cure is coming home, which most doctors prescribe within sixty to seventy-five days of symptoms.
I also recently got recommended for promotion. Like I said some months ago, the Army enlisted promotion system is kind of whacky. I put in a promotion packet, which is kind of a little biography of military and civilian accomplishemts such as education, physical fitness tests, marksmanship and other awards. All of these things are comverted to points. Your personal points are augmented by points from your commander, who assigns a number (sometimes very arbitrarily, I'm sure) of points to you based on how worthy he thinks you are. Lastly, your packet is presented to a promotion board. They also give you points, based on your packet, and either recommend you or disapprove you for promotion. At that point, assuming there was a positive recommendation, the packet is forwarded to the proper order-issuing authority, which is usually the higher major command. In my case, this is the 88th, in Minneapolis. From there, they finalize the packet, and issue promotion orders. After this whole ordeal, you can start wearing the new rank. Hopefully finance got word of the promotion, too, and you start getting paid more. With any luck, my packet should be arriving in Minneapolis any day now, and my orders should be cut by the end of the month. But, this being the United Staes Army, I would be not at all surprised to see myself not getting promoted until December. Merry Christmas!


Album of the week: "Armed Forces" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions