Day +70 "Happiness is a Warm Gun, Mama"

70 days folks!!!  30 more and I am outta here!

As I mentioned in my last post (sorry for the length of time between posts) it’s been a very “messy” week. I finally got off the Neupogen which was causing my lower back pain, and as expected there was some residual effects… weakness, tiredness. But I finally got back up to two laps (yesterday and today). We’ll shoot for three tomorrow.

Tony S., Ruth Ann’s cousin, is staying with me for a week and a half while Ruth Ann attends her last ESL course back in Orlando. Becky needed a break, too, and she’s back in the research department at Disney. We got some really good news this week, Becky will be going to Hawaii on business for the pre-opening of the new Disney resort on Oahu. She’s excited and as expected she’s starting the work now… almost two months before she goes. I wish I could go, too, as do Ruth Ann and Sean.

One of my neighbors left for Afghanistan two weeks ago. He’s a helicopter pilot doing casualty extraction… hope they’re not out of “hot” LZ’s. I was thinking about Viet Nam, and when you combine it with Hawaii, all I can think of is the trip from Travis AFB in Oakland, CA. It was a long trip; we stopped in Hawaii, Guam, Wake and Manila before we landed in Bien Hoa airbase in Saigon. I was with Ernie, who never passed up a chance to get a little lit. When we landed in Honolulu, we had an hour and a half and they let us off the plane… straight to the lounge and started sucking down the  scotches as fast as we could, for fear there wasn’t any in Viet Nam.

Needless to say, there was a tense moment when we discovered that finding the boarding gate was a lot harder than we thought… especially when we were holding each other up. Quite a sight… two drunken 2^nd Lieutenants, desperately in search of the gate.  We found it, boarded the plane and didn’t see another drink until we got to Viet Nam. We met Bobby Schwartz( a friend from Fort Gorden), and he directed us to the nearest officer’s club (a ramshackle building, as I recall), but the beer was cold. And all of us were there for the duration. As I said, counting down from 100 is a lot easier than 365.

Say a prayer for Rod, that he comes safely home to his family.