Care packages

There's something both satisfying and very sad about sending a care package off to the hubs. The obvious is that it's satisfying knowing that the things that I have written, collected, crafted, touched, packaged, arranged just so and so forth will be in his hands, hopefully soon (poke, poke, army mail ;).

The sad bit is giving up the items I've been working on and sending them away. It seems odd, but I know that when they're out of my hands, they won't be coming back until he does. And then there's that other part of trying to figure out what to send next to top this one.

Luckily anyone going through separation these days is not the first to do so, and we have tons of ideas from those before us and amazing technology to make staying close easier.

Something I've been thinking of lately- I think there are really three things that bring out parts of a relationship that otherwise may be gloss-overable.

• traveling together
• playing games together and with groups
• conducting a long distance relationship

These three things more than anything else have taught me a lot about how we function together, how we overcome obstacles, what creates tensions and how we stay close through difficult times. Just my random thought for the day.

Vocab of the day: 
Military history lesson instead- the origin of CARE packages (WWII) and what was in them (1 pound of lard and liver loaf, for starters): http://www.care.org/about/history.asp

Tide out, tide in

So, the fabulous news is that I have a) acquired summer work and b) almost completely navigated through house negotiations to arrive at a sale.  And of course, after months of waiting and watching, above events happened within a day of each other.

I have discovered that the lovely hubs and I seem to have different processing for future stressful/intense events. I internalize immediately and begin my freakout, tapering off somewhere right before or shortly after said event. For example, deployment. Orders issued about three months before the move: instant Shannon implosion. I was still functional and mostly normal but it only took a tiny trigger to send me into worry mode- sappy movies, terrible commercials, a particularly nice day... bizarrely almost anything. It has been more or less steady suck until about a month after the deployment began and while things are still not fun, I feel like I've already put all my stress and worst-case-scenario thinking in and have exhausted my stash of worry. The recent bad news of Koran burnings has caused some stress, but honestly I've already been through most of it already. Which is kind of nice.

On the other hand, it seems that the hubs does less of this pre-projected worrying. Not to make a value judgement on it or say he's not aware of roughly the same things that have freaked me out for months, but it seems to be dealt with on a more case-by-case basis. Perhaps this is an evolutionary advantage- if we both hit the stress-ball stage at the same time, who is there to be reassuring? I find this pattern emerges in most of our major decisions, and in some ways I find it amusing- "Oh, I've stopped having nightmares about buying the wrong house and being trapped forever? About time for hubs to start voicing some concerns." I find it quite amusing now that I'm calming down overall.

Anyone else find this a trend in your partnerships?


Vocab of the day: 
Military: CIP = Community Involvement Plan

The horror...

Watched Revolutionary Road before bed. Now I kind of wish I had watched Saw instead.

In the midsts of trying to buy a house, that was not a good movie choice.