Perspective & Our Week

I think the main problem I have in dealing with Rob being gone--and with my anxiety in general--is a lack of perspective.

Rob was telling me when he first got home that when his fellow Hotshots complained about losing a day off that was initially promised or something else relatively minor, he'd always remember that at one time he had it a lot worse and how much worse his situation could be.

Specifically he reminded me of what happened to a Stryker unit out of Alaska who was returning home from deployment right around the time he was gone.  After 12 months in Iraq, the decision came down that deployments would begin to last 15 months instead; as a result of some horribly brazen decision made by some fucker sitting in a nice office, soldiers who were literally on the runway getting ready to reunite with the loved ones had to go back to Iraq for an additional 3 months.  Rob told me that no matter what happens, he isn't one of the guys on that plane, and any hardship he confronts now by its nature can't be as horrible as that.

My husband is much better at maintaining perspective in this way.  In contrast, when I'm upset at something minor I'm generally at the same level of anxiety that I would be in a much, much worse situation.  I think this is where the discrepancy comes in our stress levels when one of us is away, and why sometimes it seems (to me) like I'm "missing him more" than he misses me.

Anyway Robbie becomes available and on-call as of Friday, and I'm hoping that with each fire this will get slightly easier.

So here's a recap of our week, which has mostly been Rob's weekend since he's had the last three days off.

Since last year we instituted the tradition of birthday week, I got to pick most of what we did this week.  Rob took me out to lunch at the Coyote Cafe (fucking yummy) and P.F. Chang's (yes, again).  On Thursday, he made me grilled cheese and a margarita, and for dinner made me turkey-feta-onion burgers with corn on the cob and wouldn't let me do any dishes.  I got pretty lucky el department de husbands.

Also, ignore how much I look like a little boy in a dress in the following photos.

Anyway I hope you're all having a great week so far.  I haven't been myself lately and I'm hoping to get back into blogging slightly more regularly; I just can't imagine that you guys want to hear "sat around the house staring at the TV screen all day"on every post.