Way down here you need a reason to move
Feel a fool running your stateside games
Lose your load, leave your mind behind, baby james

Oh, mexico
It sounds so simple I just got to go
The suns so hot I forgot to go home
Guess Ill have to go now

James Taylor is so wise.

I have a math head ache. That's when the area behind your eyes feels like its spinning because you have been thinking too hard.

Tomorrow afternoon I leave for Mexico. My to-do list is pretty extensive between now and then.

But then I'll be sitting on the beach drinking a margarita. And going SCUBA diving. And exploring old ruins like Indiana Jones.

I think that will help me with my brain headache. Especially since I've determined we're leaving all technology (laptop, phone, ipods, etc) behind... Just a book and a beach.

Since it already generated so much comment, I thought you (you know who you are) who are so opposed to women in combat should read this letter written by a woman who chooses to be in combat on the front lines in Iraq:

It is up to the individual American (man or woman) to make the choice to serve according to his or her capabilities and desires. What the public apparently thinks gender roles should be should not dictate legislation or hinder the inherent right of every American to choose to fight for his or her country...

By far the most important traits to have out here are intellect, discipline, and a hard work ethic. Those characteristics know no gender, either. I am an operations officer for a logistics regiment because I am good at it. I see more than a few men who are not effective in their mission-critical jobs because they lack basic leadership skills, have a weak backbone, cannot write well, or are not well-organized, etc. Or they have a combination of all of these traits. Why should good, well-trained, capable women have to leave the area of operations, then? And to be brutally honest, I can kill an insurgent as quickly as anyone. Except they do not stand and fight—-instead they hide exploding booby traps for us or lob us with indirect rounds. (Our convoys were hit with three IED’s—-and found another two-—just in the last week alone.) If they were within shooting range, ANY Marine would be more than happy to take them out. Hell, most of the insurgents are rather scrawny and short, and taking them down with some buttstrokes or other basic martial arts skills which we all learn is easily doable. We are here to kill the bad guys and to do it violently, and we do not take this awful task lightly. Bring it on.

Go read Girl Sailor for some more first hand accounts of women in the Navy. She just ran a series or responses to the accusation "Women are a distraction in the ready room."

If your XO says "women are distracting" he may mean he is distracted. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, other men may be, too? Thing is, you are there and if they are distracted they have to deal with it. If you acknowledge it you give them due respect but put the ball back in the XO's court (as leader) to handle it. I mean, if his men get distracted by one harmless person in the ready room, how will they handle AAA in Iraq? Now that's distracting.

My weekend: Party party party!

Oh, and Byron is home, yay! He totally surprised me with a bouquet of roses and by showing up at the doorstep at noon on Saturday when I assumed he was still asleep in his hotel room in Miami. He didn't surprise me completely, I started to get the idea he was on his way home about 30 minutes before he got to the door, so then I engaged in a game of "calling his bluff". Its still nice to have him back for however long he's here before IOE (that's his first actual trip with his new job).

Went to a Tres De Mayo party on Matt & Steph's beautiful patio. Their house has character. I want to live somewhere with character.

And of course, flying. I'd write all about it, but I don't have to, because Sarah's written about it, with pictures!

An amazingly brave woman, being prevented from doing what she does best...

Vice President Cheney pinned Brown, of Lake Jackson, Tex., with a Silver Star in March for repeatedly risking her life on April 25, 2007, to shield and treat her wounded comrades, displaying bravery and grit. She is the second woman since World War II to receive the nation's third-highest combat medal.

Within a few days of her heroic acts, however, the Army pulled Brown out of the remote camp in Paktika province where she was serving with a cavalry unit -- because, her platoon commander said, Army restrictions on women in combat barred her from such missions.

"We weren't supposed to take her out" on missions "but we had to because there was no other medic," said Lt. Martin Robbins, a platoon leader with Charlie Troop, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, whose men Brown saved. "By regulations you're not supposed to," he said...

Let me get this straight, the Army would rather go without a medic rather than have a woman do it? That's absurd. Regardless of what you think of the military and the war, men's and women's lives are of equal value. And in this case, not letting this brave woman do her job risks a lot of lives...

Hopefully clearer minds are prevailing. It looks like the military is slowly being pushing into considering revising their policies on women in combat - not just because in many cases they can do the job equal to any man, but also because of their own particular skills as women.

In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units -- not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them. Such war-zone pragmatism is at odds with Army rules intended to bar women from units that engage in direct combat or collocate with combat forces...

"The current policy is not actionable," concluded a Rand Corp. study last year on the Army's assignment of women. "Crafted for a linear battlefield," the policy does not conform to the nature of warfare today and uses concepts such as "forward and well forward [that] were generally acknowledged to be almost meaningless in the Iraqi theater," it said...

Military officers in the field and independent experts have said it is both infeasible and contrary to the Army's own warfighting doctrine to prevent women from serving in proximity to -- or together with -- all-male combat units in today's war zones. They contend that if the goal of the policy is to protect women from capture or bodily harm, it cannot be done in the scramble of conflicts such as those in the Middle East.

I passed my final cert sim. Yay me! I'm sure the training process I went through is as clear as mud to y'all, but that's a big deal. It rocks.

I was going to celebrate by going sailing. However, the wind was gusting to 30 mph last night. As that is enough wind to assuredly capsize the little boat I race, and swimming in Clear Lake is unpleasant to say the least, we didn't race. Instead I went and had the traditional post-cert margaritas. Yum.

An interesting article on last week's botched Soyuz landing. Aside from the interesting part, the author finished it off with a run-on sentence that clearly indicates to me he had his thesaurus open to the "p"-section:

Pusillanimous pussy-footing with Russian paranoia about their passion to conceal their 'dirty space laundry', and diplomacy-dictated toleration of brush-offs and continued cover-ups...