Val Makes a Bad Day Good

As my previous post probably suggests, I’ve been in less-than-stellar mood lately. I’ve been very busy supporting the Logistics ROC (rehearsal of concept) drill. I should have a very small role in the ROC drill, seeing how I’m not in Logistics, but they kept hitting me up for information and tagging me to brief more and more things. I understand that I’m one of the few people that have been tracking the force flow for a while now, but that doesn’t make me a Logistics officer. Plus, I’ve been trying to actually do some Air-related taskers on the side and the RC-West team still wants me to help them out on their planning. Plus! The 14-15 hour days seems longer than I remembered them.

But probably the biggest thing that’s been bugging me lately is waiting to see the final draft of my Lt Col PRF (promotion recommendation form). I know the form has been written and they have to send it to me before the board on 8 March, so I’m just anxiously waiting. This next board is my next and last decent chance to be selected for promotion and my chances all hinge on whether I get a “Promote” or “Definitely Promote” recommendation. Only a “Definitely Promote” recommendation would get me promoted. Otherwise, I “have” to retire in the summer of 2011. But to be honest, during a chaotic deployment like this I often think I would rather retire and move on to something different.

Lucky Val gets to hear most of the things that bother me because she’s one of the few people I feel I can vent to. Plus, she’s my bestest best friend in the whole, wide universe. So she knows when I’m struggling or down in general. But even before I vented to her here recently, I just happened to check out the Navigon blog and see what sweet and thoughtful words she had to say about how hard I work (Feb 15, "How Do You Do It?" post). No one knows better than me how hard Val works and hopefully she knows how much I appreciate her. It was just wonderful timing and extremely uplifting to read how much she appreciates the work that I do. Even when work or the world in general starts to wear on me, just thinking about how lucky I am to have such a wonderful wife and children always puts things in perspective for me and I find the patience and endurance to “just do it.”