Blessed Friday is here!

Waking up next to a warm lump of kitty cat is a wonderful thing. Sadly, waking up also means getting up, but at least today is Friday, with the weekend stretched gloriously out in front of me. Of course, I have to get up early and go into work tomorrow anyway. The muckety-mucks in Washington are disturbed at the number of murders and suicides that have taken place in the Seabees recently and demand an answer. Of course, any government-produced answer requires lots of numbers, so I get to go to work tomorrow and produce numbers along with a few other key players in the battalion. We’re going to see if there is a trend that we can find that will help us explain why so many people are going off the deep end. As a chaplain, I have an easy answer: Sin. More specifically, the sin of alcohol (and to a lesser extent, illegal drugs). Seabees are a hard-drinking lot. Many of them are also young, love to party and hunger for sex. Some get married and have kids. Sex and parties don’t mix well with kids or produce stable marriages. Domestic violence results, the divorce rate climbs, children are abused, spouses have affairs, people turn to alcohol to self-medicate the pain, etc. Eventually, we get to the point where our Seabees make the irrational decision to kill themselves or someone else. I don’t know if you can plot that on a graph, but I guess I’ll find out if we can tomorrow!

Ok, sorry for the rant. Back to my day. I spent this morning cleaning out the last remnants of my office. I threw the odds-and-ends into a box. If I come back from deployment and haven’t missed any of it–off to the trash it goes! My garage is starting to fill up with boxes, both from work and from under the bunk bed in my home office.

After a leisurely lunch back at home, I took off this afternoon to visit our Seabee in prison (see: above murder discussion). I like starting off my weekends with a prison visit. I find my conversations with her to be quite relaxing.

After my little prison trip, I headed home (talking to my sister on the way) to clean the house in preparation for visitors this weekend. As I prepare for bed, I would give our house a strong B for a cleanliness grade. We will have to get up tomorrow and make it an A before the in-laws drop in. Mustn’t let them think that we live like pigs! I think the cleaning has worn both Melissa and I out as we are both crashing. That, or our bellies are full of scrumptious homemade pizza and (in my case) crispy chocolate bunnies. I know I always sleep well on a full belly. So too, does the kitty. Her incessant pleas to us to feed her have paid off; now she lies at my feet ready to become once again a warm lump of kitty. How different from this afternoon when I taped her helping Melissa make the bed. She was a wild monster then...

Cheers,
Peter