Afghanistan: Number 25 (My last post from Afghanistan!)

Our transfer of authority ceremony

Alright everyone.  This is it.  I am going home.  Many of you have asked if I know when.  The answer to that is yes, but I cannot share it.  I can share after we have moved, but will not be able to tell you our next movement dates or times of anything like that.  Once I get back into the U.S. will be a different story, but for now, just know that within the next week or so, I will be home!  So here it is, my last post and the end of this part of my journey.

Playing volleyball in our free time...

Mental: I am having some frustrations in this department honestly.  I have not completed my second black belt project because I am still waiting to receive my data.  This is through no fault of my own and I can honestly say that I have no grand appreciation for the speed at which contractors move.  However, I did have an interview last Friday with a Brigadier General and have been officially endorsed to go to school and certify as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt.  Unfortunately, we are still awaiting the exam results to go with it, so once we get the score key (a huge debacle because of the furlough), my qualifying exam will be scored and I will submit my packet.  Then there are about 5,000 more hurdles to go, but I plan on just taking them as they come.  Lord willing, I have a tremendous amount of potential in this area.

Physical: As you already now, I received the highest score possible on my Army Physical Fitness Exam just a couple of weeks ago (a 300).  My other goal of the six pack... well... I guess I will call it success.  I don't need to flex for it to be visible, but I am not seeing a lot of definition.  It's probably from all the ice cream I eat.  Regardless, I am at the lowest weight I have been in the last four years or so and am overall happy with the way I look and feel (even though I was also happy before).  I still intend to try to keep up the momentum when I get back and keep my run time down.

Can you tell I am not very good?

Financial: Well, my stocks have been up and down this week.  Both of my stocks have been near or surpassed their 52 week highs this week and then have dropped back down into a respectable range.  I am still planning on holding onto them.  I'm not the most financially savvy person I know, but both stocks are looking pretty strong and are significantly higher than what I bought them at.  Hopefully I don't forget about the too much once I am back stateside.

Seriously though, I had no idea  what I was doing.

Emotional:  This is a weird one in preparation for coming home.  People don't seem to understand that going home for a Soldier is in some ways, more difficult than leaving.  We train and prepare to leave but don't do much for coming back.  I haven't been alone or had a day off since I got here.  Going home, living with my husband, having to cook for myself and grocery shop and pick out clothes and drive myself around are all going to be transitions for me to get back into the hang of things.  I might never be alone here, but I haven't had to share my life with anybody either.  There is no one I had to talk to and take care of at the end of the day.  This is not to say at all that I am not completely excited to come home, because I really am, but it is a forewarning that this is a transition for me.  Getting back into a schedule will take time and patience.  On a somewhat similar note, I have been praying recently that God would help me fall more in love with my husband than I have ever been before.  This has been my constant pray over the last week and I can already feel it being answered.  I cannot wait to get back to my love, my groom, my companion, my husband.  To see him, to touch him, to be touched by him, to speak with him freely, to sleep next to him, to be with him... I cannot wait.

Spiritual: How good are you at being still? As in Psalm 46:10 "'Be still and know that I am God'..."  I am not very good at being still.  I have had issues being still my whole life.  Call it ADHD, call it hyperactive, call it over-thinking, over-analytical... Whatever name you want to give it. I don't think I have ever truly been still.  And honestly, I am not sure I know any women (or even men) who have told me they figured this one out.  We seem hard-wired for multi-tasking and calming chaos in our homes.  Our jobs and our lives seem to never demand stillness.  I used to even confuse stillness with laziness, but have since realized that it is actually the opposite.  But I digress.  Let me first say that my to do list for getting home is a mile long.  I am trying to get into school for my Lean Six Sigma Master Black belt, I am running against the clock to get a new job, the cabinets in our kitchen need redone, I want to build a green house and start a garden (some day down the road I want to have chickens and some day further after that, I want to try bee keeping), I want to do some minor landscaping in the back yard, plant some trees and bushes, buy a gun, get my concealed carry license, build new shelves in our closet, continue building a multi-media server for our house, create a planter outside my bay window, create cushions to sit in the bay window, potentially add a shower to our downstairs bathroom, build a fire pit, go to Illinois, go on vacation to Mexico, learn French and get LASIK.  Now, these are things I am thinking about for my next year home, but you can see that I have a lot of plans in front of me.  And I was nearly giddy trying to pick which one I wanted to tackle first (and when I say one, I mean a minimum of 3 because that's how I operate). I haven't had a day off on this deployment and if I am not running around doing something, I am sleeping or talking about the next thing I am working on.

So you can probably see now where the Holy Spirit intervened as a blessing to my dear husband (who was probably overwhelmed by my planning).  Still is not my forte.  Still is not watching t.v. or going for a walk.  It is literally still.  It is stopping the mind from wandering and planning, stopping my mouth from moving and just living at peace.  Others might call it meditation or clearing the mind, but really it's stillness.  And we don't really get any of this as a culture.  Stillness is most clear to me in my understanding of God's command to take a Sabbath.  Rest. Be still.  Remember God's still got this.  I used to think that still was passive, mostly because that helped justify my lack of being still.  Then I realized how active a task it is.  Ask a five year old (or me for that matter) to sit still.  See how long that lasts.  It is a rather arduous chore.  Better yet, I can't seem to truly clear my mind for more than a minute at a time.  But I bet if I worked on stillness that time would get longer.  If you read Psalm 46, you see that our God is very active.  It is in our stillness that we can see that it not us, but He who is running it all.  It is in our stillness that we come to know God.  Knowing God is being able to see Him, His heart, and His movement in our lives.  If I am always moving, I confuse myself into thinking that everything is my doing.  It's my "thanks God, but clearly I've got this one," kind of moments.  My activity causes me to get distracted by MY thoughts and MY actions and MY works in MY time.  Stillness is a time to reflect on GOD's thoughts and GOD's actions and GOD's works in GOD's time.  I am my own biggest distraction from God.  I create a whole world of distractions that I call "productive" "necessary" "useful" "important" etc.  So instead, when I get home, I am going to focus my time on learning to be still first and incorporating that into my Sabbath's and my every day life.  One thing I do know, if I can't figure out how to be still as a wife, I am really going to struggle to figure it out once we have kids.  I am ready to be still and know that He is God.

Afghanistan: Number 24

Clearer view of mountains after rain

Alright, so I am a few days late.  This was kind of intentional, as I didn't want to post on my birthday, which was Sunday.  I turned 25 and as you might imagine, it was really just another day in Bagram.  It was a normal Sunday, in that I got up, video chatted with Kevin, had the morning off, went to lunch, then work then church after dinner.  Unfortunately, we had a rocket attack that night that was probably the first one that actually scared me, but at least it happened after midnight and not technically on my birthday.  Aside from that, it rained on my birthday, which is the first time I have seen rain since June (it technically rained for a few minutes last week, but I didn't know it was happening, so I didn't see it). But all in all, it was a regular day in Afghanistan.  So here goes another post for Afghanistan, knowing I should be home in just a few weeks.

Physical:  No new updates on this one, and there probably won't be much the rest of my time here.  Now that I have maxed my APFT, my fitness goals are pretty much complete.  I am probably in better shape than I have been in a long time, but I have never really been out of shape so that isn't saying much.  The goal now is to maintain when I get back, and that will be very difficult when I am back to the land of good food.

Financial: So there isn't a ton new to report here.  I did learn something new the other day though.  Basically I learned that if I hold onto my stocks for under a year, I am taxed on my gains in my current bracket (25%) but if I hold onto them more than a year, they will be taxed at 15%.  So I think I am going to try to hold onto both my stocks for the next year if I can.  And since I am getting so close to going home, I think I will even share what those stocks are.  One of them is Home Inns & Hotel Management Inc (HMIN) and Yandex (YNDX) which is basically the Russian version of Google.  Both are doing well for me and looking pretty strong.

Mental: So Lean Six Sigma is going well.  I am working on a second black belt project right now that basically covers proper planning within the Army.  Overall, I am showing that proper use of Army planning and design models paired with Lean Six Sigma can save the Army a lot of money compared to just picking projects not aligned with already set planning efforts.  My second project is going to help me get certified in Lean Six Sigma on the civilian side, since I already have my certification all settled on the military side.  This is also going to help me pursue my Master black belt.  Really, in the next week or so, I need to brief a General Officer from our division my path and plan for certification.  If he approves it, then I will be going to school for it next year, most likely.  If not, then it is dead in the water and I will just maintain my black belt.

Emotional:  So this one has been pretty good.  Life has been pretty easy going recently and I am very thankful for that.  I am also very happy that my replacement is here and we are officially starting our change over training.  She is catching on quickly and I think that change over process should be pretty seamless.  Once the new unit officially takes over in a couple of weeks, we will start heading home.  I think during that time of travel, I will be doing some automatic blog posts.  I am planning on doing a "stuff I learned on this deployment" post.  I am working on it now and am just debating whether I should break it up into a miniseries, or keep it all together.  Once I have everything written out, I will probably decide which to go with.  Honesty, I have learned a lot while I have been here.  Things haven't been easy, but I know that I have learned a lot from the experience.

Spiritual:  So I have been continuing in prayer and reading.  In my prayer life, I have been praying very consistently for certain individuals throughout the deployment. I am not seeing any sort of answer to that prayer, but I am glad to have stuck by a spiritual discipline for over 200 days.  In my reading, Kevin and I caught up to where we intended to be.  We started reading through the bible chronologically in March and it is broken up over a year period.  So back in July, we decided to read two passages a day until we got caught up to the right day.  Oddly enough, it just so happened to work out that we were caught up on my birthday.  We enjoyed reading so much, we decided to continue doing two-a-days.  Which should have us done before the end of November.