Work: these days and upcoming summer

These days work has been going pretty smoothly, so I mostly just try to keep busy. I'm focused on enjoying the comforting regularity I currently have, and try to keep from worrying about a potential future deployment or job change.

This past Friday, though, I got assigned my first FLIPL (Financial Liability Investigation of Property Loss). That's the investigation the battalion commander orders whenever there's a significant property loss.

Although the company in which the loss occurred had conducted it's own inquiry, my job is to go around and ask follow up questions and document my findings. It's kind of cool -- I get to be the lieutenant colonel's "personal representative" for the next week.

In a couple weeks, we'll also go through a convoy live fire exercise. That's not quite as exciting, but it'll break up the monotony. We had a dry run a few days ago, and we did well enough. There's no doubt the field exercise we did a while back gave us good experience at not looking like bumbling fools.

In the next few months, I'll have some fun moments. In May I turn 35, and as a sort of birthday present I'll get promoted to first lieutenant in early June, just before our second baby comes. The extra $500 raise that accompanies the promotion will be just in time.

Later that month I'll reach my one year mark as a platoon leader. That's significant because I might have an opportunity to move on to some other job in the battalion, maybe executive officer of some company or a staff job in HQ.

In July I'll reach my two-year mark in the Army, which will bring another $400 per month, and I'll get my second of three student loan repayments. (The figures are all public knowledge by the way -- government salaries are no secret.) There's a certain "Christmas in July" aspect to all this .

I'm also shooting to take my Language Proficiency Test for Korean about that time; hopefully I can pass and get an extra $200 per month.

So the summer of 2010 will be a fun one, assuming the heat isn't as bad as last year.