A Nicholas Update

I’ve been trying to get the boy on here and update you himself but considering his crazy long hours he really has not had the chance to do it. I usually only talk to him 15 or 20 minutes a day then he needs to get to bed and rest up for another long day of working in the sun. He normally heads to work around 6ish (from what I’ve gathered) but it can be as early as 4am and most nights he doesn’t make it back to his room until almost 10pm. Needless to say he’s exhausted. They’ve had a number of aircraft issues and it’s taking long hours to get everything under control. He told me today that they have 2 aircraft that are just being problem children and no matter what they do they keep finding new issues! He hopes they will finally be finished by the end of the week and he and Mike (his other MTP) will be able to take a little bit of a break. He has not had a moment off since he left on March 16th. He’s worn out. On the positive side though he says that this deployment so far still sucks much less than the other 2 so woot for that!!! The food is really good and he’s making an effort to get to the chow halls for meals and he gets a hot shower every night. Vast improvement right there over his last trip over!!!

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about care packages and right now he doesn’t need anything. I’ve been asking him and he said it’s nice not living in a crap hole because if he needs it he can run to the PX and grab it right then. If he tells me anything he needs I will put it out there. With his days being so long he just doesn’t have time to do anything else right now. I’m sure he would love to take the time to read or watch a movie but it’s just not happening at the moment.

So far the days are flying by for both of us. I can’t believe it’s already a day shy of him being gone a month. I know time will go even quicker when I’m in GA working with mama. I realize that we’ve both become quite jaded with the whole deployment thing. I miss him and he misses me but for the most part it’s business as usual for both of us. This is our “normal”. I’ve also realized that I rely heavily on the timeline of deployments and TDY’s to judge when events happened in our lives.  I catch myself saying “after Iraq”, “before the first Afghanistan deployment”, before this deployment”, and “while he was at Rucker” often. I can’t wait for the day that we don’t have to plan our lives around deployments. Ahhh a new normal. It will be fabulous.

And he’s going to hate me for this…… I think he needs more sunscreen. lol (and yes, that’s his room)

And the boy doing what he does best.