Bike!!!

My Bike has finally arrived with all its pieces.  I have had a great time watching my old Tour De France DVD's and riding along on my trainer.  Thanks Liz.  She was able to get me it through the USPS this time for substantially less money than FEDEX cost us to Kirkuk last time.  This time I also have a good 9 months to ride it.  Another little piece of info coming in yesterday was that the unit has tentative dates for our two week leave.  It looks like mine will likely be the first two weeks of January 2009.  I'm pretty excited about it even though it is almost 7 months away.  Liz tells me that she will hold off on Jacob's first birthday for a few days and then we should all be together for it, which will be fun.  I requested one of the last slots for leave as it is so hard to go back to Iraq after spending some time with family.  This way, I'll only have two months or so after I get back here until I get to go home for real.  I am planning some travel soon to our unit HQ in Balad and the helicopter situation here is always frustrating.  I woke up this morning thinking that I would be leaving but once I saw the sky I knew I wasn't going anywhere.  I'm told that the helicopter pilots need three miles of visibility to fly and I always wonder how they are able to fly at night but not in the dust.  Anyway, not much I can do about it.  I'm hearing some rumblings that I may need to move my team to Balad to be closer to the unit commander so I can keep up on the other prevention teams as I am in charge of all of them.  I originally thought that I could just fly around wherever I am needed but boy with these dust storms, it's getting harder and harder to plan travel.