All the News That Is News

The news of the day is there's not much news. Now before you drift off to another site in disgust, let me explain. Blake has been moved to somewhere else and can't get on the internet, which means he hasn't been keeping his MySpace page current, which is where I get most of the info on him. I sent him a text message last week saying that we were getting a little concerned since we hadn't heard from him and he called later that same day.

He's been moved from his home base to another location that needed replacement personnel in his career specialty for about a month. He's been there now for 2 or 3 weeks and said that he would be there until sometime in the middle of March. I asked him how safe this base was and he said they got a little more shelling there than where he was before, but nothing serious. "We're being shelled but it's not serious," sounds like an oxymoron to me, but he was perfectly comfortable with the idea. We'll just be glad to see him get back to his home base. Or home period for that matter.

He gave us a little info on what it's going to be like when he comes home. He said he would get a few days off right away, but didn't know if he would be able to leave the base or not. Then he will have to go through about 3 weeks of debriefing to get them all acclimated to being back in the U.S. From that point, he said that he will get a 30 day leave. He's not sure that he has to take it all then as he would like to split it up over the holidays later this year. In his mind, he would like to take the month of July off, mostly to celebrate Dusty's birthday with him.

He's almost 100% sure that he will be leaving for Kentucky once he returns to duty in the U.S. His unit is moving from Ft. Hood to Ft. Knox, and while he could change units and stay in Texas, he doesn't want to be in a position of being deployed with a new unit sooner than he would normally have to be.

He's even talking of re-enlisting since the job market is so bad here. We've talked about it and decided that that would probably be the smartest thing for him to do. He also wants to be stationed in Europe, and reenlisting would be the only way to make that happen. Or so it seems now.

He's worked with several civilians who do his job over there and has been excited with the possibility of doing this when he gets out. He says there's a lot of money to be made if you're willing to be deployed, and so far, he hasn't had a problem with that.

Also, he'll be up for promotion soon. That's something else he said when he called. Don't know when, but he thinks it will be before he comes back home. That would be nice. He can't wait to come back home and see his friends and family again.

Well, I guess there was more than I thought to report when I first started. Till there's more, just keep him in your prayers.

Later.