The mood here in Juarez del Norte is thick.  Thick with stress, thick with unexpressed anger, thick with everything that accents the sucky parts of Army life.  It’s assignment time (well, two to four months ago was assignment time).  There are those with unwelcome assignments, impending deployments, etc.  There are those for whom the Army can’t seem to get it together and then…

there’s us.  The AGRs are in a great state of flux that is hopefully ending soon.  Initially, the AGR MSG’s were going to be held over until after the SGM board results come out in July(How’s that for alphabet soup?).  Thankfully, someone put a bug in the right ear and that has changed.  Hopefully, we’ll have orders this week and hopefully they won’t be for Harlingen.  Wichita isn’t my first choice, but it isn’t Harlingen and that, my friends is something.

But the net effect of all this in-limbo-ness and this “I don’t want to go there”-ness is that everyone is cranky.  Rather than adapting a “Fuck it, let’s have some fun!” we’re all collectively kind of crawling into our shells and waiting for the moving trucks to arrive.  It sucks.  It escalates the suckiness of remedial Army kindergarten to a different level.  All this uncertainty and unhappiness dominates conversation and just makes us crabbier as we absorb our friend’s pissed off, add it to our own and pass it along the line.    Add a crabby-sick-of-school-this-is-a-total-waste husband in the picture and you may as well forget it.  We’re all crawling into our closets  and cleaning out our stuff and just waiting for this to be over with.  Unfortunately, without orders, no one knows when that will be.