The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

My latest post is up at Milspouse.com: ‘Waiting (Im)Patiently.

We submitted our list of preferences about 6 weeks ago, and we were supposed to find out the first week of this month—then it got pushed back a week. I knew that somewhere mysterious decision-making machinery was churning out our future, but I was vague on the details. Did they spin a wheel on a cubicle wall somewhere? Did they throw darts? Roll dice? So Danielle explained the ‘ranking and stacking’ process to me while we ate breakfast, which, sort of, cleared things up.

So, where are we going? I’ll go ahead and spoil the surprise—we’re going back to Norfolk—but read the post anyway.

We’re relieved to be going back to Norfolk. Danielle and I had had a lot of conversations about where to try for next, and we were leaning to Everett, Wash., from the beginning. It would have been somewhere completely different for both of us. We would have been near Seattle. We would have been near Portland. We would have been near Northern California wine country (sort of). But we would have been far away from everything else (though I do have family in California, and maybe we could have ganged up on the Midwestern Faction and gotten them to come West for the holidays, for a change).

That line of thought, though, was a pre-baby line of thought. Had it just been the two of us, we might have pushed harder for Everett, but instead, we included just one ship out of Everett in the top ten list (read the Military Spouse post if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

We concentrated most of the list on destroyers out of Norfolk. See, we can go back to Virginia knowing where everything is and, more importantly, knowing we’ll have friends in the area. That’s going to be key for Sean and me.

I know the city will have changed some over the last several years, and that some of the people I knew will have moved on, but it still feels like a homecoming of sorts.