Every time a military family moves, a lot gets left behind.

These are sometimes donated, sometimes gifted, often times pitched & then there’s jewels like these – the abandoned.

When my friend & her family moved back to the States in June, she left behind the lilies she had purchased & planted last year.

Stargazers & Casablanca lilies – the biggest, freakin’ lilies I’ve ever seen – and my mom was a florist. So that’s saying something.

But she left them behind & for almost a solid month I have had fragrant lilies scattered through-out the house.

Since they’ve still not rented out her old house, it allowed me to sneak into the backyard every couple of days to snip off more flowers. If the place is still empty when they begin to die back, I’ll go next door & dig them up to take home.

But then there’s the oddities that get left behind…

…like this high-performance, American muscle-car radial.

[please ignore the scattered camo-covered gear also strategically stowed in our front hall]

We’re actually babysitting it until a friend can figure out how to ship it home. It seems the packers & movers won’t ship a single spare tire.

Moving 6 times in 7 years, I’ve come to pick up a thing or two. And every freakin’ time we have to move again I think, “there’s got to be an easier way”.

[This is where a good spiral notebook comes in handy - small & portable.]

The first step to figuring out just what that easier way is, is to break it down in chunks – think through every step of the journey. So for example, here’s how our move back to the States is gonna work:

1. Getting ready to move
2. Getting Maggie on a cargo plane
3. Our flight back home with Kitten (the howler)
4. Arriving at DFW & picking up Maggie
5. Staying in a hotel in DFW with pets
6. Fixing up Eric’s Jimmy that’s sat for 3 years
7. The road trip to our next base (wherever that is)
8. Staying in a hotel with pets while we hunt housing
9. Moving into our new place without a lick of our stuff

Fudge, that’s a lot of steps for this move.

But once you’ve got the steps listed – written down one step per page in your spiral notebook – start imaging yourself in the middle of that step.

What has to be done before this happens? What has to wait until the last minute? What could be done in advance? What would make this portion of the journey easier on me, on Eric, on Maggie & Kitten? How am I going to feel by this point – exhausted? Frustrated? Ready to scream? What am I going to be responsible for?…and if the PCS Fairy granted me one wish, what would I ask for?

So rather than go through each & every step…let me just give you an example using the “hotel in DFW” segment of our trip.

At this point everything is still high-level – you don’t have to get into the absolute details of everything – just a good overview.

So #5 – staying in a hotel in DFW with pets.

• We’ll need to find a hotel that takes pets close to my mom’s
• We’ll probably need it a minimum of 3 days – more likely a whole week while we fix up the Jimmy
• The room will need at the very least a mini fridge & microwave – this way we can save money on food
• We’re going to be really tired, so let’s spring for a room with a king size bed
• The earlier we book, the better deal we’ll get – especially considering we’re moving in December
• Kitten will need a litter box (w/ litter & scoop), food & bowls – on arrival
• Maggie will need food & bowls – on arrival
• Kitten will do better if she has her hidie-hole to sleep in (it will remind her of home)
• Maggie will do better if she has her pillow & blanket (to remind her of home)
• I will do better if I have my feather pillow, a good book & my sound machine : )
• We’ll need wireless internet
• Need to decide if Maggie stays in the hotel with us the whole time or if we find a kennel to put her in.
• We could do our laundry at mom’s
• We’ll need to set aside time to spend with friends & family before we hit the road
• We’ll both need prepaid cell phones until we get settled in our new base.

And that’s just step number 5!

By this point it can look really overwhelming – and that’s ok – because for me, I’ve figured out how to keep from feeling too stressed out. I make a wish.

[ahem]

Oh Great & Powerful PCS Fairy! If I could have one wish during this time it would be…

…to have an over-flowing gourmet gift basket of fruit & cheese & chocolate & bread and all other kinds of amazing you-can-only-get-this-in-America foods waiting for us in our hotel room as we check in

…with a travel candle & maybe a potted orchid to take to our new home

…with a litter box & food waiting for Kitten & food for Maggie, too

…and a pre-arranged appointment for a massage at a nearby spa the following day.

In U-Haul’s name I pray, amen.

Ok…so it’s a little more than one wish. But the thing is, by thinking of it I can now figure out a way to make it happen – especially this far in advance.

So what needs to get added to my list?

• Order a gift basket from Central Market to be delivered to the hotel
• See if they’ll throw in an orchid
• I can bring a small travel candle…add that to the packing list
• Order a complete set-up for Maggie & Kitten from Petsmart & have it delivered to the hotel the day before we arrive
• Find a nearby spa that offers a reasonably priced 30 minute massage & book an appointment

The massage trick is something I picked up in the move from Virginia to Oklahoma – courtesy of my sister. Well, that and the gourmet chocolates.

[pick a road trip, any road trip]

She got me a gift certificate to a local spa & I decided to use it the day before I hit the road to Oklahoma – with then 3 cats in the car.

Having that opportunity to relax after so much stress (I had sold our house by owner) – still knowing there would be more to face once I got to Oklahoma, made the whole process easier. It also didn’t hurt to hit the Williamsburg Chocolaterie on the way out of town. They made the best swirled mint liqueur chocolate truffles.

And just those two little steps in the midst of all that Army life chaos made the trip that much brighter.

So here me now all you Army wives!

Only you & I know how much work & stress & pain & turmoil it is to move time and time again & I don’t even have kids to drag around in the process!

Find your PCS Fairy, make your wish & then find a way to make it come true. Find someway to take care of yourself, to reward yourself – DURING THE MIDDLE OF IT ALL – to help keep your sanity intact.

Trust me – you’ll thank me later & you’ll never skip this step from here on out.

With 130 days left in Korea we still don’t know where we going yet. It’s the question everyone asks. And I get it…but  believe me, I want to know more than you do. Because it would kinda be nice to start figuring out the best neighborhoods to live, what I’ll have access to again…{crossing fingers there’s a Panera}.

But it’s a total crap shoot.

The Army gives us the chance to submit our top 3 choices – but it’s completely their call on whether or not they even factor them into consideration.

Since Eric has a specialty MOS [military occupational specialty] it means that’s there’s only a handful of places we could get sent. In some respects knowing the contenders in advance is nice – it takes out some of the fear factor. But then again, it’d be great to be able to choose from more than just our normal handful.

So let’s run down our options:

1. Fort Eustis, VA
2. Fort Rucker, AL
3. Fort Irwin, CA
4. Fort Polk, LA
5. Fort Bliss, TX
6. Fort Hood, TX
7. Fort Campbell, KY
8. Fort Drum, NY
9. Fort Carson, CO
10. Or the great unknown…always a possibility

FORT EUSTIS: It’s in Newport News, Virginia along the Chesapeake Bay – but we’ve been there before & the magic Army 8 ball says “all signs point to no”.

FORT RUCKER: Alabama. South Alabama. It’s a TRADOC base – which stands for training & doctrine. It’s where they train the Apache pilots to not crash them into the ground – so it’s bound to be out in the middle of nowhere.

FORT IRWIN: California. Another TRADOC base. Needless to say, not in my top 3.

FORT POLK: Louisiana. Not too far from home.

FORT BLISS: Just send me to Hell, that would be preferable over Bliss although it would be just as hot. It’s New Mexico – just south of White Sands, but just north of the drug cartels in Juarez. And they deploy.

FORT HOOD: Closest to home. Only a 2 – 3 hour drive depending on traffic on I35. It’s the largest Army base in the world & we’ve been there before, so the odds aren’t so great. But they also deploy.

FORT CAMPBELL: All I can get out of Eric on this one is that he’d…[quote] prefer to never go back there again [end  quote]. Although Kentucky sounds nice to me. It’s bound to be green & actually get cool come Fall.

FORT DRUM: Outside of the Adirondacks in upstate New York. It’s bound to be gorgeous there – but they get 200 inches of snow a year & deploy left and right…and it’s also the furthest away from home.

FORT CARSON: South of Denver in Colorado Springs. It’d be great to be so close to the mountains – we’d be getting friends & family visiting us for a change.

And last but not least…the Great Unknown.

With the Army you never know what you could get, so you always have to factor in some wild curve ball like “congratulations! You’ve been selected to become a recruiter”…been there, done that.

So I thought it might be fun to do a giveaway – if you guess where we end up, I’ll send you a….ahhh….[looking around]…umm…yeah, I’ll send you something. Maybe a box of Korean snacks: green tea KitKats, Korean moon pies? How about a Seoul Starbucks mug? I don’t know, I’ll think of something.

In the meantime, one guess per person please. And although I wish I could tell you when we’ll find out – set a time limit on this thing – the Army doesn’t work that way. Just know that sometime over the next 130 days we’ll get an email saying….

“Congratulations! You have 30 days to report to….”

[rehashing pics from a year ago since the photography protocol hasn't re-engaged yet]

How to tell you this story without having to go into all the detailed back-story…that’s my question tonight.

Hmm….

Ok, so you know the thing I signed-up for back when & how I was really excited about it at the time?…Yeah, not so much anymore.

[too vague?]

Hmm….Ok. How ’bout this?

Soon I will be teaching a group of senior leadership spouses (think 4-star & down) on the merits of “bouncing & not breaking” along with 4 other trained spouses. The Army’s new catch-phrase for esiliency-ray (love pig latin – it confuses Google).

And as you can imagine, I’m a little nervous. For you see, like a complete & utter fool, I volunteered – no, I just about mandated that I should probably start the course off.

What was I thinking?!

Well, I was thinking that out of all the people who need to learn how to bounce & not break, I’m guessing they’re not even on the list. These women nailed that skill a good twenty years ago & standing up in front of them to preach the values of bouncing just seems ridiculous…and that whoever teaches first had better get it right, had better set the tone right & had better not offend them right out of the gate…that’s what I was thinking.

So enters the fool.

To top things off, I - like the horrible procrastinator that I am, only just tonight read the re-written material I’m supposed to teach. Re-written material specifically to address the issues & attitudes of Army spouses.

To be fair, it was re-written (although tweaked is a better word) by the other 4 spouses while I was back home. So no. I didn’t get in on those meetings – which apparently turned out to be a good thing as I heard things got a little, shall we say…”heated”.

That was mid-December. Fast forward to January & they were still beating the dead horse about which material to use. Fast forward again to February and well, politics came into play, suddnely there was a new sheriff in town & a service was finally held for that poor horse.

It was lovely; I brought flowers.

So here we are tonight. I’ve just read the “material” and oh, bugger. Some of this is total crap. (Ok, well…my opinion, crap.)

I totally get that I’ve missed my window of opportunity to throw in my two cents & since I was at that funeral I have no right to dig up that poor, dead, decomposing horse just so I can get a shot in.

And it’s buggin’ the tar out of me.

The original material was written for the Joe’s – the soldiers. The ones who needed it watered-down the most….ok, let’s be honest here- dumbed-down the most. But somehow that fact wasn’t caught by my counterparts and now I have to figure out how to say a scenario - with a straight face, in front of two general’s wives…

[ahem]

“I almost didn’t get dinner on the table because the sink was leaking.”

[dramatic pause]

Are you kidding me?

Are we really going to imply that these women…that ANY Army spouse…couldn’t figure out how to get dinner on the table just because of a damn, leaky faucet?

It just twists in my side.

Couldn’t they have figured out a different way to convey frustration over a soldier-spouse not doing something he said he was going to do?

Really?….

Just kill me now…and bury me next to that damn horse.

[images from my time at Yongsan]

It would seem November is going to be one wild, crazy & cold month.

Between traveling to Seoul for two weeks for my training class, my mother’s fall & subsequent partial hip replacement surgery, Thanksgiving coming up fast, the pact Eric & I made to not turn on the heat until January…yes, not till January, a milestone birthday this week and planning a trip home…well, let’s just say that there are a lot of moving pieces.

But first & foremost, thank you to everyone who commented with words of support & advice, to everyone who emailed me their thoughts & ideas…I can’t tell you how much that has helped.

As it stands now, my mother has had her surgery & is apparently making some really good strides in her recovery. My sister has been researching nursing homes with rehab capabilities. The first was a Steven-King-esque nightmare, the second a brilliant beacon of hope. Obviously we’d prefer hope to horror. But she will have to be assessed by the staff at the home first, then they’ll make their decision on whether or not they will accept her.

And I got an email tonight from the medical logistics planner asking for the recently trained spouses to get together next week to go over how to implement the program to the spouses here in Korea. It looks like I’ll have to travel to Camp Red Cloud (between Yongsan & the DMZ) in order to attend….can you say ‘fun’?

I’ve had a lot of people ask about how the training went, if I thought it was going to be a viable & valuable program, etc. So here’s my post-graduate thoughts.

Yes, it’s a great program. They’ve managed to take psychology 101 and turn it into common, everyday language…none of the “touchy-feely” words that would make soldiers run out of the room screaming. And the University of Pennsylvania instructor that trained us was perfect.

He managed to get the soldiers respect on day one & hold it through the entire two weeks…a feat in itself, especially for a civilian psychologist.

The goal of course is for soldiers to teach soldiers, spouses to teach spouses. And at the moment the focus & pressure from the top is the soldiers.

I know there have been a total of 2500 people globally trained so far to become resiliency trainers, but I have no idea how many of those are spouses. I’m guessing that I’m maybe one of the first 50 they’ve done. And they’ve also already implemented training the first two modules to every soldier in-processing to Korea.

I think I shared with you that General Sharp came to talk to us at one point. But what I didn’t really get into at the time was his request for ideas on “transparency”.

So I know I’ve told you time & again that Korea has been a hardship tour – a place a soldier goes without his family – and that they are on the cusp of changing that.

Well, it turns out they’ve finally realized that they turned on the flood gates a little too soon. There aren’t enough resources here to support so many families – food, school, medical support, on & on.

Of course it didn’t help that they published a big “come to Korea” spread in a military magazine promoting how great things are here. So while the rest of the Army community outside of Korea thinks Korea is “the assignment of choice”, those of us here in Korea are saying “think again”.

And that was the General’s concern. How do we go about making life here…as it is this moment…transparent to those considering heading this way?

It’s a tough question, I’ll grant you that. They have to factor in big picture things like public relations, diplomacy, policy, promoting military strength. As for me, I can just shoot from the hip.

[Obama's wreath on Veteran's Day]

…But I’m going down a rabbit hole here. Let me back up…

Resiliency is crucial. Be it here in South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq or Ft Hood. And I’m really impressed how they’ve been able to drill it down to the basic skills. The challenge will be in the cultural shift it will take for the entire military community to accept it. You’ve got the old warriors who believe the Army is going soft and the new soldiers who can’t tell the difference between a thought & an emotion.

So yeah…I’m kinda grateful that I will be teaching spouses. But my thought…the idea I didn’t share with the idea-thief…is what I personally want to focus on are the spouses going through the behavioral health system right now.

The counselors are already working with them on their specific issues, but how great would it be for them – the ones struggling right now - to learn resiliency at the same time?

Let the FRG leaders focus on teaching the bulk of spouses. I want to help those who need it the most.

So jot that down…My idea.