Argh!

Yanno...I wanna go to OCS. This isn't a surprise to anyone, right? Yeah.

However, that means that it's going to be *no* earlier than Sept. 08 before I can get pregnant.

'Scuse me while I go whimper.

Life's been pretty boring lately...

And I need to get my butt to bed. I am getting up at 0730 to get ready for church and I am going tomorrow. I won't be able to take Communion, because it's been far too long since I had Confession, but at least I will be there.

Oh, how I miss going to church with John. I miss it so badly that it's an ache.

*sigh*

This, too, shall pass.

ARGH!

Still no word on the grade for the midterm!

Supposedly, the grades are up on WebCT but I'm checking it rather obsessively, and no dice.

I'm so going to scream.

Hmmm. So, I've been bouncing back and forth between this and LJ and I'm not sure if I should keep both up. I'm still not making as many personal posts on LJ, since I just don't feel comfortable, but there's no locking this blog.

Gah. Maybe I should switch to pen and paper?

Except that I've never been able to keep that kind up for more than a few weeks at most. I love the feedback, honestly. I'm enough of an attention whore to admit that, and it helps keep me writing, which is a good thing.

Now, off to burn a CD from one of my shoots.

This is not a good feeling...

I think I just failed my economics midterm. We'll see, if I did, whether or not the instuctor thinks it's possible to pull a "D" out of the class anyway. If not, I'll have to drop it.

*facepalm*

Excuse me while I go beat my head into the wall.

Remind me...(PROFANITY AND WHINING)

To never pick up books on OIF, okay? I spent some time at the bookstore today, and ended up thumbing through a few books on the war, and...

That numbing uselessness that I thought had gone away came back. I mean, I looked at pictures from Baghdad, including that fucking blue mosque, and streets that looked so familiar. I remembered sitting on rooftops smoking and joking with the guys I was out on patrol with, and waving at the kids that ran alongside the humvees.

I just feel so useless here. Yeah, so I might be helping a girl on my art class get a job at SG, but so? She'd have found another job without me.

It's Friday night, and since I have drill in the morning, I'm sitting here studying economics, while praying to God I don't fail my test. This semester has been such a struggle for me and I don't know what to do about it. I'm not sure how I'm doing in my beginning drawing class. I mean, there's a reason I'm a fucking PHOTOGRAPHY major, for the love of Bob. It's because...wait for it...I can't FUCKING DRAW! Do we see what the problem is here? I'm taking a drawing class, where I expected to learn something about drawing, and...I'm just confused. What about teaching stuff like perspective? What about teaching stuff like...oh...I dunno, the basics? Gah. I'm sure that she's teaching us that stuff in her own way, but it's still very frustrating.

Crap. I need to bring my homework with me to drill, too, since I won't have much time to study during the day. I've got an appointment with the wedding photographer to make sure that everything's going the way we want it to, and I should get a delivery date on the album tomorrow.

I need to pick up some more PT shorts and t-shirts at the Camp Mabry PX tomorrow, so I hope they have them. If not, I'll have to stop by Ft. Sam's clothing sales on Monday. Next weekend, I'll be in Bismark, N.D. to attend a public affairs conference. Whee.

I still don't understand economics. I really don't, but I'm off to read one more chapter (again) before I go to bed. I'm going to be taking a practice test Sunday, just to see how screwed I am. Wish me luck.

Songs that make me cry...

There are a lot of them it seems, especially lately.

John posted the lyrics to Johnny Cash's song "Rose of My Heart," and although I'd never heard it, I loved it. So, I dug it up, and listened to it. The recording I have is probably later in life, when age had started to wear Cash's voice a bit, although I doubt it was too long before June Carter Cash passed on.

I was okay for a bit, and then...I just started crying.

I am so in love with this man, and it really does hurt to be apart, but I'll wait for him as long as it takes.

I'll be here when he comes home.

I hate this with a passion...

One of the side effects of my meds is the fact that I'm not so scattered. That's a good thing, but my brain is now in high gear. That means it never shuts up. Never. I'm constantly in a running conversation with my brain, and that includes having very busy dreams, in which I am terribly frustrated by the amount of things I need to get done and never seem to.

Worse, there are nights when I can't get my mind to be quiet long enough to sleep. I'll lay there with my eyes closed, knowing that I'm trying to sleep, but not being able to. I'll spend hours in these weird states, waking up just as tired as I was when I went to sleep.

Last night, though...

Last night I just couldn't trick my mind into letting me sleep. Sometimes, if I lay very still, and pretend I'm asleep, I'll manage to actually get to sleep. If I tell myself very firmly that I need to sleep, sometimes that works.

Last night?? Nada. Zip. Nothing. Ain't happenin' here.

Ryan called at about 0315 to apologize for his sister calling my cell phone instead of 911 (to report a fight on the side of the highway), and we ended up chatting until he fell asleep on the phone about an hour later. It's a good thing, because he seems to be unable to get much sleep either.

I finally managed to drift off at around 0445.

So, my alarm goes off at 0745. I started to cry.

I suck and I hate this. I am so going to start taking some benadryl to sleep. Or melatonin, or a brick to the head.

Shaking...

I'm finally back up to the right dosage on my meds. I'd forgotten how much I dislike the side effects. I've started having the really vivid dreams, and right now, I feel like I'm going to fall over. They'll pass, but I'm tired and right now...

*sigh* I don't know why I bother even mentioning how much I miss John any more. It's not like it's any surprise, and it doesn't get better.

I would love to have my husband here, so I can fall over in tears, and realize that he'll still love me, even if my hands shake and I'm dizzy.

'Scuse me while I whine.

I *will* get to church in Austin this weekend. I will.

Tired and cranky...

And not much of a friend these days. Just too wrapped up in my own stuff to manage to care about others, it seems. I hate that. I hate it hate it hate it.

For that, please forgive me. (Ponsdorf, I'm talkin' to you!)

Right now, this tunnel is still stretching out in front of me forever, and the light that was there has receded until it's a tiny pinprick on the horizon. Right now, I'm doing good to be keeping my head above water and still sucking air.

My economics class is KILLING me. I don't understand it. The art stuff I'm good with. The econ KILLS me. Dead. Dead dead dead dead. Dead. Did I mention it's KILLING me?

I'm looking forward to working on my next design project. It's on tonal range, and it was supposed to be a drawing project, but because it's not a drawing class, we get to use any medium now. Can we say "digital camera" and "Photoshop?" I knew we could.

I'm so lonely. So lonely. I know that I'm not alone, but I want to have someone just reach out and touch me, that someone being John. I want so badly to be able to reach out and touch him, to crack open an eyelid at some Godforsaken hour of the morning (say...0700) and see him standing there with a grin and a cup of coffee, knowing that as long as he's got that magic bean juice he's safe from harm.

I'm so tired of this all. I know, I know. We knew this when we signed on. I get that Doesn't mean I don't get to be pissed off about it. And now, my unit's talking about a two week AT in Germany.

In FREAKIN' MARCH! Hello???? God, can we PLEASE get a break. Please? The money would be nice, but still...

It's not funny anymore. My sense of humor packed up and moved south for the duration. It didn't leave a forwarding address, either.

Ouch.

Yanno, there's a reason there are six zillion books out there on buying a house, or land or whatever.

It's because it's incredibly confusing and will make your head blow up if you're not careful.

John and I are looking to buy land. Not a ranch, really, more of a ranchito or a rancho not so grande. You know, between five and 10 acres, with some trees and neighbors who aren't right on top of us. Folx who we can see if we want to walk up the drive, turn right or left on the road and walk a bit, but not when we look out the window. A place where we can leave the blinds open all the time, because there's no one else around and we don't have to live as a prisoner to my slight paranoia. A place that doesn't look like all that and a box of Twinkies from the road, maybe, but one that is a bit nicer when you go down the road and around that bend and see the house itself.

Ideally, this is our retirement place, the place that we'll head to when the Army is through abusing us both and we decide that it's time to be bums together. It's the place we'd like to be able to throw the kids out the door with the admonishment "Don't get lost, don't screw with the scorpions and don't drown each other!" and then have them come straggling back in six hours later, hot and sweaty, but having conquered all the Indians in the local area, chased horny toads down little rocky crevices, and been kids in the country.

Ideally, we'd like to be able to live there sooner rather than later. You know, put a nice little modular home on a concrete slab and live there until we're ready to put the dream house on the dream build site.

That's the ideal.

The reality is going to end up a bit differently, I think. A lot of the places we're looking have some pretty good restrictions WRT to modulars/manufactured/mobile homes, and I understand why. I really do. That doesn't mean that I'm not smacking my head against the wall in frustration.

Most of these places are outside of city water and sewer and so, we'd need to do a well, septic system and a driveway along with running electicity to the build site. God alone only knows about internet access and cell phone coverage and all that, but I'm sure that as fast as this part of Texas is growing, it won't be long before they're all available even in the boonies, which is a good thing.

That being said...

I just don't think we can swing a bit of land in a nice place, along with a small custom home. Just don't think we can do it.

We can do a land payment, with no problems at all. That's not a big deal. Once you add in septic, well and the other site improvements...it gets problematical.

Toss in the fact that John wants to do a stint on the drill trail and it gets even more interesting, as we have to plan on finding someone to lease the house. There are some other things, but that would be the biggest problem, and my folx did have some issues when they owned a rental house.

So, now I get to try and communicate all this to John. God. It's not that he's unreasonable or anything, or that I'm scared, it's just hard when there's a second long lag between when I say something and he hears it, or just trying to do all of this while he's so far away.

It's exciting and scary and wonderful, all at the same time.

Wheeeeee!

Hey John!

I love you!