Why The Sandbox Misses Me

I can’t recall any exotic locations where I spent New Year’s before my sixteenth birthday. In fact, I don’t even know where I celebrated New Year’s this year but I’m pretty sure it would qualify as exotic. I was somewhere between Kuwait and Germany in an airplane.

As many of you might already know, I have been on my Rest and Relaxation leave for the last two weeks and today is my last day. Of course I’d be lying (and in trouble with Kristen) if I said I was ready to leave but the low temperature here today is -22° F and the high is supposed to be a blazing -7°. There is currently a low of 35° F in Mosul so that should feel downright tropical for me.

I have been able to spend lots of time with friends, Brownie and family. I thought the time would really fly but it has seemed to go slow enough to make it worthwhile.

Speaking of Brownie, the Boxer, he is just over two years old now which makes him about 16 in human years if you buy into that. I think we need to start calling him Girl Scout now.

He also seems to be quite interested in my truck. I hope he doesn’t drive it too much while I’m gone.

For the first few days after I got back I was taking the “rest” portion very seriously. It took me a while to get adjusted to this time zone which I did by sleeping at seemingly random times. If you want to know what the movie “Seven Pounds” is about from a point of view of someone who’s state of consciousness was hit and miss just let me know.

Next we went to Boyne for skiing for a few days. It has become sort of a Christmas tradition for us so it was nice to be able to make it this year. There was a lot of good snow and few people on the hill so it was perfect.

The other major thing I did was a woodworking project. My original plan was to get it done before I left for Iraq initially but that didn’t happen. It gave me some more time to work on the design which I worked on well into the actual building of the project. It’s a secret birthday present so I hope my almost one year old niece doesn’t check her email. You can click on the ‘project card’ below and go to Lumberjocks.com for much more information on the project.

Other than that I have just been enjoying my time with family, not shaving, and marveling at the speed of the internet here. I don’t even have time to read magazines while I wait for pages to load. I should be back in Iraq in a few days and getting back into the swing of things. Many of you have asked when I will be back home from this deployment and I don't really know. I'm expecting that it will be about eight more months but of course the Army is subject to change.

Back to the box,

Kyle

If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.

-Herodotus