Joyful Noise

The last couple of days, I have been sorely tempted to use this blog as an opinion platform. In part, this would postpone or eliminate the complicated process of figuring out how I am doing over here, the equally difficult task of communicating that in a meaningful way, and perhaps provide a more complete picture, for you who are not here, of some of the gaps (there are a lot of them) between what is “common knowledge” in the US and what is “ground truth” here. I keep having to say to myself, “Self, you started this thing with a specific purpose in mind, it was a good purpose, and people are counting on you to stick to your purpose. They are reading this blog for a specific reason, to find out how you are, not what you think.” Of course, many of the things I say in this blog are my ‘opinion,’ say the quality of the food, but in this case, my opinion represents my experience, and it would be fairly ridiculous (or meaningless) for someone to tell me that the food that I ate did not really taste as good as I thought it did. This blog exists because of you, the reader, so if I start to stray from what it is YOU want to read, then put my feet to the fire…

Though there are simply not enough hours in the day out here, one of the Chaplains is trying to put a band together—and he actually has a tuba he needs someone to play. It will probably be relaxing (though we’ll have to see if this is overcome by the associated frustration) to get out of the office and practice for a half hour a day, and I’ll evaluate with the Chaplain after a week or two to see if it’s worth continuing (I played tuba in high school more than 20 odd years ago). We have enough instruments to get a quintet going, I think the Chaplain said, so we’ll see. I wonder how far the practice room is from the rest of the base? By the time I walk out there and back for a ½ hour of practice, I might have burned up a full hour.

Semper Fi, Jon G.