....when your having fun

Time is flying by faster than I feel comfortable with. I am getting settled in my new assignment with the 3rd Infantry Division here in beautiful Fort Stewart, Georgia. The family stayed in Florida for a myriad of reasons, with my impending deployment back to Iraq this Summer topping the list. If there is a bright side, it is that we have had the last 3 years of my being mostly gone to practice getting good at me being gone. The kids are getting so big, and every week seems like a year when I arrive home on Friday night. Ely is becoming a young man before my eyes, and Emily has her first loose tooth. Evan will always be the baby, regardless of how big he gets. I miss them all so much...

Alright....

I am going to start writing somewhat regularly.....as soon as I can think of something interesting to say......

Good-Bye Gramps

I've been living in a bit of a surreal world the last few days. I was already a third of the way through a 3 month mission, when I was informed that my grampa was in the hospital and not doing well. He and I have always been very close, and the fact that I haven't seen him nearly as much as I wanted too in recent years was something that I had been preoccupied with lately. I often expressed my desire to load up the kids and drive to Utah with my wife, who being full aware of my guilt was always in full support.
I arrived on Thursday afternoon despite several setbacks (that is another story); and walked into one of the hardest scenes I have ever found myself in. My 4 aunts and mother were a mess. Grandma was holding up amazingly well, and I saw her as an amazing source of strength throughout this entire ordeal.
I spent the night with Gramps, and was able to talk with him, and come to peace with the situation with which we found ourselves. He imparted to me his final wisdom and wishes, and I informed him just how much he meant to me.
He passed on Friday afternoon surrounded by those who loved him most, and there is not a doubt in my mind that he is at peace. Words can not describe how much it meant to me to have those precious few moments with him. I will never forget him.

The moon?

I was listening to a program the other day talking about Sir Branson and his moon flight service. I made me wonder, as space flight becomes more efficient and cheap (they now have a shuttle that can do it for 200k a person), who owns the moon. I see in the near future, a governing body for the moon. It would most certainly be a multinational effort, but what if this is the next big worldwide divider. Oil is slowly becoming yesterdays news...we need something else to bicker and go to war over. Interesting...

Justification

I decided to start a journal as a place to put my daily thoughts and rantings of the state of affairs with which we find ourselves these days. I am afforded the luxury of much alone time with my current job and I spend this time thinking. My brother Josh once told me his "Old Blue Chair" was his car; his place to think and ponder all that was happening around him. I have carried that with me, and often find myself old blue chairing it in my car as well. I'm a thinker, it's a curse passed down to me from my dad, much to the chagrin of my wife. I hate the idea of not knowing something, what it means or how it works. I am addicted to wikipedia, and find myself spending hours linking to page after page of information. I overuse commas, and write run on sentences. I like to write as if I am speaking, which is often fast and machine gun like, however; I also try to articulate what I mean, and think before I say it. Crap, I'm self-analyzing now....anyway; more to follow......