November 10 (Day 31)

Wow! Finally made it a month. Well, what can I say, the last couple of days have been great, but not for the reasons you might think. My tennis shoes came in on the 8th, so now I can start working out and getting back into shape. It actually felt good just not having to wear my uniform what seemed like 24 hrs. a day. I went to the gym last night, ran for about 25 minutes on the treadmill at about a 8-minute/mile pace. Want to get back to 7 minutes, but need to work into it. It has been several months since I have done any real exercising. All my pre-deployment activities took all my time, plus once we got into a certain window of time before heading overseas, we were not allowed to participate in formal PT with our unit. The powers that be want to ensure noone gets hurt, causing fewer people to be able to deploy, thereby hurting the mission. I also got my new boots yesterday. As I mentioned, they are the Nike Special Field Boot. I got them back to my room and took them out of the box. I was amazed at how light they were, probably as light as my running shoes! That alone would probably sell me, but they are real comfortable (they are based on a running shoe platform) as well, so I am hooked. Just need to break them in a bit. The bad news recently, and it is bad, is the weather took a nasty turn the last two days. It went from the 80s on Sunday to at least the 40s on Tuesday. Once you add the rainstorm we received, it made a potent cocktail. It was so miserable! :'(  Supposedly, it is going to warm back up to the 70s this weekend. Hope it is true. Snow fell north of here at FOB Stone, one of my subordinate APOs. Of course, they are in the lower mountains, so no surprise there. Something of interest - I ran into another Adventist yesterday morning while working at the USO. A SPC (Lee) noticed the back cover of the quarterly on my table, and thought it looked familiar. He is from Korea, and we talked for a few minutes. He let me know that he coordinated to have the chapel made available to him on Saturdays so he can study/worship. Evidently, I am the only other Adventist he has come across, so he has the chapel to himself.  Just received new taskings from my "bosses" at KAF. We already send reports with mail volume and a plethora of other postal information. However, now I have to take the same information they already receive (in a ridiculously complicated excel spreadsheet), and put it in a different format. Basically, I am doing their job for them, that is to say, distilling the information they already receive into a simpler form. I wonder why they just don't make the excel sheet simpler, in other words KISS. Bureaucracy strikes again! Now I will become simply another Power Point simpleton. Now my life is complete. And on that note, until next time...