BBQ anyone?

So Sunday night I had the "privilege" of briefing the Colonel in our office instead of the Brigadier General. The BGen is much more fun to brief b/c he asks questions that he truly wants to know the answer to. The COL asks questions to see if you really know your stuff. Part of the problem is that the COL goes to lots of meetings, so naturally he's going to have more information, and form his own ideas as to why certain things happen a certain way. Along that note, the COL "grilled me" so to speak. He asked a bunch of random questions, and while I knew most of the answers, there were a few that only he actually would know the answers to, do to his position as I said. At the end of the brief he literally asked me, "So is there any other event I can grill you on?" I said, "well I'm sure you could on all of them sir, but none of any significance!" That got people laughing and he moved on to other briefers. When I got done, one of my analysts said that he questioned me so much b/c #1 I'm a US officer (he's US Arm and an academy grad - he wears the big "academy ring" too) and #2 b/c I'm female and they don't get a lot of chances to "tease" women around here. Good thing I grew up with lots of teasing!



Speaking of Colonels, yesterday I ran into COL I. who was one of the commanders while I was in Baghdad last year! He was coming down our office steps from inspecting his sister unit at my base (he's stationed at Bagram-1 hr north of here). I couldn't believe that I saw him! What a small world it is! He didn't get very much time off after his last deployment either. It was funny b/c the major that he came to inspect was all nervous and wanted to make a good impression, and then as soon as I saw him I was like, "hey COL I. what are you doing here? How ya been..." we just started rambling and the major was all surprised that I was just shooting the breeze with him! I thought about calling him George, as that's his first name and he'd actually get a kick out of it, but I decided not to push it. It cracked me up too, b/c he called me Katie. 1-he remembered my name, and 2- not many people in the military know that name for me anymore. I prefer Kate for simplicity sake, but if a person wants to call me Katie, it doesn't bother me. Speaking of nicknames, on a random tangent, the newest one I have on this deployment is Katerina. It's the Greek variant of Katherine and Kiriakos (one of my analysts) doesn't like Kate, so he either calls me Katerina, or Boss. He says in his funny accent "whatever you want boss!" So cute!