Wow, it's been a long time since I posted. My regrets.... Here's what has been going on here.

The Rodeo
The first annual Balad Rodeo went down a couple of weeks ago. My buddy Andy was the mastermind behind this event, which ballooned from a little hospital get-together to a big freakin' deal! Donated prizes poured in from back home, to the consternation of those concerned about the appearance of solicitation of gifts from civilian enterprises. The planning got pretty intense as the Rodeo neared, and Andy bent but didn't break under the stress of the monster he had created! The day of the rodeo was beautiful, and hundreds of people came out for burgers and 'dogs, (plastic) calf-roping, bull-riding,
Guitar-Hero-ing, and two-stepping. There was a float parade, a hot-dog eating contest, lots of country music, visits by the general and some medal of honor winners, and a rodeo clown contest. The Mustache March competition concluded; unfortunately, the closest I got to a trophy was as runner-up for "Most Robust." The 'stache got shaved on the last day of March, never to return (at least until next March...). I got to stop by the Rodeo a few times, although as the surgeon of the day on call, I was in and out of the hospital, seeing a few injured troops or Iraqis, then making the surreal journey outside to clowns and barrel-racing. Only in Balad...

VBIEDs
The last few days have brought us a dozen or so pretty severely injured national patients, many of them from this incident. You just shake your head every now and then at what suffering some will inflict on their fellow human beings, without remorse. This VBIED (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device), or car-bomb, was detonated in front of a crowded Baqouba restaurant, killing scores of men, women, and children. The pattern of injuries is gruesome, too, with a combination of fragment peppering and full-thickness burns. Given the number tallies on CNN, I think one of my Iraqi colleagues in Baqouba is pretty busy himself with more of the injured victims.

The Grinder
The number and severity of injured victims has given birth to the name we affectionately call the Balad Theater Hospital, "The Grinder." It just seems to keep rolling along, inexorable, feeding in the worst of the blown up/shot/burned, churning out discharges at the other end, patched and sutured up, quite a bit the worse for wear, like a humming, eerily efficient machine. It's a privilege we have to be able to serve in this way, especially with the amazing team we have here, but it does wear you down sometimes.

The end is near!
In just a couple of weeks, the first of our rotation will be departing. Others of us have to wait a little longer, but my, how the time has flown! It would be hard to imagine a better surgical experience for a newly minted general surgeon than to come here. I thanked one of my mentors while he visited a couple of weeks ago for the opportunity to come here, to join the ranks of the Balad Association of Doctors Anaconda Surgical Society. The acronym should be self-evident.

I'm the SOD (Surgeon Of the Day) on call tonight here at the Air Force Theater Hospital, and it's just after 1:15 AM. We've just "tucked in" two injured US troops who came from Baghdad, which is sort of a nightly occurrence. One of them had to go back to the OR on arrival here. I can't believe it's been two weeks since I last posted...sorry. It's been a little busier here lately, with lots of Iraqi thoracoabdominal injuries and our fair share of postoperative complications.

Thank the Lord for small victories. And really shout your thanks when you get big victories! We had two of those this week. The first one, who we call Lazarus, is a young man who walked out of the hospital (on crutches) this week after being shot in the groin and bouncing between Iraqi hospitals before being sent to us. The typically courteous referral letter from the Iraqi surgeon, written in both Arabic and English, starts out: "Dear Dr., Kindly I refer to you young male present with bullet injury..." His gunshot destroyed the junction of some important vessels in his groin (probably the same constellation of injuries as this guy) and he was so near death that most of us had never seen someone so physiologically deranged "come back to life." Thus the nom de guerre, Lazarus. (Briefly, for you trauma guys, pH 6.72, BE < -30) Our senior surgeon, the czar, remarked on the phone to me when I called him in the middle of the night, "He's a dead man. Oh, well, I'll come on in." So after a two week hospital stay, we didn't hesitate to snap a photo to remember Lazarus by.

The other big victory is happening as I write. Little 2 1/2-year old M, whose name and face I cannot show due to security concerns for his Shia family, has been with us for going on two months. He was badly burned over 45% of his body with an burn injury to his lung as well. One outgoing surgeon remarked, "You'll probably spend all your resources on him for two weeks, and then he'll die." Eight weeks later, with all his burns skin-grafted and healed, he's due to get on a plane in a couple of hours to fly to the a Shriner's Hospital in the US for rehab and likely some additional surgeries. It's really a tribute to the dedicated USAF and Army personnel here who labored over him for those two months that he is alive today. I hope to hear great things from this young man one day. I blinked back some misty eyes when his mother told me, "I will tell him about you every day that he grows up so that he does not forget."

The other thing you may notice in some of these pictures is the atrocity between my upper lip and nose. That's right, folks, it's "Mustache March" here at the AFTH. I started a bit late, but I'm catching up. It takes a dedicated team to grow mustaches for a month, but we're a crack unit, and victory will be had. And then, on the last day of March, there will be a shaving such as the world has never seen.

Thanks to all for your care packages (wow! there must not be any PowerBars left in Virginia!), and especially for the notes and emails. Your care for us is much appreciated. Two months down, two to go!

Yesterday afforded a little time to do something nice for our OR staff, so we planned ahead to have our Critical Care Air Transport Team (CCATT) bring us some bratwurst from Germany, where the wurst is significantly better than at the Exchange here on base. We boiled them in near-beer and then grilled them for a little while. The "party" was on the hospital roof, around OR 5, and was a good time.

Speaking of near-beer, the quantity and variety of nonalcoholic beers really boggles the mind. General Order #1 for the AOR specifies, among other things, that no alcohol will be consumed or brought into the country. So, the DFACs and BXs carry a variety of nonalcoholic malted beverages: Beck's, Holstein, Bitburger, St. Pauli Girl N.A., and others are readily available. It's a little bizarre, I admit.

For all the non-medical (or really non-surgical) people out there, you may not really get this, but would someone please stop shooting out the popliteal artery....please? Last night I did my third popliteal vascular reconstruction (two of them combined artery-vein injuries), not to mention the one or two others the other guys have done. It's really getting crazy...I'd like to just fix a simple, say, SFA or something, but no, it always has to be right behind the freakin' knee.

OK, that's the medical jargon moment. I've attached some pictures of base life, like the cardio part of the gym, and Rob and Darren getting crazy in a dust-storm. The sky really is that color when the wind whips the dust into the air. It's eerie. Then, if it rains, the dust comes out of the air as mud, splattering you all over.

So long, and thanks for all the letters, emails, and packages!

My wife and kids just got a package from me: three kids' books and a DVD of me reading them! "How," you may ask, "did you manage that?" Well, it's thanks to a dedicated group of people with hearts bent on serving our troops called USO - the United Service Organizations. USO has been around since just before World War II, and boosts troop morale by sending care packages, sponsoring celebrity visits to the AOR, providing military lounges in airports and on bases, and the United Through Reading Program.

At the USO office here at Balad, I can select a book for each of my kids, sit down and read it into a video camera that burns a 20-minute mini-DVD, and USO will mail it and the books to them! That's incredible! When they got
the first one, my kids watched it over and over, with little A pointing and saying "Mama, mama" whenever he saw me. I guess his parent vocabulary has shrunk to only include Mama right now. I've since gone and recorded again for them. Thank you, USO! (And I'm sure your donations to this nonprofit org would be appreciated.)

In other news, it's been quiet for a few days here. About a week ago we had a three-day surge of patients I told some of you about. We were filled to overflowing, with 45 patients in 40 "beds" on the ward. (We put five kids in one room on cots, with some dads to supervise). That surge was partially due to AQI (al Qaeda Iraq)'s wrath at some families not relinquishing their sons to join the terrorist group. To retaliate against the families, they blew up their house: women, children, and all. Fortunately, out of this harm and misery al Qaeda is just making enemies of Iraqis, whose "Sons of Iraq" or "Awakening Councils" are spurning violence.

I've included a picture of my living quarters, my "hooch", to show why I spend very little time there: it's depressing. I mean, it's clean and it's mine, so it's adequate. Sleeping there at night can be challenging, too. Every half hour or hour, you're jarred out of your slumber by the deafening roar of what seems like the world coming to an end, but what is really two F-16s taking off from the nearby runway. At night you can see the conical fire from their afterburners. Then the night quiets down again, only to be awakened again by the "DUK DUK DUK DUK" of two Blackhawk helicopters coming in to land at the hospital helipad. Then you wait for the call on your phone: "15 casualties, come in, we need you". And if that call doesn't come in a few minutes, you drift back off to sleep.

And that's where I'm going now...to sleep.

This week has been a busy one. It started Sunday, when I was on call. We had a relatively quiet morning, with a couple of operative cases to do, and then everyone except me and my backup, vascular surgeon T, filtered out to go to the gym, church, or some "rack time" in their bunk.

Just as our last operative case was finishing up, the call came overhead: "Trauma call times nine to the ER, trauma call times nine to the ER." Well...sounded like some business coming our way. I walked the twenty yards to the ER to find the breathless chief of the medical staff telling us the report: an IED explosion in a Balad market (per CNN, a VBIED, or vehicle-borne IED), with probably as many as 30 casualties coming to us. This is known in ER parlance as a "mass casualty," with many more patients than immediate resources, triggering a sequence of events to meet the surge in demand. Everyone gets called in, and as the hospital personnel start to arrive, so do the first wave of casualties.

By the time all the dust cleared, we had taken in 23 Iraqi casualties. Many more died at the scene, and a few were taken to a local hospital. It becomes difficult keeping everyone's blood, Xrays, and vital signs straight, with no names, SSNs, or wristbands, only a numeric identifier written in Sharpie on their forehead. The scene is hard to describe, and some surreal moments stick in my head: the third-country national housekeeping staff "mopping" the floor between waves of casualties using chux pads in a "wax on, wax off" motion; the young child who arrived without signs of life and never regained them; the linear trail of blood on the bottom of the CT donut where each patient passed over it; the operating rooms with two cases, side by side, being done concurrently. It is a remarkable place that can do these things, and it speaks to the incredible professionalism and competence of the staff I get to work with here. They are all, in the words of General F, "rock stars."

But who does this? Who willfully blows up children, shopkeepers, wives, mothers, babies? I can hope that a just God will visit his wrath one day on those who would do this, and at the same time I see the dark corners of hatred and bitterness in my heart. I guess I'm just shocked to see it writ large in this country.

So now, 96 hours later, it has begun to settle. Open abdomens are closed, wounds washed out a few times, some patients have escaped the ventilator, and the few minimally injured have discharged. And we wait for the next one.

After a relatively quiet week or two, things have been picking up here, and it's sobering seeing our young soldiers arriving as casualties. These guys have my utmost respect, living and working out among the Iraqi population, most of whom are glad to have them around, but some of whom would like nothing more than to kill as many as possible. The problem is, it's not apparent which is which. And so when they arrive at our hospital, injured or on death's door, every one of us here will bust it to do everything we can to save their life or limb. That is the tribute that I can pay to their bravery.

Last night battalion commander Colonel M came around the ward with his Sergeant Major, visiting their injured troops and awarding them the Purple Heart right there in their hospital beds. Some of them, with swollen faces, splinted extremities, and morphine pumps, had little reaction except to nod. I'm proud of those guys, of the grit it takes to do what they do.

I've been busy lately, and although that usually means the misery of someone else, it's a good thing to not be idle. A distal pancreatectomy in a child run over by a car, a repair of stomach, liver, diaphragm, and lung in another Iraqi patient who was shot, and a laparoscopic gallbladder surgery in one of our contractors have kept my hands busy. While it's gratifying to reconstruct an artery in a soldier's arm (thanks to our rocking vascular surgeon T's awesome assistance!), we certainly get to spend more time caring for our national patients who don't have the chance to get airlifted out of country. We form bonds with the people we take care of here, many of them children, who are often the unfortunate "collateral damage" of war, to use a sanitized expression.

I remember watching the ABC Nightly News one night as a boy and hearing about a man shot in the gut with an unexploded tank round in a place called "Iraq", which was at war with "Iran". These places seemed impossibly far away to me then, but we heard about them every night. After hearing the story of this unfortunate man, my dad said to our family, "War is a terrible, terrible thing." I don't know why I remember that, but it's true. Even when there is some justification for it, "good reasons" to engage in it, there is still an overwhelming burden of sorrow and misery that flows from war, and I get to see it every day firsthand.

It's strange to think how my interests have changed. Before, I couldn't have told you where Dijail, Baqoubah, and Muqdadiyah were, or which was more tumultous: Anbar or Diyala, or where EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) came from, but now those are part of my world. The New England Patriots' Superbowl loss and John McCain's wins really have much less daily significance to me than the latest news of Muqtada al Sadr. Fortunately, the Stars and Stripes keeps me updated on both.

This just in: Emergency Room Dr. A has hatched a plan to host the first annual Balad Rodeo this spring, complete with steer-roping (albeit a plastic motionless steer), bull-riding (on a barrel), and other knee-slappin' events...more on that when and if it happens!

Well, here's my first blog update on life in the AOR (Area of Responsibility - the military's term for all the Middle East deployment sites, including Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Diego Garcia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan...maybe a few more, too). I think the term Area of Responsibility is a bit ironic, in the Colin Powell sense.

I started my journey 13 Jan flying out of San Antonio to Norfolk. I boarded there for about a day, leaving on a Delta 767 chartered by the military specifically to fly to Qatar. We flew to Germany and refuelled, then left again and flew to Qatar, arriving around 11 PM. It was FREEZING there, about 35 degrees and rainy - not my idea of the desert! We unloaded and sorted our bags, then passed customs and immigration before waiting for a shuttle to take us to housing. After waiting in the cold mud for about an hour, one finally showed up. You'd think that with 20,000 people a month passing through Al Udeid Air Base, they'd have a system for this by now, a mere 5 years into the war. But no, it seems to be a surprise every time some people show up. When we got our bunks (a big tent with 30-60 guys in it) around 5 AM, we crashed for 8 or 10 hours. Next day it was a quite comfortable 55-60 degrees with the sun out, falling again into the 30s after dark. We assembled that night to fly out, and then waited about 7 hours in the terminal before getting on a C-17 Globemaster for Balad. We all strapped on our IBA (individual body armor) and Kevlar helmets and filed onto the plane. It was an uneventful 2-hour flight, at the end of which the pilot cut the engines and dove steeply, banking into a tight spiral before landing. I think we went from 29000 feet to landing in about 5 minutes.

After inprocessing (this was quicker - they seemed to KNOW that we were coming, unlike at Al Udeid), we went to pick up our bags and check into housing. I then split away, picked up my issued 9MM handgun, and joined my colleagues at the hospital for a quick tour. I already knew several of them, since I come from the largest USAF medical center, which supplies a great many of the personnel for deployments. Balad Air Base was the former Iraqi Air Force academy. Many of the concrete buildings are Saddam-era, like the indoor Olympic-sized pool and the outdoor soccer stadium, where Uday Hussein shot many of the Iraqi soccer team when they lost an embarrasing World Cup game. About 35,000 people live here, making it a small city.

The next day I started working. My first week I was assigned to the rotating duty of taking care of the ward and ICU patients. I rounded with the "Trauma Czar" (our trauma medical director, a colonel) twice every day, and ended up being in the hospital 6:30 AM until at least 11 PM every night. After I rotated off that duty, things eased up some. The Balad Air Force Theater Hospital (AFTH) began as a series of tents linked together, and moved last summer to a "hardened facility", meaning a real building. The "old wing" was a Saddam Hussein-era clinic with a 2 1/2 foot-thick concrete roof and a basement which, before renovation, still had rings in the concrete basement walls where political prisoners were shackled for "reprogramming". The buildings added onto this house four operating rooms, 20 ICU beds, 40 ward beds, two Philips 16-slice CT scanners, an ER capable of 30-40 patients during a surge, a dining hall, lab, pharmacy, chapel, and some clinic space.

My typical day is like this: I wake up around 6:15, walk to the hospital (it's about a 100-yard 4-minute walk) around 6:30, and we have a morning report at 7:15, discussing all the previous 24 hours' admissions, followed sometimes by a clinical presentation by one of the docs or a morbidity and mortality conference. We then proceed to the OR while the trauma czar convenes multidisciplinary rounds on the ward (including surgeons, orthopaedics, nutrition, psych, discharge planners, physical therapy, and nursing staff). Several OR cases are scheduled every day, usually washing out wounds, closing abdomens, skin grafting, excising burned tissue (lots of pediatric burns), etc. Daytime is usually when casualties arrive at the ER, heralded by an overhead hospital-wide page in case you missed the roar of Blackhawk rotor blades beating the air. This is the opposite of trauma in the U.S., which heats up at night. Nights are generally quiet here. When someone "sick" comes in, everyone swings into action, drawing blood, getting IVs inserted and blood transfused, obtaining a chest X-ray, ultrasounding the chest and abdomen, taking vital signs, etc. If the patient needs an operation, we usually have them in the OR (just down the hall) within 5 or 10 minutes.

At 6:30, all the surgeons wander in and we all go to dinner together, piling into the back of a pickup truck and driving to the DFAC (dining facility, in mandatory military acronym-speak). I'm the on-call or backup trauma surgeon about every third night, which means I stay here overnight. The food isn't bad (Thursday is Mongolian stir-fry night, Wednesday is surf-n-turf - good crablegs, but the "steak" resembles camel-meat predigested in a shark's stomach), and there is a good selection every night. "Family dinner" helps keep us all happy together and getting along, not an easy task for a bunch of egotistical surgeons. Afterthat, we come back to the hospital for evening rounds and maybe a movie or cards. The next day, it's the SAME THING. The running joke is that it's like the movie Groundhog Day, where every day is the same. The only thing that marks the time is what's for dinner that night at the DFAC. Today IS actually Groundhog Day (Feb 2), making it a little surreal.

Thanks to you all for your emails! The best things are letters, pictures, and emails from home.

Hours before departing for deployment, I finished some renovations on the kids' bedrooms upstairs. When we moved in, the two upstairs bedrooms were dingy, scuffed white, with thin, industrial-grade blue carpet on the floors. One of the best features of the upstairs, a dormer window, had been closed off from the bedroom proper, hidden behind a little plywood door in an attic crawlspace. So, where to start? Well, what we did was...

1. Paint. The girls chose pink for their room, and we painted the boy's room a shade of blue. Wherever did we come up with those choices? I know, I know, we're pretty creative. That was earlier this fall, so then we felt like we were on a little roll, and kept on going...

2. Add some built-ins. We hired a carpenter to build some bookshelves in the girls' room on either side of the windowseat. He also added some closet space in an unused corner of the upstairs landing. Both make for some great storage and shelf space...

3. Finish out the dormer. Next we had our carpenter frame out and finish the dormer, to incorporate it into the room. He made a good start, before ending up completely stuck as to how to make the angles work between the old and new walls. So we bid him farewell without hard feelings (before any irreparable damage was done) had another (more geometrically-inclined) carpenter come and finish the framing and put up the drywall. We finished the inadequate mudding job before priming and painting it. Before jack-knifing on the highway to dormer completeness, though, the two-dimensional carpenter did reveal to us an important find: an original long-leaf pine subfloor underneath the junk carpet! Ooooohhhh, Aaaaaah!

4. Refinish the floors. Oh, this nearly broke me. But now that I look at it, it's the thing I'm proudest of. This required first pulling up all the carpet (the deceptively easy part), followed by scraping all the tenacious carpet-glue off the wood, assisted with, at various times, a combination of heat-gun and chemical stripper. Next I sanded the floors (couldn't do this first - the glue gummed up even the most course sandpaper, and at $6.98 a pop I wasn't looking to go through a lot of the drum-sander rolls). Finally, the polyurethane finish went on and we had our new rooms ready! I then also found matching reclaimed longleaf pine at Alamo Hardwoods to finish the floor of the dormer.

So, you can look at the finished "before-and-after" pictures...

BEFORE

AFTER

The sheer volume of recent happenings in the life of our family precludes any thorough telling at all. So I will not attempt to be comprehensive. This is…life in a nutshell.

The Move July 26th we closed and moved into our new home. Monticello Park is an old neighborhood next to the Art Deco district, built in the 1920’s. The Deco district (part of the Old Spanish Trail) has been undergoing a smoldering revival for the last ten or fifteen years, highlighted by the newly renovated Woodlawn Theater, the “Deco B” (our local HEB), and the Bihl Haus arts center. We’ve had a chance to entertain a few of you, and can’t wait to get all our friends over.

The Music That’s right, it’s ACL Fest time again! Peter and I went up together for two days, catching the Arctic Monkeys, Paolo Nutini, Blue October (don’t bother), Arcade Fire (oh, yeah), Lucinda Williams, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wilco, The Decemberists, and Bob Dylan and his band. All that in a mere two postmeridiens. I won’t wax as eloquent as last year about it all, but I will disclose that this year’s surprise “best in show” for me was Arcade Fire. So I went and bought their 2007 release Neon Bible.

The Group Our Redeemer community group is off to its fall start, and we’re co-leading it with Jon & Heather and Wes & Elizabeth. We honestly have the greatest group of people EVER! Of course, my Reformed brethren would remind me that all of the personality, talent, chutzpah, character, and outright coolness that our group brings (oh yeah, we bring it) really comes from the gracious character of a God who delights to give “good gifts” to us unworthy wretches. Oh, yeah, that brings us to the next point, which is that Carrie and I are going to class and working through…

The Theology Redeemer’s Intro to Theology class is our weekly dousing (not immersion, mind you) in the Reformed theological tradition. It’s rocking, but I’ve already got makeup assignments because I am on…

The Trip To somewhere you’ve never been and I can’t tell you (see me later for details).

Wow, that was cryptic. Anyway, as we slide into fall…forgive me for not writing the play by play this summer after each succeeding event.

It's been an eventful summer so far...

1. I finished my residency. After all the banquets, pictures, etc., it has settled in that I'm no longer a resident. Before starting as a surgical attending, though, we thought it seemly to take some time off...

2. We took vacation. We started what was to be a round-the country (or at least the eastern half) tour, to Minnesota, Wisconsin, then to Virginia and back. We first spent some lovely days in Wisconsin, where the kids played through the long summer days with their cousins. They got filthy and mosquito-bitten and loved every minute of it. But our reverie was cut short to learn that...

3. Our house was struck by lightning. That is, the house we're buying was struck while we were away. We were to close July 9, but it'll be delayed about a week. More on the house in a later post...

4. We're packing to move! We close with the buyers of our house next week, and I start back to work.

Yesssss! Picture blogging is up and running, thanks to "the Lee." A picture is included both for personal reference and to prove that illustrative posting is indeed functional.

I'm coming to the end of a chapter in my life. The last five years I will no doubt recall with some fondness, though it will only be because memory always seems to make grueling and painful things more rosy simply because they're past. This year has been the culmination of my surgical training, my chief resident year.

The surgical chiefs are, by all rights, the kings (and queens) of the hospital. Like few other specialties, general surgery chiefs have earned their distinction as "the one who you call when the s*** hits the fan". For five or more years of residency, these individuals spend day and night in or near the hospital. If a junior resident or a medical specialist is at their wit's end with a terribly ill patient, you can bet a chief has been called to that bedside. If there is bleeding that can't be controlled, that's who you call. Those bags under my eyes, the thinning hair, the 2-day stubble on my face, the ghostly look that says "I haven't seen sunlight in weeks," these are all the scout-badges that say "Yep. I'm the guy to call."

I learned much of what I know from my chief residents along the way, starting with Larry, my chief at UVa. I then try to pass on to my junior residents and medical students those same lessons, the ones they don't teach in books. "Always order a chest X-ray after inserting a central line." "Be sure to pack that wound all the way in to the base." "One centimeter suture bites when you're closing the abdominal fascia." I haven't always been a great teacher or patient example, but I try. Everyone remembers their surgery chief.

If a chief surgical resident says "I need an operating room NOW", the OR staff knows: 1. This is serious, 2. Someone will probably die if we don't hurry, and 3. The chief will know what to do when they're in there.

Even the surgical attendings will defer to their chief resident in consultation, scheduling, and patient care. If a chief renders an opinion, you can bet it'll be the last word. And so, after 1,017 (at last count) surgical cases, I'll soon be moving to the next level of duty, as a surgical attending. I'll again be shepherding young residents through difficult surgical cases and difficult patients. But it won't be with the badge of pride I wear on my (stained and torn) white coat:

J----- B. A----, MD
General Surgery
Chief Resident

Thanks to my big brother Lee, the architect behind the new improved the alley blog. It's getting better all the time! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

I've never sold a house before, but it's a pain. You live in this twilight world where the house is always "in show condition." Arrrghhh.

We had two showings today, and Carrie has it down to a science: the kids go into the car to play and read in their carseats, Carrie runs around like a too-fast silent film character, fluffing pillows, turning on lights, pumping up the AC, throwing dolls into closets, and eating stray crumbs off the floor...OK, she doesn't really eat them. But I do. Then it's off to wherever, maybe the park for picnic lunches (we do that alot these days - cuts down on my crumb-eating from the floor).

Anyway, I'm ready for it to be over. No offers, yet.

And we backed out of an offer on a little stone cottage more downtown, for several reasons. I'm glad, though, because now we're under no pressure to sell quick.

So, from my long absence from the blogosphere, you may be wondering "What's so all-fired important in Josh's life that he doesn't have time to blog anymore?" Well, the answer is simple:

Sleep.

Yep, I've chosen in these last few grinding months to actually go to bed at a decent hour instead of pecking away in the office on a chronicle of my somewhat mundane life.

Enough already. Here's what's going on...

1. We're probably going to stay in San Antonio. Yep, after telling everyone we'll be going to Europe or some such exotic locale, the USAF has decided that those locations were really not open to me, after all. "Probably in San Antonio?", you say? Well, until one actually puts pen to paper on the first day of work (perhaps, scalpel to skin, in my vocation), you can't really consider anything to be a sure thing. At any moment the call could come: [Imagine the boss with a coffee mug here] "Oh, riiiight...yeah....I'm going to need you to go to...Uzbekistan."

2. If we do indeed stay here, we're looking to make good on becoming crunchy New Urbanites and move into town. Leaving the soul-sapping suburbs and our McMansion for a neighborhood with a little more "character" [read: old houses with lots of things wrong with them but oh, so charming] is the plan. We'll keep you updated on the progress.

3. Asher is crawling and pulling up. Clearly extraordinarily talented at all sports and manly things just like his grandfathers...these things skip generations, I'm pretty sure.

More later...