Who you gonna call?

If you're the Canadian Consul-General and you got mad mold problems, apparently me!

He has a really nice dog

Aren't we Mr. Fancypants?

Got a real fixed line installed today, after 2 years of being in business.  No more getting called in the middle of the night on my cell phone!

Ft. Dix sure ain't Hawaii

I've just finished up two pretty grueling weeks at Ft. Dix, NJ.  I've been here to finish up the third, and final phase of the Command and General Staff College or CGSC.  It's a requirement for all field grade Army officers to complete in order to be promoted to LtCol.  Basically, it's an advanced course for senior staff officers. The course teaches everything from military history to leadership principles to learning how to work with the other military services and agencies.  

I did the first phase resident at Ft. Shafter, Oahu, Hawaii -- that was great.  Good classmates and couldn't ask for a better outdoor classroom.  I stayed at the Hilton, ate great meals on the economy, and had a rental car.  Classes usually were done by 4pm and on the weekend, I even got a day's diving in.  The second phase was 140 hours of online, self-paced learning with about a half dozen written papers.  Pain in the butt, but not that bad and I was looking forward to meeting up again with my group for the third phase back in Hawaii.

Two weeks before shipping out, however, I was informed that the Army had yanked my school slot, having decided that it would be more cost-expedient to send me to Ft. Dix, NJ.  I decided to make the best of things and at least see some friends and family in NYC, NJ, and Philly.

I was able to catch up with I and my roommate Jaime for a day before heading to Ft. Dix.  Ft. Dix, built pre WWII, is basically kind of a dump.  Billets are per person with shared bathroom, but the humidity is high, facilities rarely cleaned, and the power went out every several days.  Ironic that I had to come from a third world country to find unreliable electricity...

My class was 13, with two instructors.  Good group, almost all majors, with one captain.  We dove right into things.  We would be looking at the orders process.  How to analyze a mission, develop courses of action, select the right one, and brief it.  After the first day, I got pulled out of class and told that I had a problem with my academic eligibility.  Since I'm in China, .mil access is blocked, so I could not check my AKO email.  So, two of my essays had very minor changes needed.  When the graders didn't hear back from me, they just marked it an as failure and this came back to haunt me.

Without going into the details, I spent a lot of time there in a sort of limbo befor common sense finally prevailed and the cleared

The two weeks were especially hard because I would usually get up at 5 or 5:30am, spend an hour catching up on emails before everyone left for the day in China, then go grab breakfast and start class by 0700.  Class ran until 7pm at night.  Between homework and then doing my other FT job, I was often up to 3 or 4 in the morning. 

Throw in jet lag and I was feeling super crunchy by the end of our two weeks.  Just happy it's done.