it's what time?

Life is winding down!

All of my time-consuming, spend 12 hrs at work on my off days are over! Thank goodness! :) Everything turned out great in the end, as always, and i managed to stress just enough, as always. I ended up getting a lot of one-on-one face time with my commanders and huge kudos from all the management of the hospital. Yay! I am learning more and more in the military and in life, that it is not what you know, It's WHO you know. Cheers to making contacts!

In other new my body is supremely confused at the moment. I am back to night shift and hating it, and have had to switch back to days this week for combat training (more on that later). I would wake up at 2 am, rarin to go and not be able to sleep, then try to go to bed early so i could get up for 5 am and lay there completely unable to get any shut-eye. I am learning to take some fabulous naps however!

This week i had to do combat training for my upcoming deployment, which is somewhat laughable considering i'm not ACTUALLY going anywhere! However, there is a lot of speculation about possible forward deployment to the sandbox. We'll see. Regardless, i had a blast with the training. I spent two days with the security forces, learning how to shoot/take apart and move with an M9 and an M4. In normal ABU/BDU's this is pretty do-able but our second day was field training in a Kevlar helmet, mask,Flak vest and gloves with an m4. I have no idea how our troops shoot accurately and move in all that gear (plus 50+ pounds of other gear)! It was raining and we had to crawl through the grass in fighting formations, and tromp through the mud and trees in the woods, attacking the enemy (paint-ballish bullets). It's crazy how quick you have to move to re-load a new magazine and charge your weapon while ducking fire behind a tree. I loved it, but i would shit my pants if i had to do it for real. The adrenaline just from the exercise is enough for me! Charlie flight, my team that i was the leader of, won every time, not one of us was killed. New calling for me?...lol

For those of you that don't check facebook...Rich and I are back together! We never stopped talking, and when Rich got back from his leave in Michigan he came to visit. We had an amazing time exploring the Luray Caverns in VA ( a must see!) and acting like kids in an English style garden maze. We also went out to dinner with a bunch of my friends here and just enjoyed being together. For some reason we can't get rid of each other! lol..in all honesty, there really isn't anyone else i want to be with, and we realized how great we really are together. :)

Did i mention i hate night shift? It is so incredibly boring here that i couldn't take it anymore and applied for my masters. I was originally going to do a dual masters degree in healthcare administration/mba, but the more i though about it the more it bored the heck out of me. my ultimate dream is to go on humanitarian missions and i'd love to work for the cdc or nih. Sooo...drumroll, i am getting my masters in public health with a concentration in emergency and disaster management. With this i could also potentially switch to the public health service ( i would keep my rank but my deployments would only be 2 weeks at a time,and not in combat zones...something to keep in mind for later in life). I am doing a completely online degree so we'll see how it all pans out...

All in all, life is good, and always changing!