Washington DC - May 1993

I'll go ahead and apologize now for not writing sooner and get it out of the way. The past few months have been challenging, frustrating, interesting and boring. All of this and a paycheck too.  Gotta love the Navy!!  (NOT!)

Well I have finally finished school for the semester and thought I would try to get a letter out. This past winter has been the pits. I took leave over Christmas in Colorado and returned the week before New Year’s. Luckily, the whole week it snowed and I worked half days so getting back into the work "groove" wasn't too strenuous. Now I have to say that people in DC are wimps. When it snows, they panic big time. A couple of inches of snow and the gov't implements the "liberal leave" policy. Which means civilians can call in to take leave. Military of course have to come in. But with over half of my command civilian, there's not a lot I can do when they are not there. So I showed up on those snowy mornings, did some work, and then left around noon.  Pretty rough!

During some of the worst weather in DC, I got to go to London for work. I had to go over there to lead a planning conference for a realignment of their communication systems. The work portion of it was definitely interesting. CINCUSNAVEUR is located in London, and they were not happy with what I wanted to do. I got into several heated discussions with this Captain who knew just enough about communications to be dangerous. It was a pretty difficult task, but I did a fairly good job. I took a couple of days off after the conference and explored London. The weather was pretty nice for January and I had a blast. I got to see Cats, Les Miserables, and Grease starring Debbie Gibson (didn't you wonder what had happened to her??).  It was definitely cool.

I was actually beginning to like work. I was doing stuff that was challenging, working with fairly new technology, and I got to travel. Some of my future projects would have been Camp Smith in Hawaii, Jacksonville FL and Camp Lejuene in North Carolina. Notice how I slipped the past tense into that sentence. Yes, as soon as I begin to like a job, they decided to do a reorganization of our command. Well, the master planners of this re-org, didn't do a very good job and everyone is complaining. I am now a technical planner. Of what??? Who knows, it keeps changing. My supervisors keep telling me specifically what I don't do (the stuff I was working on before), and only generally what I am supposed to do now. Long range planning, budget projections for outyear funding, Life Cycle Management. Of course I don't know anything about that stuff.

I came here in July. For eight months they trained me on a several systems for a couple of projects, but now they are going to jerk me out of that after all of this training, and throw me into something I don't know anything about. Now I'm willing to be trained, but why waste all that training you've already spent on me??? Well part of the problem is that my old boss and my new boss have a severe personality clash, and I'm stuck in the middle and am miserable. How miserable was I?? I was so miserable I started the process to become a UN peacekeeper in the Western Sahara. A message came out asking for volunteers to go for six months to Western Sahara to be peacekeepers until their national elections. So since I was so miserable I looked into it. Talked to the people about it, etc. If I was going to do it, then I had to extend a year so I wouldn't screw up my school plans. I put in a letter of extension, but it is still stuck in the bureaucracy and now it looks like all the spots for the Western Sahara are filled.

In the meantime, my job sucks. My supervisors cannot get their act together, so I'm muddling through the best I can.  Hey, I still get that great paycheck (heavy sarcasm). Life overall is fair. I'm glad school is out. I just finished classes in "Weapons Proliferation & Military Conflict" and "Intelligence and National Security Policy." Both were really interesting, but a lot of work. I am taking two summer classes: "The History of Southern Africa" and "The Arab-Israeli Conflict". But they don't start until June, so I have a couple of weeks to play with.

Summer has come to DC and that  means tourists.   It is now excruciatingly painful  to drive  anywhere  near the Mall.  The parental units are coming for a visit early this summer, which should be pretty cool.  And  some friends may be dropping in throughout the summer.  The social life thing is difficult.  I work in your typical bureaucratic office where the average age is 50. There are no single male officers under 30, only three single female officers under thirty, and no single civilian females in my command, and everyone has their own life and live so far away that I really don't hang out with people from work that much.  With school and stuff, getting out and meeting new people is difficult. But I do have my friends from my apartment building so that's cool. Really don't have that much more news.  I'm thinking about going to Maine in September for a few days vacation, then maybe to Colorado in October for the Navy-Air Force Game.  I will try to be better about letters and stuff. If you're ever in DC . . . .