Birthday

This office has an interesting tradition. When it’s someone’s birthday, everyone pitches in and they buy a cake from the ice cream shop. And when it’s a guy’s birthday, they buy the girliest, froo-froo-laa-laa decorated cake they can order. So today it was Gil’s birthday. When they took his cake out of the box today, the cake was decorated with a kitten and it had pink and green icing flowers. For a 24 year old manly-man’s birthday it was pretty hysterical. I wonder what they do for a woman’s birthday?

I’m still learning my job/what I’m going to be doing. This job is pretty far outside of what I normally do, but I’ll do my best and apply the fake-it-‘til-you-make-it philosophy. There’s no real guidance/regulation/code that governs this work, so I can’t be “wrong”, except for the “that’s not the way we do it here” mentality.

Everyone in the office piled in a couple of cars this evening and went to a new place to eat nearby for steak dinners. It was pretty good steak. Nothing fantastic… I wouldn’t go too far out of my way to go there again. But it was all right. They also had seafood which my new friends dug into. I guess you can’t have seafood in Boston without crab legs and scallops.

The heater in our suite went out last night. I woke up freezing my toes off. The heater didn’t really go out, but the thermostat is on a timer and Mike and I can’t figure the darn thing out. Mike has the next two days off, so he’s planning on messing with it and trying to get it right.

I called Sara and Dad this morning. It was good talking to family again. This deployment just started, And I haven’t gotten to the “Groundhog Day Effect” yet so time is really dragging along. I’ll have to find a link to explain the GDE…

Anyway, I hope to go in early one day this weekend and call the kiddos to talk to them for a while. This is hard being away from everyone this time. But each night I go to bed is another day down and another day closer to home.