Quick update:

* Had a great time in Seattle.  Caught up with a bunch of friends, including some pros and conrunners I’ve been friends with for 20 years.  (Crap, 20 years!!!  I’m getting old.)

*My shoulder has interesting MRI images.  I peeked.  I will see the doc on Tuesday.  I’m still gimped up, but at least I’m making progress.  If the vertebrae is trashed and/or nerve restricted, probably a good thing I’m not in Afgahnistan.  I still would rather be there in many ways, but that’s the old warhorse hearing a bugle.  I know guys in their 70’s who still twitch to the call.

*Work is speeding up.  I lost my other engineer to NASA in Huntsville, Alabama.  If you know of mechanical/chemical and maybe civil engineers who want to work on weird design projects ranging from weapon systems to pressure vessels to new marine craft to downhole tools to airframes to chemical reactors to simple product design..... let me know.  I’m about to to get swamped and need more hands on the bilge pumps.

*I’ve transfered to a training unit.  Its weird for me -- they don’t even have weapons in the unit.  WTF.  But it will give me a chance to learn some things as well as get various aspects of my life straight.  Well, relatively speaking.

*I have gotten back to my fiction writing, at least in spurts.  I’m catching up with my military correspondance courses.  I’m hoping to get the shoulder fixed so I can get back to the gym as well as back to fencing and/or kung fu.

*The boys are doing well.  They still need therapy and for their sake I’m glad I’m not leaving any time soon, but they are doing well.  I hope to go to WorldCon in early Aug. and bring them.  I’m hoping to recruit at least one other adult, maybe Cheryl (Dad’s wife) as she won’t be interested in all the parties at night.

*Krista appears to have been assimilated into the gumbo known as South Louisiana.  She misses her family greatly, as well as the mountains and forests, but she also feels at home here.

Otherwise, my life continues to be the placid, uneventful, carefree existance it has always been.  More news as we beat it into submission, tie it up, and make it do dressage.