Good news and bad news

I've promised to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly about life leading up to and during a deployment. In the military we live by the mantra that the only constant in life is change. So of course I shouldn't have been surprised when Nick's pre-deployment plans changed last week, again. It turns out that he'll be doing an additional week of training in Floriday during March. I joked to Nick that, while one week in itself isn't much time, this one week officially makes his deployment committment one full year (until now we were just one week short). We also got the official word that Nick may get three or four days furlough at the most in Indiana immediately prior to the deployment. So when Nick leaves for training in April I may not see him again until his mid-tour in the late fall or winter.

My new is not all bad, though. Something happened today that finally cheered me up after last week's bad news. This package finally arrived for me! Nick mailed this gorgeous wooden jewelry box, engraved with "Hall" in Arabic, to me from Bahrain back in October. We've been waiting for it to get here, and had pretty much given up on it. Then, today, out of the blue it arrived. I'm certainly grateful for this gift, and am thankful that I've once again been cheered out of my sadness.