2011 - It begins :)

First post in 2011 and it only took me until Feb 2nd! Whoo hoo! I never really did listen to my christmas music. But I did spend a couple days with Peter in my MP3 player. I wish I could have gone to see him but it just didn't quite work out that way. Christmas was nice - a little weird but nice. It was just strange to not have anywhere we needed to go you know? We opened presents and sat at home, watched TV and played games. It was nice. Josh got the skateboard he has wanted for a while. It was a nice one too - I was rather proud of myself. Curtis got some posters so his room wouldn't be so naked, and his own Zune with a docking station. It was relaxed, and somehow not quite real feeling. Does that make sense?

Of course, 2 days after Christmas I got snow. It was awesome. Just these pretty little flakes floating down for a couple of hours. Nothing to shovel, nothing to drive in, nothing to stick and ice over, just enough to float down and look pretty. Perfect! New Years was pretty calm too. And now we are in 2011. Can you believe it? Where does time go?? So here we are getting ready for Aaron's deployment. I am not sure how I feel about that. I have known it was coming for a while - it is just more real now. I worry of course but for the most part I am fine.

I know some of the girls here think I am cold beccause I am not crying hysterical, or angry and yelling about how I don't want him to go, or crying about how I will miss him so much I don't know how I wll live. He is out on a field excercise for a week now and some of the girls are crying about how much they miss them and cant stand having them gone. All I can think of is - seriously? It's 4 days! Get a grip. But then I am not a young newlywed so what do I know. Personally I find a week to myself relaxing. Is that bad? Maybe because I have been expecting for a while it easier for me? I mean - he did join the army in the middle of a war - we knew he would deploy sometime. Thats a given isn't it? How could you not expect this? If you didn't want to go - you shouldn't have joined. I know me and the kids will be fine. I work, my kids are older so I know I will be busy. My routine just wont change much. To be fair if it was me and a couple toddlers and no job - I could see this as daunting. Oh well.

On the plus side - where they are going they should have the internet at least part of the time so he gets to skype! Whoo hoo! So I guess it is just cuddle as much as I can while he is here and go from there. :)

Welcome Winter -- I think

It was cold this morning. Really cold. Like 35 degrees. Yes mom I know it is much colder there but when it was 80 on Sunday 35 is cold. I actually had to turn on my heater. Which is a good thing really because it is hard to get in the Christmas spirit when you still have to use the a/c in your car. I think I miss snow. Not driving in it - and certainly not plowing it, but the way it looks on the trees and the grass. I go outside and look at my little palmetto plant by the door and think to myself - yes, it will be a different winter here for sure.

I hope to get a Christmas tree soon. I really want to put it up to really get in the mood. Because I have to say planning this company Christmas party is really sucking the spirit out of it for me. I am almost done shopping for the kids though. Yay! But my kids are the only ones getting presents and they only get a couple. Everyone else gets cookies and love. Sorry guys - it's all I can do.

I just realized I havent listened to any Christmas music this year. Maybe that's the problem. I need me some Peter. He will be in Tennessee in January, it's only 8 hours away. I wonder if I could afford to go. That would be awesome.

Thats all I have now. Love ya!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I am not even going to mention how long it has been since I posted. I would like to say I was too busy, but since I have the Internet at work that's really not much of an excuse. Honestly - it is just pure laziness. Couple that with the fact that I prefer reading to writing and add in my basic hermitness and that equals crappy blogger. :)

Anyway - let's see what has been happening in the world of the Smith's in Georgia. The heat finally broke. I think we were in October before our heat index went down under 100. It has been a very pleasant upper 70's to mid 80's the last week or two with a nip in the mornings that is nice. Maybe sometime in December I will need to turn my heater on. I don't miss driving in the snow but I have to admit that it certainly doesn't feel like it's almost Christmas. It makes it a little harder to get into the spirit of things you know?

Otherwise - life moves on. Josh had stomach surgery a week before Halloween. He was complaining about a stomach and I just kind of brushed it off. I mean - it was just a stomach ache right? But he kept complaining and said it was getting worse and he started crying. Then I realized he didn't have school the next day so he wasn't trying to get out of anything and I felt bas because he looked like he was really hurting so I took him in to Winn. (The on-post hospital, it has a urgent care in the ER) They said his stomach felt full so they did an x-ray, then they did a cat scan. Several hours later the doctor came in and said there might be something but it was probably nothing but just in case they were transferring us to the Bacchus Children's Hospital at Memorial in Savannah since they don't really deal with kids. I said, um ok. So we rode in an ambulance to Savannah at 4:30 in the morning. When we got there the doctor looked at the cat scan and said his intestine was kinked and we need to do surgery. Now. I said sure and 20 minutes later he was in the ER. I guess all the stuff they did when he was a baby left some scar tissue that grew and stretched as he did until it finally kinked that intestine. *sigh* But after 4 days they said go home, and we did, and now he is fine. Except that the scar he had from before is just a little longer and a little crooked because it swerves around his bellybutton. I told him his old scar was the "cut here" line.

Curtis finally got his braces off last week and I finally made my last payment to the orthodontist! Hooray! Now he better floss those suckers religiously!

I went to Oktoberfest in Savannah. It was awesome. They had all these little booths everywhere (which is really why I go to any festival) and I found two awesome artists. One is photographer and the other a painter. Loved them. Aaron found a life size model of Marylin Monroe and loved her too. A little too much according to some photographic evidence I have. :)

Haven't been to the beach in a while and I miss that, but I did get to drive out to South Carolina to see my sister last week! Yay for family moving close! Well...closer. Within driving distance. Ok easy day trip driving distance. For anyone but my father who probably thinks 10000 miles is day trip driving distance. Anyway - you get the picture. And I get to go back in a couple days for Thanksgiving! Yay for turkey (and Adrian's stuffed mushrooms)!

Now if I could only get all the details of our FRG Christmas party settled to everyone's satisfaction that would be great!

Family Update!

It hasn't been a really exciting couple of months. The boys are doing well in school. Josh makes friends as easy as breathing so he is always over at someones house or has someone over at ours. I wish Curtis had it as easy but he doesn't seem to have anyone he hangs out with. I know a lot of it is because there are a million kids Josh's age around here but just not many Curtis' age. I'm not sure what to do about that. He seems fine and says he is but still. He is doing well in classes but missed to cutoff day to try out for football so he wasn't able to do that. I want to sign him up for Tai Kwan Do or something. We will see.

Josh is playing football on post and is playing pretty well. Aaron is coaching and has decided football is a lot harder to coach than baaseball. Especially dealing with the parents. But I told him you just have to realize that that there will always be unhappy parents, just do what you do. As soon as I get his pictures back I will post some.

Aaron is just doing the Army thing. Which turns out to be a lot more standing around and boring breifings that I thought it would be. They all feel that there is a serious lack of training going on. They still dont have their weapons yet and that is worrisome. They deploy in March and they really need their own weapons to train and qualify with before they go. He goes home next week for 11 days so that will be good for him. Also, he will be in Fort Hood in November for 2 weeks to meet the Brigade they are deploying with. That will be a good thing I hope.

And I'm just plugging along. I am working, which is a good thing. My bosses like me and its an interesting place to be. I work at a Nissan dealership as a receptionist. And I sit on my butt all day so I have gained back 20 pounds. I am very dissapointed about that! I need to do something but it is so hard to get up at 5 in the morning to excercise and I just dont have time at night between football, and laundry and dinner etc. I know these are just excuses but still. *sigh*

Georgia is...Georgia. Hot, muggy, and green. We have in the hundreds with out heat index every day for the last couple of months. 95 is hot at home but its almost unbearable here when the heat index goes up to 111 because of the humidity. Blech. But the wildlife is interesting. Daily you see something running around by the house - armadillos, turkeys, foxes, snakes, raccoons,turtles, vultures, and more squirrels than a disney movie. It's all right here - but I would give a lot right now to see my mountains and fish the UM.

Love to all my family out there!

I don't Care How It's Made

Have you ever been scrolling the channels on T.V. and you get sucked into a show you really don't care about but find strangely compelling so you end up watching the whole thing anyway? Like the show How It's Made. I really don't care how they make chain link or wodden barrels, and yet here I am wasting an hour my life finding out how. In spite of myself, there are a couple of episodes that really were interesting. You quietly say to yourself - huh, how about that? Sometimes it happens with less informative shows like Say Yess to the Dress (now that really IS a waste of 30 minutes)but mostly with shows from the Discovery Networks. Not to be confused with other shows on Discovery that me and my family love like Deadliest Catch and Mythbusters.

Anyway, I am a big fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. Im an escapist-type reader. With some horror and the occasional biography and history thrown in. But I found myself looking at a book the other day that I have walked past several times, mostly because I liked the sound of the title. Cryptonomicon just sounds cool. But its a complicated book dealing with a lot of math. (Crypography is actually a lot of wierd math and probablities and things I really dont understand.) Math has never been my strong point and is not a subject I look for in the topic of my reading material. But I picked it up anyway, and in the bonus materials there is an article the author (Neal Stephenson) wrote for the magazine Wired in 1999. He talks about...well, wires. The original cables that were laid down for morse code - and later used for telephone wire and the evolution of cables for internet and phone and how and where they have to be placed and made to hold all the data, the poltical power struggle of who owns the cables and how precarious the internet (and long distance telephone calls) really are. And of course - how they are made, from then to now.

In spite of myself, it was really fascinating. Things I had never thought of, and if anyone had asked I would have said I really didn't care. It's something we all take for granted, that this whole world wide web is something that is "out there in the ether" and can't be stopped. But destroying one major connection point (like in Alexandria) could be devastaing to any number of countries. Huh, how about that? The best part of it was the author though. He wrote it humor - knowing his audience is a bunch of techno nerds who are way smarter than I am. Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

According to legend,in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying “Mr. Watson,come here.I want you.”Compared with Morse’s “What hath God wrought!’’this is disappointingly banal— as if Neil Armstrong,setting foot on the moon,had uttered the words:“Buzz,could you toss me that rock hammer?’’It’s as though during the 32 years following Morse’s message,people had become inured to the amazing powers of wire.

About one of the early men who tried to solve the problem of seding information along a wire.

In the Victorian era was an age of superlatives and largerthan-life characters,and as far as that goes,Dr.Wildman Whitehouse fit right in:what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists,Burton to explorers,Robert E.Lee to generals,Dr.Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.He achieved a level of pure accomplishment in this field that the Alfonse D’Amatos of our time can only dream of.The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer.

About where one line was being installed outside of Hong Kong:

It’s a hot day,and kids are swimming on the public beach,prudently staying within the line of red buoys marking the antishark net.Handley remarks,offhandedly, that five people have been eaten so far this year.A bulletin board,in English and Chinese,offers advice:“If schooling fish start to congregate in large numbers, please leave the water."

Now there were a lot of fun and interesting things in this article that I would normally never have read. Now I think I need to read the book. Cryptography could be just as fascinating.