Deployment

Procrastination is Motivation?

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My subconscious must be just perverse enough to make it difficult for me to blog unless by so doing, I am procrastinating on something else.

Actually, I think that’s why having a double major worked out so well for me in college. When I had a programming deadline, I could write a religion paper. With an essay due date looming, I could lose myself in endless lines of code. See? Perverse. Or contrary, at the very least.

I have no children to wrangle or job responsibilities to juggle, so this deployment has given me Time with a capital ‘T.’ It sloshes about the corners of my house, unused, in temporal eddies that could probably be used to fuel a couple of Star Trek plots. Some of my readers are no doubt gritting their teeth as they read this, thinking, “How dare she complain about having too much time on her hands! I could use an extra four hours just to keep entropy at bay.” If I could figure out a way to reallocate some of my superfluous hours to you busy folks, I’d be happy to oblige — just as long as I could reclaim them when my schedule eventually reverts to “bursting at the seams” mode.

Right now, though, with all this Time floating about, I’m having trouble generating the necessary internal pressure to sit down and write. I have ideas for SpouseBUZZ posts sitting woefully neglected and unexpanded-upon. I haven’t yet told you the story of my triumph over the recalcitrant lawnmower. ENS Wifey’s faithfully-produced MilSpouse Friday Fill-In questions have gone un-filled-in for weeks. My poor blog is parched, and I chalk it up to a lack of non-writing projects on which to procrastinate.

The solution, clearly, is to give myself some other assignments, undertakings to make typing seem a rejuvenating process and prose a refuge. To that end, I just ordered a cackle-worthy amount of yarn and made plans to embark upon my first large-ish lace project. (Hey, no one said my non-writing task had to be unpleasant — it just has to be Not Writing.) If my self-assessment is correct, knitting the way I will need to in order to finish this gift in a timely fashion (read: until cross-eyed and fumble-fingered) will make “sneaking off” to bang out a blog post seem deliciously like getting away with something.

Am I the only weirdo who procrastinates her way into productivity? I’d love to hear about any little tricks you use to fool yourself into getting things done.

To the Nth Facebook Page

Come on over and give me a 'Like,' if you so desire.

Speaking of procrastination, Facebook reigns as one of the greatest time sinks of all time, as it has since I was in college (you know, back in the days before middle schoolers and your grandmother were on it). It was only a matter of time before I joined the “Facebook Page for my Blog” party: To the Nth is now officially likable, social-networking-wise. Let me know if you have a page you’d like me to come visit!

Time is Marching On

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Flight Gear Vera

"Your helmet bag is comfy, hooman."

Today is a good day for my own personal ways of counting down until Sampson is home with me and a pair of kitties who would really prefer to have his flight gear conveniently strewn about for feline lounging. Not only did I get to flip the calendar page from February to March, but I get to put the trash and the recycling forward tonight. Recycling is every other week, so I am pleased to note the passage of fourteen more days in this deployment. I am two weeks — one fortnight! — closer to being able to hand trash duty back to my husband, a chore I will gladly relinquish into his capable hands the moment his plane touches down on United States soil.

My parents ventured down to visit me over the weekend, so I am coming down off the high of good food, fortifying drink, and excellent company. I hope they enjoyed their little mini-vacation as much as I did. It was so good to spend time with them, and it was refreshing to have a house full of laughter and loved ones again. I sometimes forget how quiet it truly is with just me in the house. Well, I’ll grant you that the cats can be noisy buggers when they’ve a mind, but they’re not big on witty repartee.

My in-laws are coming to visit next week, which is super-sweet of them. With any luck, my house will still be fairly organized from my whirlwind of pre-parental-visit cleaning this past Friday. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except I lost some of the housekeeping time I’d allotted when I discovered the necessity of mounting an all-out assault on the moths that had infiltrated my pantry. Gross, gross, gross. On the plus side, having to get in there with bleach forced me to clear out some items that had been sitting around for a while, like the wedding favor candy from my cousin’s reception a year and a half ago. Whoops.

In non-disgusting food news, I have a loaf of bread about to go into the oven, whereupon it will fill my house with a mouthwatering aroma that will make it difficult for me to resist tearing into the honey-whole-wheat goodness the nanosecond it’s done baking. Strength! I’m gonna need some strength here, people, lest I burn the roof of my mouth on the staff of life.

(It’d be totally worth it, though.)

MilSpouse Friday Fill-In #30

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What is your favorite MilSpouse blog (not including Wife of a Sailor who we all love, or your own)? –submitted by Our Crazy Life

Now, now, it’s not nice to play favorites. 😉 I’ll give what might be perceived as a cop-out answer and say SpouseBUZZ is pretty cool because of the variety of viewpoints it offers. SpouseBUZZ was one of the very first milspouse blogs I added to my RSS reader several years ago, back before I kept my own milspouse blog or really sought out others’.

What are your favorite perks about your s/o being deployed (we all know there are perks)? —submitted by Ramblings of a Marine Wife

One thing I have savored is not having to live my life by the flight schedule. We have no idea what my husband will be doing the next day until the flight schedule goes out the evening before. Until that point, we don’t know if we’re looking at an oh-dark-thirty wake-up for an early brief or if he’ll overshoot a reasonable dinnertime by hours due to a night bounce (Field Carrier Landing Practice, or FCLP) session. My hours are much more regular when Sampson is away; I imagine it will be a bit of an adjustment to get used to planning around the flight sked again when he returns home.

How long did you date your <significant other> before getting engaged? Married? –submitted by Utterly Chaotic

We had been dating for about four and two-thirds years when Sampson proposed. We initially thought our engagement would be about a year and a half long, but due to the exigencies of flight school, we wound up getting married just a few days shy of one year after he proposed.

What do you think your <significant other> would do if s/he wasn’t in the military? –submitted by Adventures of M-Squared

We’ve talked about this “parallel universe” scenario from time to time. I think we would find ourselves living close to our Northern Virginia roots while Sampson worked as an aerospace engineer for one of the big government contractors. It’s possible that I would be working for the same one as a software engineer.

I think one of the main things that kept Sampson from going that route was the knowledge that if he didn’t even try to make his childhood dream of being a Naval Aviator a reality, he would live the rest of his life wondering what might have been. The fact of the matter is that one can pursue a career in engineering after a career as a military pilot, but the reverse is not true. Some things must be done in youth or not at all.

If you could talk to the Secretary of (fill in your appropriate branch) what is one suggestion you would like to bring to their attention in order to improve the lives of military families? —submitted by My Life as His (Air Force) Wife

I don’t know about the lives of military families in general, but it would set this Navy family’s collective mind at ease to have confidence that those in the upper echelons understand the difference between sustainable, well-supported efforts and temporary, extraordinary measures to get the job done in a pinch. None of us can function interminably at “in a pinch” levels.

Are you a military spouse/fiancée/fiancé/girlfriend/boyfriend? Hie thee to ENS Wifey’s blog, snag the questions, and add yourself to the Mr. Linky for this week’s MilSpouse Friday Fill-In!

Cute Paper Motivates Me

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Fellow aviation bride NavyGirl of Marrying the Navy recently held a Reader Recipe Giveaway. I submitted my recipe (Lentils with Spinach and Goat Cheese) largely for the fun of writing up one of our household staple meals, but the random-drawing Force must have been with me: I won! (I only wish my admittedly healthy recipe had been as drool-worthy as the cookies NavyGirl featured after the announcement.)

"What to Eat" meal planning notepad

The turtle wonders what delectable delights will fill the tantalizing blanks.

Sampson and I have never, perhaps, been as good as we could be about planning our meals in advance. When we did, though, it was always a pleasant surprise how much of a stress-reliever it was to have answers to “the eternal question” (as the adorable notepad puts it at the bottom of each page) written down right in front of us. Our grocery runs were smoother, we avoided situations where we needed to dash out at the last minute to get some missing ingredient, and we didn’t wind up eating out when we hadn’t already planned to do so.

And then stuff would come up, and we’d get distracted, and we’d forget to sit down and plan out our meals ahead of time. The same old rut welcomed us back: “What’s for dinner?” “I dunno. What do we have?” “I dunno. Wanna go to Chipotle?”

It’s been even worse since Sampson deployed. I haven’t gone out to eat, which is good, but neither have I been motivated to cook just for myself and wind up with piles of leftovers. I’m kinda lukewarm about leftovers; I get bored with the same dish reheated, and with the household’s King of Leftover Demolition currently halfway around the world, leftovers can hang out in my fridge for a long time. Unless I come up with clever ways to transform those boring remnants of a previously exciting meal into something new and different, they probably won’t get eaten.

That’s where mapping out my culinary week is going to come in really handy: figuring out how I am going to utilize leftovers from one meal in future recipes throughout the week. If I plan out my “transformations” ahead of time, I can space out my leftovers so that roasting a chicken and making rice pilaf for myself doesn’t mean a week-long dinnertime death march until it’s all gone (read: when I can’t stomach another bite of microwaved chicken and rice, it languishes in the fridge until I eventually throw it out). A far better scenario is likely when I know before I roast the chicken that I will use the leftover breast meat for chicken salad one day and soak the remaining dark meat in a soy-sesame marinade to go in fried rice made from the leftover pilaf on another.

Less wasted food, more motivation to cook, and I get to indulge my stationery nerdiness by writing it all out on a hip notepad? Thanks so much for a prize imbued with several different kinds of win, NavyGirl! I strongly suspect that many recipes from her other readers will wind up jotted on the notepad in the coming months.

Supplies Party

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In the days before Sampson* departed for this deployment, I was at a bit of a loss as to what I was supposed to do to get myself ready. Oh, we had already taken care of the concrete stuff: my military ID was renewed, the base stickers on my car were updated, we had our powers of attorney and all that good stuff. Sampson was busy at work right up until the day he left, so I had a lot of time on my hands at home with the departure date hanging over my head and not a lot of substance I could do to prepare myself.

One thing I did find to do was make a phone call to the United States Postal Service and request a military care package kit. I hate talking on the phone with strangers, so it took some mental wherewithal to get myself psyched up for waiting on hold until I reached a person, but I am very glad I did. The request was easy to make, and the kind lady with whom I spoke assured me the assortment of boxes and other shipping supplies would arrive in a couple weeks.

It felt good to do something — even a small something — to make me feel I was in control of at least one aspect of the upcoming deployment. I might not have known much, but darn it, I knew for sure how I was going to deal with putting packages together for my husband! Bonus, I got to look forward to the arrival of the kit on my doorstep, which got me looking past the looming goodbye.

Cat and carboard boxes

Vera is ready to assist, if by "assist" we mean "hinder in any way possible, up to and including getting cat hair stuck on every bit of tape."

It really is a comprehensive kit: assorted Priority Mail flat-rate boxes, address labels, customs forms, the little plastic sleeves for said customs forms, and even a little roll of Priority Mail tape to tie everything together. Everything arrived on my doorstep, neatly wrapped and at no cost to me. Of course, I will still need to pay postage to actually mail the packages, which is no doubt a big part of why the USPS is so happy to give us the kits gratis.

If you are a family member or friend of someone in the military, call up 1-800-610-8734 and ask for the Military Care Kit. All you have to do afterward is dream up wonderful things with which to fill those boxes before you mail them off to make your servicemember’s day.

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* Sampson: I finally bestowed upon my husband a bloggish alias, so I need not awkwardly refer to him as “my husband” every time I mention the guy.