Greetings,
Despite my best efforts to blog more regularly, its been about 5 weeks since my last post. Part of the reason, or at least part of my excuse is that I have been assigned the position of Public Affairs Officer for Navy Central Forward Headquarters Kuwait (NFHK). This billet requires me to do a lot of article writing for the command newsletter and some ghost writing for our Officer in Charge. It's a rewarding job in a lot of ways, but it also saps my energy for blogging. See...that's a good excuse, right?
I'm excited to share a few highlights from this past month. If you read my post from August, you know that I had the opportunity to travel to Afghanistan. While I didn't do much traveling this month, it has still been event filled.
I had the privilege of baptizing one of our Sailors, GM2 Todd Drury. Todd has been regularly attending the weekly church services that we do here at Camp Arifjan and last month he approached me with the desire to be baptized. In the following weeks we organized an informal baptism ceremony for Petty Officer Drury at the local base Chapel.
Several members from the command came out to witness the event, including both the Officer in Charge and the Command Master Chief for NAVCENT Forward Headquarters Kuwait.
Deployments can be a great opportunity for both Sailors and their families to reconnect with, or even discover for the first time, their own spirituality. Having your own faith or spiritual practice can go a long way towards helping you cope with those unique and extraodinary challenges that you are sure to face during deployments.
In other news, I FINALLY got up with the sun to run my first 5k of the deployment...
MWR hosted a 5k run on September 10th to kick off a series of events in remembrance of 9/11. This picture below was just before the run. I base firefighter is preparing to raise the flag for morning colors.
Seen below, yours truly. A lonely Sailor in the midst of Army folk:/ I did however find a fellow Shipmate to take this photo:) So far, I've lost 15 pounds on this deployment!!
I had so much fun on the 9/10 5k that I ran another 5k at a neighboring base on 9/11. Got a very cool t-shirt for 23 minutes of pain.
If you remember from my previous posts, I've been playing on the base soccer team for the past few months, which has been AWESOME, and I offered to assume the responsibilities of manager/coach when the old guy leaves. This will finally be happening next week and our team is right in the middle of a base-wide soccer tournament, so that will certainly be keeping me busy.
Last but not least, we had our change of charge yesterday for Captain Warnock, our OIC. He was relieved by Captain Garcia. I was mostly involved in the Public Affairs side of things; setting up videography/photography, creating the press release for the military, posting pics on the command Facebook page, and other miscellaneous things. Good times.
So all-in-all I guess you could say its been a pretty good month:) Still staying busy and trying to make sure that I use my time here wisely. I'm pretty excited to be well into the month of September since my wife has arranged a lovely vacation at the Wyndham Resort in National Harbor for my R&R at the beginning of October. This will be a two week half-time in my deployment for my wife and I to catch our breath and just enjoy each others company. Obviously I'm REALLY looking forward to that:)
I owe a big THANKS to so many of you, my friends and family, who continue to support Julie and I during this times of separation. This certainly is one of the more safe and comfortable deployments that I have ever been on, but it is never easy to be away from the woman I love.
Keep in touch, God bless you all.
