As I mentioned last week, since mid-June, Dustin has been a geographical bachelor, which is a servicemember who lives apart from their spouse and children, due to their assigned duty station and status conflicting with their family's plan,Dustin is still in Pensacola, Fla., finishing up his tour there, and I am in Smithfield, Va., staying with my parents, because we are moving to Bangor, Maine, eventually. Hey, it made sense in the beginning.

Last week I shared with you that Dustin is learning a lot during his time alone. Mainly (1) cooking for one is not much fun, and (2) weekends are the worst.

He's also discovered the following:

I wasn't kidding when I said doing laundry in a hotel room is hard.
When we were living in the Navy Lodge shortly after we sold our house in Florida, doing laundry consisted of these steps: get laundry off floor and put it in basket; convince boys to put down XBox controllers and put on their shoes; balance baby on one hip and basket on the other; ask Ford to pick up underwear that falls out of basket along the way; go up stairs because elevator is broken; go back down stairs to get forgotten quarter; pay 75-cents again because dryer didn't work the first time; take bra out of baby's hand; find older boys who have now escaped and gone down the broken elevator and are stuck between the first and second floors. Repeat eight more times.

When Dustin called the other night, he asked, "So what did you guys do today?" I said, "Laundry," and he said, "That's all?"

Yesterday, Dustin did laundry at his temporary home, the BOQ (Bachelor Officers' Quarters). Over the phone, he told me how inconvenient laundromats are, and how much he appreciates our washer and dryer (that's me, by the way).

And he didn't have two kids and baby with him.

When the cat is away the mouse will go golfing.
Dustin doesn't get to play many sports when the boys and I are living with him. After I've spent a day retrieving Darth Vadar from the bottom of the commode and getting bubble gum off the bottom of the baby's shoe, it's "Dustin's turn" to help when he gets home ... so that I can make everyone dinner, of course. My grandmother Doris says this whole "his turn" thing is a new phenomenon. "There was no 'his turn' when I was raising kids," she says. "It was all 'my turn.'" Accordingly, my grandfather did whatever he pleased when he came home from work. My grandfather also didn't know how to open a can of soup.

Last spring, I wanted to play softball for the church league. "How will you do that with the kids?" Dustin asked. "You can't expect me to come home to watch the boys."

He had a point. I didn't join the team. A few days later, Dustin came home with a baseball shirt with his squadron's logo on it.

"What's this?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm going to play on the squadron's baseball team," he said.

What followed next was a bunch of words that my editor won't print here.

I suspect Dustin is playing a lot of baseball now that he is alone.

But he's also golfing every day that he isn't working. He's golfing so much, he thinks he needs new golf clubs. I guess he's forgotten that his geographical bachelor days are almost over.

It's quiet when you're alone.
When Dustin was on deployments, I always fell asleep with the television on. It kept me company. But I didn't watch just anything. I fell asleep to the news. When you watch sitcoms or reality television, the characters all speak to each other, not to the camera. People on the news speak directly to you, the viewer. That helped me feel less alone when I was going to sleep at night.

I don't think Dustin is falling asleep to Larry King, but I know that on several occasions I've called his room, woke him up, and heard the television still going in the background.

"It's real quiet without you guys here," he said the other night.

I guess you could say that Dustin is also learning that he misses us. We miss him, too.