Ah, the joy of being at home

Yesterday was a little nuts. After I finished what I had to do at "Port Wood," I dropped by their dental clinic to try to get an exam.

(One of the primary measures of effectiveness for Army Reserve commanders these days is the deployability of the unit. This means that there is a neverending barrage of requirements to go get a shot, get your teeth looked at, draft a family care plan, etc. I will be truly impressed if (and only if), when the deployment actually occurs, this leads to an increase in training time and allows us to skip the days spent at the immunization clinic at the mobilization station. I somehow doubt that will be the case.)

Of course, that wasn't going to work, so I drove like the proverbial bat out of Hell to get back up to join some other folks in getting a dental exam here.

I pulled that off and was declared in possession of deployable teeth (let's here it for flossing!).

Then, because it's a digital Army, I went to the ID card facility because I did not have sufficient functioning certificates on my ID card. This was preventing me from using my ID card to log in to the great Army Online Thing.

[sigh]

Got a new ID card (with certificates!). Then I called it a day and came home. Opened the door, walked in, and found this:



That, ladies and gentlemen, is/was my Sibley Guide to Birds. Not my little Sibley guide that covers the eastern half of the US, but my big one.

That #4 on my bird book "special" list. If he'd eaten 1,2 or 3, it may have been a walk out into the back yard with a 9mm and a shovel.

The annoyance level was elevated by the fact that my bird guides aren't just reference books, I record the birds I see and ID in them.

So now I have a pile of pages stacked on top of the gun safe to go through when I have some free time (ha!) and move my notes over to one of my other guides.

We're going to skip trying the whole kennel concept, and I'm going to just use a loop of logging chain and couple cinder blocks on Jack during the day, I think.