Thanks, taxpayers!

Thanks for footing the bill for Sean to go do service work running a humanitarian medical clinic in Africa. There isn't much need for radiologists at most charity clinics since they don't have the expensive equipment on which to shoot the studies, so until this point we had just been donating part of his moonlighting money to help run those clinics instead. Sean did some primary care rotations ten years ago, so not sure if he is actually qualified for this job but army needs a warm body that hasn't been over-deployed already. They will now pay him tax free which is a huge break for us. Less tax dollars for the government to spend though, so it's not us sponsoring the trip. Also, as a radiologist, he is one of the highest paid people in army and no doubt the highest paid humanitarian aid worker ever. Doubt we would have ever taken 6 months to do charity work for free, truth be known. Oh, and they will pay a civilian contractor $200,000 to fill in for him while he is gone. But the hospital felt that Sean was the best candidate to fill this role (again, the role of a primary care doctor or if he is just going to do the admin tasks of running the clinic then ANYONE could have done it). I don't know why we have such a big budget deficit in this country, by the way. It's certainly not from overpaying primary care doctors though, who are much abused and taken for granted. No wonder army can't keep most of them around.

We have talked a lot these past few years about our spoiled children who take everything for granted and how we could get them some perspective. Even driving them through the "not good" neighborhoods around here wouldn't work because all they would notice is that a lot of those people have more toys and pets in their yard than us. So this will actually be very good for them to learn all about where Sean is going and who he is going to be helping. They won't be happy that he is missing Anna's first communion and that we will probably cancel all vacations until he gets back in the fall, but we'll get on a schedule and get used to it. We are NOT telling the children this news for a few more weeks to lessen the crabby time. So please do not bring up this subject around them.