I’ve been messing around with joomla a fair bit recently and have a new site up theraggedege.net. So far I think I really like it and plan on doing most any of my web related activities over there now and probably won’t be updating fallonz.com much if at all for the forseeable future. Joomal definatly makes managing the website easier albeit at the cost of some style. However I really don’t have any style or artistic tallent to start with, so that’s rather moot.
I expect I’ll keep doing a fair bit of tinkering with the templates until I can find something that isn’t too ugly, but hopefully most of the basics are there now.
I’ve gotten www.skybyes.com up and running. It’s secure, it’s got all the back end scripts for a new blog & an online store. There’s google analytics chugging away to figure out how/where people find her site from so we can figure out marketing stuff. It has absolutely no content what so ever yet… 
Hopefully Tera and Heather can get something up that doesn’t look worse than a 3 year old with a crayon, as that’s completely beyond me (my artistic skill tops out at aobut a 2 year old with finger paint). At least most of the back end stuff should be good to go when Heather gets some style stuff going and Tera gets some content.
Well, it’s been a while since my last blog entry, and the parental units were doing their best wounded puppy face thing over the phone last time we talked, so apparently I’ve been guilted into updating.
Australia and New Zealand were a blast. NZ was noticeably greener than the Pacific Northwest and incredibly scenic. Everybody down there is more or less as friendly as they try and advertise. Australia has rum and coke on tap…. On tap! Combine that with the best beef I can recall eating in the past 7 years (it’s not hard, I’ve been overseas on military bases eating nothing but frozen and cheap low quality junk) and eating at the DFAC on base is almost painful now.
My boss is doing his best to abuse me and injure me. I was barely able to walk the other day. Hopefully this whole “gym†thing will get me back into better shape. It’s nice being able to hit the gym during the day when there’s nothing much going on at the office. It’s one of the benefits of working for the military and kind of falling under military doctrine, including being fit to fight or “Army Strongâ€.
Tera is off in Kuwait for a Network+ class for a week. Allegedly it’s hellishly hot there and kind of miserable. It’s something else to consider about our thoughts of transferring to Kuwait at the end of this contract, which somehow started to sneak up on us (just over 3 months to go). Speaking of end of contract, we’ve got it narrowed down to somewhere between Colorado, Afghanistan, Kuwait, somewhere else in the Middle East, Antarctica, Australia & Europe. And by between, I mean geographically in between… which pretty much just rules out South America, Russia, Greenland & outer Mongolia. Some day we might get our future figured out… we hope.
I’m studying to renew my CCNA which expired about a year ago, and I’m assuming Tera might be trying for her Network+ certification given she’s in class for it right now. She’s taking time off from University of Maryland due to not having enough time with the pace of work at the HelpDesk, hopefully things won’t be quite so hectic here after the contract and whatever we move onto next. In the mean time I think were both going to bust out a couple of professional certifications.
Well, about time for me to run, will hopefully post again soon.
Sydney was Ok, we did a couple hop on hop off buss tours that were pretty decent. Opera house (don’t want to be in the 3.5% of all tourists that dont actually make it there) & Sydney harbor bridge were pretty impressive.
Everything you ever heard about New Zealand is wrong. It’s neon green, the best spring folage doesn’t from, Oregon doesn’t even come that close. The 5-6 days we had for Sydney were plenty, but I’m going to really wish we had an extra week or 4 for New Zealand. Nice people, nice beef… Oh the beef. I had a sirloin steak the other night that nearly made me cry. I ralized it’s been been at least 7 months, if not years since I’ve had a REALLY good steak. So tender, so tastey.
 Tera got her horsey fix, we still hurt from that., Saw hobbiton where the filmed the hobit town scenes for the LotY trillogy. Nice and picturesque.
Have to get up early tomorow, so calling it a night.
Well, were down here relaxing. Having spent the past 8 months in the Middle East, there’s not quite the foreign impact I was expecting, but it is a very nice western semi-touristy place.
Well, Tera and I take off for the airport about lunch time here today. I think were up to about 20 margaritas that were scheduled to drink on behalf of other people.
In homage to my father I have decided to rent a manual car for driving around wrong hand drive New Zealand. Hopefully I’ll be able to navigate a stick on the wrong side of the car as well as he did that year we lived in England.
Hopefully catching up with a couple of old friends when we hit Brisbane when were there. Not quite as much planned as I thought we’d have, but winging it always leaves more flexibility for finding cool stuff.
So I’m sitting in the mess tent eating breakfast with Mike and Kalie when I realize something isn’t quite right. At first I thought it was just the wind blowing the tent until I noticed my chair was wiggling as well.
No clue how big it was, or where, but other than a minor pause in eating breakfast nothing noteworthy happened here.
Edit: Magnitude 6.2Â 160 miles NNE of us here in Kabul. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2007asas.php
Nothing teriably exciting going on, lots of rain lately, and lightening the past couple of days. Were slowly finishing up details on our trip down under.
Well, we finally have tickets and a schedule (end of April & May) of what cities we’ll hit (Sydney, Auckland & Brisbane), but nothing beyond that yet.
Our schedule:
- If you have a Gmail and/or Google calendar
- If you don’t, use
- Or use if you know what to do with an
use it
We should be figuring out what all were going to end up doing here soon.
Oh, and ya, we heard the explosion this-morning, apparently it was a store full of black powder and/or ammo for hunting going up or something.
But they may take their sweet time in finally getting the mail out. Here in early March I finally got a copy of the Hanus Christmas Letter sent last year. I think it bounced through Kwajalein before comming to Afghanistan, but 3+ months? Daym.
And speaking of snow… Despite being bare shirt sleeve weather yesterday I woke up to find about an inch or 2 of snow on the ground and it’s been snowing pretty much all day. Of course it starts as soon as Tera gets to Ali Al Salem to fly back here. So Tera is sitting at Ali Al Salem and happens to be in the same tent as Kaile Howell. Kalie is heading over here to work as a VTC tech, and her husband, Mike, has worked in the NOC for about a year, with me.
As usual, Kalie’s paperwork is seriously messed up, so she’s been stuck in Kuwait for over a week waiting for things to get fixed so she can finaly come here to Afghanistan. Anyway the girls apparently were up all night lastnight talking about us. Mike and IÂ are sure that bodes ill for us. Either way were both hoping to see our wives soon, but seem to be conspired against by forces beyond our control.
Next Page »