Summertime Blues

We approach mid-month August, mere weeks away from the Big Change for US Forces - Iraq. I get a new boss. My new boss gets a new boss. All of us get a new mission. New Dawn.

Who knows, maybe it gets me some extra bling -- another ribbon in addition to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Or not, no telling at this stage of the game.

Anyway, here's yet another picture of me trying to have fun without alcohol. We're getting it down to a science -- fire up the grill at 1800, ice down the alcohol-free Becks or St. Pauli Girl or Lowenbrau, bring fruit/fries/onion rings/salads from the dining facility and start burning meat. The best part is spending four hours purely BSing instead of grinding it out at the cubicle farm.

This would be a great place for Scott Adams (Dilbert) to come for new material. I thought my team had an off-week in terms of needing to provide an update to the commanding general, since we normally work from a schedule and begin assembling analysis almost two weeks out. On Saturday I'm told to brief Thursday and, oh, by the way, part of it needs to be something new and different and painful to figure out.

So we commence to apply our considerable Excel and Powerpoint skills to create multiple charts with circles and arrows and paragraphs down below explaining what all the numbers and colors and acronyms are supposed to be descriptive of. And we scour countless media stories to see who wrote what and when and what did they say and why what they said differs fom outlet to outlet because every media outlet has a unique bias. And we, in time, make some sense of this and complete the brief with a few hours to spare.

Thirty minutes prior to the brief, my boss calls me to let me know that maybe I should explain my slides carefully, since the portions of the brief in front of me turned out to be a little thin in terms of content. Meaning I had 1/2 the slides in the whole thing. So I did, and all went well and I left there thinking we would catch a break for the next week, since I was not scheduled for anything then either.

No sooner did I sit down back at my desk than I get the word: CG liked it, need even more for next week -- something that captures all of the change in Iraq over the last couple of years. Maybe twice as long a brief as this week! So, if you read this T. Ryan, the work adage remains: the more you do, the more you do.

New Dawn. I'm ready for it. Hope it Dawns cool. I think I mentioned once or twice that it is hot over here.