Hey I'm back! Drop that ball now, I'm ready for 2021!

 Well here we are.  Like so many years before.  The last day of the year.  I have somehow managed to make it another year and as always, I am going to try real hard to be optimistic about the new year.  I have generally been pretty good at seeing the good side of life and even though we are now in an incredibly dark times, I am hopeful, if not completely confident, that 2021 will be better for most of us than 2020.  

     When I first started this blog in 2006, I was starting a new phase of my life...my second military phase. When I go back to that first blog, where I told everyone who might be reading about myself, I am amazed on how hopeful I was about my future.  I was in a rut for sure back then.  Stagnant in my career, stagnant in my love life, stagnant in general.  Mind you, I had lots of good friends, a big yellow dog named Elvis and theater.  But yet, I was looking for something else.  I was going through a mid-life crisis.  What I found was the military.  I had always loved my time in the service, and I had missed it terribly.  And not only was I going to rejoin, but I was going to volunteer to go to Iraq!  That's crazy.  And I did it.  At the end of 2005 I was just Glenn Read, private citizen.  But by the end of 2006, just a year later, I was Staff Sergeant Glenn Read, US Army, stationed in Balad Air Base, Iraq.  I remember how happy I was thinking about the upcoming year. I would love to have that same naive spirit I had 14 years ago.  But the beginning of 2007 was not pleasant.  The war would would come to the war zone and I haven't felt the same since.  That's what reality does to you.  By the end of my time in Iraq, I had definitely been transformed both in a good way and a not such a good way.   2007 was about coming home.  But by the end of that year I was feeling like I left my home and my family (fellow soldiers) back in Iraq.

     And now, its 13 years since I came home.  I would deploy again a few years later, but somehow that deployment did not affect me as much as the first time.  I miss my soldiers.  I am going to try to reach out to them.  I feel like I need to fix somethings in my life.  So I am not doing resolutions.  I am just let this year go into history.  And I hope to tell you next year how great 2021 was.  Happy New Years.