Todd's Blog

For a number of years now, I've been saying that I'd "kind of like" to be able to do my home business full-time (as in it provides a significant portion of our income) after I retire from the military. But if you asked me to name a specific reason, the best I could usually come up with is that I'd like to avoid the stress of looking for another job. Woops ... I've had a negative "why". As you can probably guess, although having a continuously profitable home business for over 10 years now could certainly be considered successful in relative terms; if I had to retire from the Air Force tomorrow, I wouldn't yet have enough of a regular income to avoid a job search. Clearly I need a stronger motivation to build my home business income. I retire from the military at the end of 2013, so I've only got two years to figure this out. Last Friday, the girl's school had a military dad's lunch, in honor of Veteran's day. I got to go eat lu

I spent a little bit of time today, getting my uniforms together, and building my "72 hour" bag for my upcoming deployment. I'll most likely finish packing the night before I leave ... that's just how I roll. But at least I was able to start getting things ready while I was home today. And even better, my 3 year old daughter Jaiden spent about 25 minutes helping me .. and that's not even "help" in quotations ... she actually did help me. One of the 1st lessons I learned about Army support 6 or 7 years ago, is that when you go to the field, you should pack your clothes in gallon sized ziplock bags before putting it into your rucksack. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way, back in 2007, that this rule also applies when preparing for a regular deployment to a fixed base. When I went to Iraq the first time, for some reason I just stuffed all my clothes into my rucksack, and big "body bag". When we got to Al Udeid, Qatar, I took my little back