22 October 2006

What a Week

Sorry it's been so long since I posted. This has been quite a week, as you might have guessed from the last post. Not that it's been entirely bad. The expected ass-chewing never occurred. When I showed up to work on Monday afternoon, some people wondered why I had even come that early.

My new job, which I think was decided that day, is CDO, or Country Desk Officer. This is sort of odd. We already have four CDOs, and we aren't reorganizing the countries to fit five CDOs; instead, I'm going to bounce around the office and fill in here and there. Starting tomorrow, for example, I'm going to be the CDO for Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan--although we don't do anything in Somalia so it's really just Ethiopia and Sudan, and really, it's mostly Ethiopia. Sudan has discovered that the easiest way to prevent unwanted foreigners from getting in and seeing what the government is doing there to grind the gears of bureaucracy to near halt. We haven't got a fresh visa from Sudan in about three months.

This means I have somewhat normal work hours--0700-1700, roughly--and that I don't have to be at work if there isn't work to do. I also get to eat lunch sitting down at the chow hall rather than at my desk. It will, however, severely restrict my internet time. I'm not unhappy about that, but it will mean less downtime and thus less time spent surfing, reading, etc. So I'm going to spend more time reading and writing and less time surfing. But still enough to post for my faithful readers, and still enough to check college football scores (ahem, number 12 Clemson beat number 13 GT 31-7, while three schools ranked above us struggled against unranked opponents. If there's not movement on the top 25 rankings I'm going to be pissed).

Lately I've been thinking a bit about this thing I do, this whole military thing, which hopefully I won't be doing for too much longer, and especially about what we're doing here. It will probably result in a few posts in the next seven weeks (yes, that's all the time I have left out here--and I'll spend one of those weeks on safari in Kenya! Yaay!) about military issues that may bore some of you out of your skulls. Feel free to skip them. Then again, I may not go so far as to commit anything to paper (or ones and zeroes as the case may be). You never know.

Well, I must be getting on. There will be more posts soon, very soon! Maybe tomorrow!

1 comment:

Lucky Bob said...

Good thing you got that thing in the mail if you have to read more. Make sure you are in a location you can laugh out loud to read the Campbell book. And did you look at those rushing stats for the game. My God. Eveything else looks fairly even, but rushing was way over the top. It was a great thing to watch. I'm waiting on the rankings too.