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