Whoa!

This whole senior advisor/senior spouse thing is still sorta freaking me out. Next week we will be having the entire brigade over for burgers and brats -- fortunately the entire brigade consists of about two dozen people so far. Whew.

But now I have to call a sergeant and tell him what I need from the unit for the BBQ. Weird. Like "Sergeant, I need some tables and chairs, and the Commander (woo. That's Mark. Again, weird.) will be tasking the various sections with bringing drinks and salads and stuff." Cannot begin to explain how strange this all is.

And to see Mark as the Commander. He was talking to a young soldier, and the soldier seemed kinda nervous. Yeah, because my husband is the big cheese. Hard to wrap my head around that one.

In other news, we are approaching the big race. Miles and miles and 70-some hours of sitting in a voyager canoe (a long canoe that can seat about a dozen people). I am not racing. Mark is, with seven friends, co-workers and complete strangers. It's the Yukon River Quest, if you want to google it. I have some photos of us in the canoe, still though trapped in the camera, since my computer is down. Still. With the blue error screen of severe annoyance.

(insert random and colorful swearing here. As spicy or tame as you would like. I am not fussy.)

This weekend they are doing more canoeing practice, so I will this time get a photograph of them in the canoe, from shore rather than from a middle seat. I really love canoeing, but sitting in a canoe for hours and hours and alll day and night and day and night and day and ....not for me.

Alrighty. Cannot sit here all afternoon. I must attempt to fetch a mower from self-help -- the Army hands out mowers and shovels and rakes and hoses and grass seed and various and sundry such items to those who live in government quarters -- our grass is getting ridiculously long. Except for the backyard, which suffered greatly under our dogs less than benevolent attentions over the winter.

Then I have to continue to clean and plan and obsess over this dumb brigade BBQ (it's really hard to remember to say Brigade instead of Battalion. Flailing around as the senior spouse, that's me...).

Plus the Army Birthday Ball is tonight, so I have various primping and preening and...let's just stop right there. I am wearing a dress, so all you ladies reading this know what I will be doing for the next several hours, and you gentlemen reading don't really want to know. Right? Right.

Hey! Two posts in less than a month? I am on fire!

I am around...

But very busy lately.

My computer has crashed, as well, which means I have to use Thor's to go online. Except Thor is home for the summer, so I have to compete with him for it. I don't always win...

Part of the reason I am so busy lately is that I am suddenly a "senior lady" and a "senior adviser"...that's what happens when your husband is the deputy commander of a brigade. Now I have new responsibilities and new meetings and social things to go to, which is great. I don't mind that part at all.

It might be a little weird for some of the spouses in our brigade, though, since I am so not the stereotypical LTC's wife, at least according to some enlisted spouses. I regularly hear how I am not at all like an officer's wife...

I am working on getting my photos -- which are on my external hard drive, not the crashed computer, thank goodness -- available for posting again, and I have a thousand digital copies of slides my father took, which means I can eventually, once I get this all straightened out, post photos of myself as a small and adorable child. Oh yeah, and my siblings, too. Not that they are or were as adorable as me.

Too cool...

I logged onto Librarything.com -- a very cool website that lets you catalog all your books, really handy when you have upwards of 2,000!!! -- and discovered a really great message was waiting for me...

Yesterday I logged on and noticed that the Early Reviewers list was about to close. Early Reviewers is a program through librarything.com -- you sign up and request a preview copy of books from various publishers. It's free, and there are usually a couple dozen books available with hundreds of people signing up for each one.

So today, I get the message that I have been chosen to receive a copy of This Will Kill You: A Guide to the Ways in Which We Go.

Here is the Amazon listing for this book...

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0312540620, Paperback)

Have you been attacked by a great white shark? Gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Been exposed to anthrax? No, you haven't, or you'd be dead. This Will Kill You reveals the intriguing facts behind the many ways humans bite the dust in encounters with deadly bugs, hungry predators, natural disasters, and freak occurrences. Thoroughly researched and illustrated, not to mention thoroughly hilarious, this book describes in deathly detail what happens to the body when it’s struck by lightning, slimed by a dart frog, or flung from a mountaintop.

No other book has ever peaked under the Grim Reaper's robe in such a straightforward and irreverent way. With a foreword by a physician at the Mayo Clinic , an afterword by a funeral director, lists of history’s most notable deaths, and a unique death rating system, everything you need to know about the ways in which we go are included in these pages.

This is great, because this is the book I would most have liked to receive. The one book on the list that I actually thought to look for. Yeah, I am a little weird and gory at times. I have a small collection of books on death and plagues and cholera and the Black Plague (and I just ordered a couple more plague books. I don't know why I am so interested in this stuff. I just am.)

So I will write up a review and post it here (and on librarything.com) once I have read it...