Brad and I just returned last night from a 9-day vacation visiting family in Iowa and Georgia. Flying first to Des Moines, we attended the wedding one of Brad’s granddaughters and enjoyed visiting with relatives of his we hadn’t seen for a long time, including two of his three great-grandchildren. We rode out the severe storms that hit across Iowa on Sunday, the 25th. We were watching TV that evening and hearing about the tornado death toll in other parts of the state when they reported that Des Moines Airport was experiencing 70+ mph winds. We pulled back the thick drapes in our motel room and saw the storm in person as we were right across the street from the airport! Fortunately the motel stayed intact although we stayed busy for a short time using towels to soak up water when the seal on the window frames did not hold.

Our next stop was the Atlanta airport where my daughter, the Frugal Princess, and her husband and the two grandchildren met us. Of course it is always good to see Angela and her family and it is always hugs all around but I found it hard to stop hugging Steve – it was so good to have him home from Iraq, safe and sound. All we wanted to do the next 5 days was just bask in “ordinary” family activities, enjoying a completeness that had been missing when Steve was gone. 

Steve and his unit are back to work at Fort Benning for the 3-week “integration” process, with extensive physical and mental evaluations and classes to help the soldiers readjust to life back home, including one that includes spouses. Since Steve is a 1st Sergeant and his main job responsibility is to deal with soldier problems, he sees first-hand the extreme pressure that long separations have on family relationships. He is looking forward to the 30-day block leave the unit will enjoy starting next week. And after that leave time, he will be back on duty but it won’t be long until he will be in the wind-down phase of his Army career, with retirement in the early fall.

Today Brad and I will be trying to recover from jetlag, but in-between a lot of rest periods, we have our post-trip duties: Brad does the unpacking and I catch up on computer backlog and paperwork. Since we were gone the whole last week of May, when I would usually work on the next month’s schedule, my main job is to “do” our complete June calendar. I have a stack of casino mail to process and I will go through it piece by piece, putting each to-do item on my plain old-fashion yearly calendar “hard” book. I tried to do a computer calendar but it just didn’t suit me. I like to see the whole calendar laid out flat in front of me. I write in pencil so I can easily erase as things change, which they do quite often when you are dealing with casino schedules. 

Right now June has only a few entries on it. By tonight it will look like all the previous months – awfully busy considering we are “retired.” Of course, not every entry is casino-related. At our age, medical appointments are frequent. But time I write in all the tournaments, all the free-play pickups (usually around 35-40), all the promotions, few of the 30 boxes of June will be empty.

This probably sounds like “too much work” to many gamblers. And sometimes we can’t decide whether playing video poker is “work” or “play.” But I do know that we have been successful financially in our gambling for 22 years because of my long hours of pre-planning. In fact, I probably like the planning part of gambling as much as and sometimes even more than the play itself. Brad and I are a good pair, because he doesn’t like to plan – he’s big on doing whatever comes into his mind at the moment. So I plan each month, but he doesn’t bother looking at the calendar. Then each morning, I tell him what the plan for the day is and that is fine with him. He doesn’t have to think about it or make any hard decisions.

About 4 or 5 days a week, the plan of the day is for the two of us to go out and carry out the plan, which might include any one or more of the following: a doctor’s appointment; several free-play pickups in the same area; playing at one or two casinos; tournament play; shopping; eating on a casino comp, alone or with friends; seeing a comped movie or show. 

We rarely go out and do just one thing. I like to organize our time by doing several things in one day so I have 2 or 3 days a week when I can stay home and have what I call my “nightgown day.”   This is the time for planning and reorganizing our gambling schedule (something I continue to do all month long), writing, and doing personal and business paperwork. (I never seem to get to the bottom of my Inbox.)

Brad rarely stays home for one whole day. He may fool around the house all morning, but by afternoon he is ready to go do something. That’s good because I have plenty on the calendar he can do without me. He does all the grocery shopping, the banking, the trips to the post office, and other household errands. His biggest job is picking up our casino bounce-back since at almost every casino where we play you can pick up another person’s free play if you have their PIN number.   He likes to joke that he probably is the only husband in America whose wife every morning tells him he has to go out to a casino and gamble. Back after he had a heart attack and before he developed atrial fibrillation and couldn’t have alcohol, I also would tell him to order a glass of red wine. “And she not only makes me gamble, she makes me drink too!”

He likes “messing around” in casinos, where he can spend some time in the sports book, watching a game or the horses and dogs run. He doesn’t always play on these “independent” casino days. At some casinos you wouldn’t play because it would spoil your daily average. And he doesn’t play high denominations without me - I schedule our major play when we can do it together. We like to have a shoulder to lean on when we might be losing thousands of dollars!! But if he is picking up free play where there is a positive quarter game like full-pay deuces wild and daily average isn’t a factor, he might play a couple of hours “just for fun.” People are always amazed when they see him play quarters when they know we usually play much higher than that, but he just likes the challenge of gambling – at any level.

Oops, this has been a long blog entry but I wanted to catch you up after being silent for so long. But I must sign off – I have tons of planning still to do!!

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What a flood of happy comments, both on the blog page and privately, on Steve’s return from Iraq. I will see that he gets all the kind messages that are being sent his way. Although the war is highly criticized all over the place, I can see that most people are supporting the soldiers even when they don’t support the war itself.   Some have asked about Steve’s future plans. After a couple of work weeks getting organized back at Fort Benning, the unit will have 30 days leave. (The running joke is that the maternity wards in area hospitals circle the month of February on their calendars and prepare for a baby boom!)   Then as the rest of the unit goes back into training for their re-deployment back to Iraq in May 2009, Steve will be winding down his 20+ years in an Army career, preparing for retirement in the fall. Since he will be only 39, he will be looking for a civilian job and/or going back to college to finish the 2 years he needs to complete an undergraduate degree. But whatever he does, both he and his family will be glad that he will be doing it in Columbus, Georgia. Those 20 years full of long stretches of being separated will finally be over.   Brad and I will be flying to GA the end of this month and we look forward to seeing Steve for the first time in almost 2 years and visiting with the whole family.  

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