Sweet Sixteen

Liz turned 16 years old today. When she was small, we use to joke about her turning 16 like it would never happen. Well, it certainly has. We ended up with nearly 30 people being here for her party, I was rather impressed they all showed up.

The birthday was a "Alice in Wonderland" themed. Her birthday cake ended up being something from the Mad Hatter's party, which is what she wanted. It took a lot of work to get it to look like this. Pictures follow.

Spring Concert Time!

We went to Varion's Spring Orchestra concert and I have the following videos posted at Youtube.com:

Mission Impossible

O mio babbino caro

The Pink Panther

Ironman

First off, I would like to say I saw Ironman and loved it. It's not as edgy as the new Batman stuff and it was a bit slow in places, but everything seemed to add to the story line and the fight sequences were enjoyable. I would go see it again in the theater. And, yes, Robert Downey, Jr. (in spite of being a recovering addict and womanizer) is hot.

But enough of that. I thought I'd share this Batman vs.Ironman video I found on youtube that I thought was funny.



Go see Ironman.

The Weather

I live in Texas. We see all kinds of weather. Wind, rain, tornadoes, hurricanes, you name it. However, I must say that I was checking the weather for Al Asad, Iraq and saw a forecast I'd never seen before: Widespread Dust and Dust Storms.

Pictures of such look like this:



Bob said it was a God-forsaken place. Sure wish the Iraqis knew that and would just abandon it.

Cats

I like cats. There is a little widget on Google homepage that displays funny cat pictures. I found one today that I thought was funny:

Gone Again...

It has been an incredibly hard two days.

The kids and I drove to the airport yesterday at 6am to put Bob on an airplane back to Iraq. Even with the thought that we're more than half way through his deployment and we only have 4-5 months left, it was harder seeing him leave this time than it was in October.

The kids felt it too. They cried openly at the airport and I also did not feel any need to hide my tears before all those strangers.

At work I feel like a stranger. I know how to do the job, but at this point I'm not sure what the job is turning into or where the company is really heading. We keep having these meetings and afterward I'm left wondering why we were there for an hour to discuss things that could have been handled in a one minute conversation between a couple of people in the hallway. Nothing was really made clear to me. My position is still...superfluous.

I'm exhausted and cannot sleep and I hate to go back to the doctor. All he does is give me more pills and tell me to find a solution to the problems. Unfortunately, the solution to my problems just left on a plane to Iraq.

Weekend Update...

Bob is home.

He got home at 1pm last Sunday. He's lost about 20 lbs. He's gained a great deal of insight and been emotionally challenged with what he holds dear. He loves his family more than anything and everything else is just a thing.

It's been good having him home and just talk. We've had to schedule our talk time, because his time is at a premium -- it's like he's a celebrity and everyone wants a piece of him. It got a little frustrating at first, but that has calmed down a bit since the first of the week. Yet I've seen more of Bob's family this week than I did in the entire 5 months prior to that.

We have 10 more days together before he returns to finish his tour. It will be a sad day. But until then, we just enjoy our time together as a whole family again. :D