Weekend at Donley's ...

I spent the weekend following around the Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Donley, as he traveled around to several bases and visited with Airmen. It's cool because I did the same sort of thing last time I was deployed with Michael Wynne, the SecAF at the time. We went to like eight different bases and he spoke to hundreds of people. Everyone and their brother wanted a picture with him (okay, I did too ...) so my job was to said pictures. Which was a fantastic opportunity. Until my camera broke ...

Right before I'm supposed to get on the plane, the shutter and autofocus go out on me. So there I am trying to make the thing work and for the life of me can't figure it out. The shutter speed adjuster won't go past 250, won't autofocus and I have to double tap the button to take a picture. Can not for the life of me figure out what happened. So I had to beg, borrow and steal cameras from other public affairs offices, which were very helpful and generous, to do my job. But there were still times when I had to use my D3. So I had to manuall adjust for lighting, speed, focus and hit the button twice every time. Or as my fellow picture takers call it, photography ...

For now I'm just trying to get ready for my next trip out. I've got almost 3,000 pictures to go through because everyone wants their photo, which is understandable. I mean, even Yoshi was demanding I get his photo out ...

Actually the Secretary was pretty cool about it. But the best was while I was headed to Jalalabad (side note: it's my second time to Jalalabad and I wrote about it last time while I was there; mostly about how fun it is to say: Ja-la-la-bad). So there I am on the C-130 (ugh) headed out to J-bad and I take a photo of Yoshi in a seat. The wing commander from Bagram Airfield, Brigadier General Steven Kwast, asks me about my dinosaur companion and I give him the quick version of the story - our youngest son loves Yoshi, I'm taking pictures of Yoshi's adventures around the Middle East. So he says to me, "Hey, you should take a picture of him with the three-star!" So yeah, Lieutenant General Gilmary Hostage (my new big boss out here) took a photo with Yoshi ...

Back on the homefront, I've been trying to work with Jennifer on getting the boys on track with their schooling as well as maintaining our own relationship. I'm still very much learning how to be a husband and father and it's difficult to do this from afar. Sending home videos, emails and pictures of Yoshi help. But next year, when she's deployed and *I'm* the one at home scares the heck out of me. I mean, I can barely feed myself, how am I going to take care of them?! But one issue at a time, right? My biggest challenge has been staying focused on my job because I'm so concerned about what's going on at home. But then again, I've had focus issues all week. Stupid camera ...