Countdown is on

Well, it looks like I’m down to under 60 days in The 100-Acre Sandbox. Due to a personnel change, there’s going to be a gap when I leave and, since I could stay another month with only a marginal impact on my between-tour plans, I made the offer to remain here just a few more weeks but it didn’t work out.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that, although I tell myself I’m ambivalent. The truth is, there will be a lot of guilt involved because it will be a problem that I could have helped solve but it’s not my decision to allow me to do it. As a result, whatever I convey to my eventual replacement will be a game of telephone: I’ll leave instruction and teach as best I can someone who has absolutely no idea what my department is about, and that person will then have to convey it to someone else. It’s really not setting them up for success, which makes me sad. I worked really hard here but by the time the next person arrives it will be in tatters.

But this means I should return to Uh-mer-‘ka around the end of October, although I won’t head home for a couple months. A lucky stroke scheduling lets me leave on a direct flight to DC for training – no stopping in Amman for 14 hours and being crammed on a Royal Air Jordanian flight filled with families loaded to the hilt with luggage to Chicago or JFK and then Charlotte and Miami before getting home. Just straight from the Sandbox to our nation’s capital. The classes I need to take just happen to be offered the next week, so I get to break up almost a year of training with a couple months off – getting to spend the worst winter months in Florida and not DC.

But before I peace out of here, I’ve got another pickleball tournament to plan. We’re going pink for breast cancer awareness. In the weeks leading up to it, the big boss requested a pickleball clinic. Somehow this also fell to me, even though I’m not exactly a superstar. This past week has been a lot of pickleball. We – one other guy and I – decided to, instead of holding a big formal clinic, have one of the four courts available for lessons on the regular pickleball times. So three times this past week I’ve done “clinics,” although, to be honest, that’s basically what happens every Monday, Tuesday and Friday anyway. There are always new people and it’s usually me who gives pointers. In about 50 minutes, they’re better than me.

Although it’s noticeably cooler than when I left for Iceland, it’s still in the triple digits. Essentially, it’s gone from being 117 to 107, and there’s little shade on our pickleball courts. It’s quite toasty. Today, not a clinic day, I and the other guy decided to just got out and play, so it was two of us for 45 minutes and then another person heard the POP POP and came out for another half hour, then, as I was trying to leave, someone else came by and we played one game of four before I finally bailed. I sweat buckets and had to shower before church!

Looking at the sports and social calendar, I have spin class, pickleball and water aerobics plus two or three 5k run/walks before I leave. This will give me at least three more T-shirts from Sandbox events, and I have decided to make a quilt (meaning pay someone to make me a quilt) from all my event T-shirts. This morning, as I was cooling off between my post-pickleball shower and church, I hacked apart a total of nine T-shirts I had set to take back for a quilt. I have plenty more– I think I counted 12, and I am pretty sure I brought some home already – but figured why not lighten my load? This also means I’m committing to the quilt.

Now I am trying to buckle down and get everything done in this under-60-day period. My R&Rs are over and the next thing to look forward to is a really crappy flight, but at least it’s a nonstop really crappy flight. 

I will miss R&Rs from here. The normal time we take is something like a solid three weeks off, and that is not my usual travel method. It’s nice to be forced to do so. This last one was centered around Iceland and that was wonderful, but since my flight stopped in Vienna, I took a couple days there and went to Bratislava, then spent one day in Vienna before returning. Unfortunately for the Vienna part, I had a nasty cold by that time, but I took a walk and found a cool amusement park and took a bunch of pictures. Enjoy.