So my sister, Kim, sent me an email asking about my daily life here. she wrote "I have friends who ask a lot about how my big brother's doing and although I know you (obviously) miss your wife and Hunter, I don't really know much about what your day-to-day life is like."
It occured to me that answering her questions here might provide some insight for others wondering the same thing.
Q. What is your work schedule like? Are you putting in 16 hour days?
A. I usually work 6 days per week with Sundays (mostly) off and my schedule varies from 9 to 13 hours per day, usually around 10 or 11. When I was working on that computer project at the airport in January, it was 7 days/week and 16 hrs/day for a month, but that was unusually tough. While here at my home camp, I work in an office in a single-wide mobile-home trailer with A/C that works most of the time.
Q. Do they have a gym on base that you can work out in?
A. There is a gym about 300 meters away; the same distance as the dining facility and a little farther than Starbuck's. :-) I go there about three days a week or go running around post.
Q. How's the weather lately?
A. It's been nice and spring-like for the past 3 weeks, but the heat has begun to arrive. It'll be in the 90s by the end of the week and will keep getting hotter until the end of the month when i should start to peek over 100 degrees. By the end of april, the temperature should go over 95 and stay that way for 5 months day and night; with daytime temps well into the 120-140 range.
Q. How are you liking having your own room? Does it make it easier to sleep or can you still hear everyone else snoring?
A. To be clear, I have
less people in my new cube, I don't have one to myself. And it's really not like having a "room" with someone else in it, either. I live in a 40' by 100' concrete room with 45 other men. There are a total of 4 tiny windows on two sides and three doors. There are 25 or so bunk beds in the room and we have divided up the living areas with wall lockers and such to make little 4-man living areas we call "cubes." Some cubes are lucky and have less than 4 people in them. This is obviously done by rank, so my roommate is a Lieutenant Colonel (one rank above me) and there are only two of us in the cube. Sound carries all over the room, so I can still hear Dave snore from 20-something feet away and have acutally moved closer to another loud snorer, my warrant officer...
Thanks for the questions, Kim. Hopefully that helped paint a clearer picture for everyone.
Jim lent me a good book on fathering before he took off. It's called "
