PCS Military Move update

This is our 4th PCS in 6 years and I still like it.  This is the smoothest one yet.  Our wonderful, hard-working , well-tipped movers ($200 from our pockets) finished yesterday.  Currently we are living in our house for a couple weeks without our stuff as it travels across the country.  It's fun! 
We are camping in our house.  We cook on a few old trays and a pan (microwave gone, must use oven, stove) and will pack them in trunk of car when we ship it and fly over there.  We play hockey with brooms and a tin foil ball in our empty living room and watch Netflix on the iPad huddled together on our makeshift bed.  
There is a lot going on.  For 6 weeks the landlords have been showing our house to prospective renters (they are asking $400 more per month so nobody has bitten yet, lol).  During our house-hunting trip, the first two houses we liked were already processing approved tenants, and a vast majority of the listings (arduous rental  process in Orange Co, CA where rental homes have lock boxes and you need a real estate agent to show you and then submit a 19 page application, then wait for 2 weeks to see if they accept it) don't accept any pets, so the one we got unexpectedly comes furnished. 
This means we suddenly had to tell the movers not to pack most of our furniture and are now selling it via our neighborhood Facebook page and craigslist, along with my 2002 car, and his old Bronco and motorcycle (the military doesn't pay to move any vehicles, except overseas, and it's $800-1000 to move the one we are moving).  It's kind of fun- our Crate and Barrel Bar sold in 1 min on fb to our neighbor and our landlord bought our distressed buffet (for more than half what we paid).
We don't expect everything to go as planned, often the mid-move adjustments turn out even better than we could have planned.  As long as we are healthy and together, we can't and choose not to complain or use hyperbole to escalate common blips to nightmare status.

And...We're Off!

THE WAIT
As a military family, we certainly aren't accustomed to letting the grass grow under our feet.  My previous post established that we were awaiting military orders, and they were taking a long time.  My marine's replacement has known he'll be coming to Atlanta since September.  I was being pretty patient until it got to the point where my pets would have to suffer in quarantine because I wouldn't be able to meet the time required to get them to Hawaii (no rabies there, big pet process to keep it that way) or Japan or Europe if any of those places became our destination.  My marine has put Camp Pendleton as his first choice for 15 years, unsuccessfully.  For recruiting, we got to choose 5 from 18 available cities.  Neither of us wanted Buffalo or Des Moines, so he picked Seattle and Phoenix, while. I picked Chicago and Atlanta, and we both picked Ft. launder dale to be near family.  We were happy it was Atlanta, but annoyed that as a native of Ft. Launderdale he still didn't get it.  As for our current situation, my marine figured we'd find out by. Jan. or Feb.  I'm the pragmatic one who believes there are no promises in life nor in the military, so I didn't expect news until March for our move in June/July.

After mid-March came and went, I began (tongue-in-cheek) asking my marine like an excited child every night, "Did we get orders yet?"at random moments, making both of us chuckle because we know that if he had gotten them, I certainly wouldn't need to ask him to tell me.  Now, I am not keen  on receiving the notice from my marine via a distracted, life-altering, phone call where he drops a  bomb at 7 AM and then has to rush to hang up and get back to work.  Most people do it that way since it's the most intuitive and natural.  I suffered through that once (he was randomly accepted to a school to which he did not apply, which uprooted him a year or two early from 29 Palms several  months after we had met in CA.  He found out when a Colonel shook his hand randomly while passing in a hallway to congratulate him on his acceptance, much to my marine's shock) and prefer to never have it happen like that again, where I'm left to get through the longest day ever, carbonated                   thoughts bubbling up and me trying to tamp them down until we get home and can pop the cork      together.

THE. REVEAL
So, I am not working, since often the timing of my employment 'under-laps' (I try to avoid overlaps!) with our moves.  I have been booking gigs as an extra on Vampire Diaries and teaching an art class to pay for a fancy gym  membership (heated pools in & outside, sauna,jacuzzi, new equipment, classes  galore) and I love it.   Since I make it a point to not let my life revolve around my marine's work hours (no clock-watching, texting when will u b home? Eta?), I was coming home from the gym one night and I opened the front door to darkness, the odor of char/smoke, and Dr.Dre's "California Love"  blaring.  Then, I turned and saw my marine standing next to the dining room table (with lit candles atop gluten free cupcakes from Gluten Free Cutie) with the most enormous, dazzling smile, arms outstretched, wearing a t-shirt with the California state flag on it.  Never one to make assumptions, I broke through the noise of the music to ask if it was 29 Palms (desert, where he was when we met) or Camp Pendleton (beach, his perennial first choice that he never has gotten). His response was to                                                             make a surfing motion and say, "Babe, if it was 29 (Palms), I'd be blowing sand in your face with a hot blow dryer right now."  We hugged and his smile hasn't faded since.  He is on Cloud 9.

MY THOUGHTS
 I'd have preferred Hawaii or Europe (our 2nd and 3rd choices since my choice of Atlanta won out last time so I let him pick the first spot), but am ecstatic that he finally got his dream job in his dream locale.  Having resided in SoCal for 13 years, I was not in a hurry to go back just yet.  I own a home in California, but it's too far from the military base for us to live in it.  Plus, I'm in this life for the adventure of it.  That said, even after all that time, I have never lived by the beach nor been north of San Francisco in that giant, banana-shaped state! So, the relief of not getting Camp Lejeune (North Carolina military town where I probably would have to live in Charleston to keep my sanity, forcing my marine to drive 4 hours to visit me on weekends) coupled with his elation and beach living has  me brimming with excitement for our next  chapter.  Stay tuned...                                                            

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Life...On Pause

Many people sum up military life with the phrase "hurry up, then wait".  After over 4 years of military life, I agree. We are on the last few months of his 36 month B-billet (random job in between deployments/real job assignment).  This means, my marine, who is trained as an infantry officer, was selected by a board of Colonels (and Generals?) to command the Recruiting Station in Georgia for the Marine Corps.  

From billboards to medical processing to the boot camp bus, my marine is in charge of 15 recruiter stations for most of the state of Georgia.  Over 100 marines and over 900 kids waiting to get into the USMC are his responsibility.  His boss is in another state, so the buck stops with him.  While he loves teaching his recruiters how to give presentations to classes of high school kids, giving speeches himself at Glazier Football Coaches Clinics and H.S. Principal Conferences on Leadership and Ethics,

The U.S. Marine Corps is renowned for its leadership and organizational strategies.  This is why my marine has met with Atlanta's Mayor Reed as well as Glazier Football Coaches clinics (!shameless! brag alert:  my marine has been rated #2 speaker in the nation at these clinics, just behind SF 49ers coach Jim Harbough).  He has also been invited to speak at many school and community events, especially around Veteran's Day.

and just helping his wo/men make their mission and fulfill the dreams of young people toward becoming marines and young leaders, his heart belongs in the field/the fleet, training a battalion for deployment or preparing humanitarian missions for disaster relief across the globe.  It kills him to think that the leathernecks he trained are deployed without him.  Marines don't want to be "sitting on the bench", they want to be "in the mix", using their skills and doing what they do best. 

 For more on the often asked question, "Why do they like and want to deploy?" watch Battleground Afghanistan (my grunt would be equivalent to the guy who never sleeps on there, the Captain, since he hasn't deployed as a Major yet) and read the book No Easy Day.  That book is about the Seals, but the writer conveys the attitude about yearning to deploy to a tee.  If you watch Army Wives, as I'm often asked, my equivalent would be closest to Denise, although TV moves their careers much faster, so we are a rank or two below where they were, last I checked.

My marine is what is lovingly and proudly known as a "grunt" in the Corps.  Uber-smart, National Merit Scholars, who earned full college scholarships have a plethora of career opportunities open to them.  But, even as a child, he was often wearing military clothing and running around the woods in Florida with a fake rifle planning battles.  His mother has a Mother's Day mug made by him in 3rd grade that has tanks and big explosions drawn all over it.  His mother was a teacher and his father an artist, so being a marine seemed to have come out of nowhere.  We now know it was his calling.  As an only child, the marines are his true brothers.  He is a charismatic, natural born leader.  I can't imagine him ever working in a cubicle.

So, while recruiting isn't any grunt's first choice of duty station (the 2011 Military Spouse of the Year proclaimed Recruiting Duty as far worse than 4 deployments due to the stress and 70+ hour work weeks), we have made the best of it, and enjoyed living more of a "civilian life", away from military installations.  We have explored and completed a bucket list of activities for the state of Georgia, from hiking the Appalachian Trail, to visiting Martin Luther King's church.  Now, we are ready to say, "Bye, y'all"!

Image courtesy of DigitalArt at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So, we will move in a few months.  And the destination is yet "unknown".  We submitted our geographical preferences.  Any day now, he will come home from work with a present for me to open.  Inside will be some token or trinket symbolic of our next duty station.  It will be our 4th move in 6 years.  Then the pause button will be lifted and a frantic house-hunting, budgeting, and packing mission will begin.  We are on this adventure together.  I had my dream career as a teacher for 13 years.  I'm happy and proud to support him in his 15th year of his dream career.