Out of sync

I've been out of my routine lately, which makes me anxious.

The disruptions have all been good: Vacation travel to Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, and getting my son David packed and moved to New York City for graduate school at Columbia University.

All good things.

And yet I'm unsettled.

I think that's what happens when you're your own boss.

I had high expectations of others to fulfill their responsibilities and meet their deadlines when I worked as a manager in newspapers. I have that same expectation of my employee -- me -- now that I'm working for myself.

I had been a Type A personality all through my work life.

My hope after retiring from newspapers a couple of years ago was that maybe I'd downgrade a bit -- to a Type B+, or at worst a Type A-. But I'm still locked in as a Type A -- feeling at times anchored to a set schedule.

Gone are the paid vacations. It's pretty simple math for a freelancer. If you don't work, you don't get paid.

So the trick was to fit some kind of a work schedule into the loosely structured vacation schedule. It was a little bit like a square peg in a round hole, but if you put enough effort into it you can actually get the square peg a bit into the round hole.

I was up before everyone else to do some work. When some of the crowd went shopping at the outlets, I passed and did some work. (For the record: I'll always take a pass on shopping as a vacation activity.) In the couple of hours between the beach and dinner, I'd sneak in some work time.

The other thing you can do when you're pressed for time in a disrupted schedule is just shorten each task.

That said: Talk to you next week, schedule permitting.

Going to bat ... for bats

I'm not sure which piece of news was more upsetting last week.

That Red Sox first baseman Kevin Youkalis was having season-ending surgery.

Or that the little brown bats in the region are at risk.

Having to choose ... I'd say the bats.

Youk will come back from his thumb surgery. He'll be back at first base. Back at bat.

Researchers say, however, there's a good chance the bats may be wiped out -- totally gone from the species line-up -- within 20 years.

I'm distressed because I love bats -- love the fact that they, like dragonflies, are voracious mosquito eaters.

Any enemy of the mosquito is a friend of mine.

The little brown bat can eat its body weight in mosquitoes over the course of an evening. That's many fewer mosquitoes that might be looking to bite me. And that's many fewer mosquitoes that be carrying Eastern Equine Encephalitis or some other unknown plague.

I'm a big fan of mosquito control. I've purchased dragonfly nymphs over the years and planted them in ponds where I work and at home in an effort to cull the mosquito population.

Apparently the little brown bats have a deadly disease -- a fungus called Geomyces destructans.

Researchers believe the fungus irritates the bats and they wake up during their winter hibernation, expending precious body fat in the process. The bats then leave the caves and mines only to die because there's no food -- no mosquitoes -- during the winter.

Unfortunately, we humans may be to blame for wiping out a species that is so helpful to us.

The fungus was probably introduced into the bat population by humans, who are immune to it, visiting caves.

According to a recent Boston Globe article, authorities have closed an enormous number of the nation’s caves and mines to tourists and “cavers”, who explore the crevices and tunnels deep in the earth.

Everywhere in the Northeast people report seeing fewer bats taking flight at dusk from their usual haunts.

I used to have bats fly from the small barn on our property where we keep lawn equipment and other stuff. Haven't seen any bats in a while.

I just love watching their aerial maneuvering as they'd eat the evening away.

I have to say. I miss Youk. I miss the bats more.

History does repeat itself

Vietnam was my generation's war. My generation fought it on the orders of our elders

Afghanistan is a new generation's war. It is being fought on the orders of the new elders -- Baby Boomers.

You'd think we would have learned from our history. Today's Afghanistan is yesterday's Vietnam, and there seems no clear way out.

It's eerie, this sense that we've been here before.

Vietnam had the Viet Cong. Afghanistan has the Taliban. Vietnam had guerrilla attacks. Afghanistan has IUDs. Vietnam had the Pentagon Papers. Afghanistan has WikiLeaks. Vietnam had presidents Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican. Afghanistan has presidents George Bush, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Back then, the political justification for fighting in Vietnam was the Domino Theory -- if we let one country fall to Communism then the dominoes would fall under Communist domination. The political justification for Afghanistan is global terrorism -- we root out the evil doers there and we'll unsow the seeds that grew the 9/11 attacks and the many attacks worldwide since.

We tried to do it then, as we're trying to do it now, by propping up a corrupt central government with American money and American troops.

In Vietnam it was Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu. In Afghanistan it's Hamid Karzai.

And we're stalemated. Whatever progress that is made in one area is undone in another area. And we constantly worry, as we did in Vietnam, whether the masses of civilian population really support their government and the efforts of U.S. troops.

When newsman Walter Cronkite questioned the sense of continuing the Vietnam War in a CBS broadcast in 1968, he said, in part: "To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion."

Johnson, upon hearing the broadcast, said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Johnson, of course, bailed as president, deciding not to run for re-election, leaving it to Nixon to continue the fight and, ultimately, give it up.

Maybe it's time for Brian Williams, the current dean of American news anchors, to reach the same conclusion on Afghanistan on an NBC news broadcast.

Afghanistan has become our longest war, a different war certainly than the world wars, but not so different from Vietnam. July was its deadliest month with 60 American casualties.

When will we ever learn?