RushingAround

So I got up at 7am, shaved and showered and came on down to Telecommunication Systems, Inc. Once I was sure I knew where I was, I stopped at a local Waffle House to eat some breakfast. I miss the Waffle House; Denny’s is the closest we have to it in Hawaii.

Not much has happened so far, just lots of paperwork for benefits and such. Here are some pictures.

And I have a 3 hour layover. I am totally paranoid about being late, so I always have to be way early, pretty much everywhere. This drives Märia nuts, but she mostly puts up with me. =) I remember when my dad dropped me off for my ski trip at the church when I was in high school, I had to be over an hour early, and this was oh-dark-thirty in the morning. Dad put up with me too.

One nice thing about planes is that you get way up above the clouds and air/light pollution to really see the stars. I miss seeing the stars in Hawaii, as the light pollution is horrible. I think you can count the stars you can see from my house and not hit 100, it really is that bad. Märia and I and the girls were out the other day though and Märia and I saw a satellite shooting through the sky. I never looked it up, but it was too high over the horizon to have been the ISS. It was nice.

A picture of the Phoenix air traffic control tower, shamelessly stolen from the internet. I just thought it looked nice. Futuristic and representative of the “valley of the sun”.

The girls are almost certainly asleep as it is now 10:49 their time. I guess that means I have been on this plane for an hour. The plane is packed. Somehow I managed to get the seat that has the only empty seat next to it. When I get there I will need to find my flight to Atlanta and wait around. From there I pick up my rental and drive to my hotel. I am going to be quite tired I think, as I am not sleeping this flight… I am sick and my throat hurts and water is hard to come by. I hate to bug flight attendants. The guy sitting in front of me has Rastafarian dreads, probably 3.5 feet long, or thereabouts. They are hanging out the back of his seat all over my right leg. I asked him to move them, and they aren’t quite as bad as they were, but I just don’t know where he would put them, except maybe over his own shoulder, and that would be very uncomfortable for him. Anyway, they aren’t bugging me now, not like they were when it was really bad. One of the Narnia movies is playing. I haven’t paid enough attention to know which it is, and haven’t plugged my earphones into the seat to listen, so no biggie. I am already missing my little girls. Seporah was in a bit of a funk. She was swapping between being grumpy with me because I was leaving, and being clingy, which I appreciate, but don’t really like. She just wasn’t very normal. Felicity was oblivious, to be expected I guess. I remember my dad left for Korea when I was 5 and Jason was 2. It didn’t bug me much, that I remember. He called and sent me back a great red backpack with my name embroidered on it and a scarf and a hat. I had my grandparents, so it was ok. The girls will have Märia, and she is really great with them. Best mom in the world, really! Best wife too! I miss you guys!

I just finished reading the first 5 chapters of Everfound. It is a fun teen urban fantasy. I don’t know if I am using that term correctly, but I call all “modern” fantasy urban fantasy, as opposed to medieval fantasy (merlin and hobbits and dragons). I guess I will sign off and try to get some sleep. Hopefully I can upload this for you guys when I land!

From her garden. She takes such good care of her garden.

22000 miles up, 22000 miles down for a phonecall between dudes 20 feet apart

You know I am tired and distracted when my English is as bad as it was last night. The real capper on it was that I said “operating engine” rather than “operating system”.  Ouch, I just lost nerd points.

Maria was totally bummed.  I was pretty bummed too.  We dropped the kids with a relatively new babysitter named Svetlana. She and her husband are Russian.  He is in the military, and I honestly don’t know how it all works, as they both have Russian accents and are from Russia, but it works.  She is trying to get into the military as well.  Maybe they are spies, but the girls love her, and she paints with them and reads them stories and such so I don’t care. 

Maria and I went to a place called the Loft downtown, because there had been flyers and such all over the internet saying Anberlin was coming there. Unfortunately, sometime between when the flyers went up and our date the place had closed down.  So we found a nice place to eat next to where the Loft used to be. It was a Vietnamese restaurant and we ate asparagus, salad, spring rolls and drank the most awesome homemade ginger ale ever. Goodness but I can’t think/write when there is music in the background and kids jumping on top of me.  It is weird, but I really need quiet to think to write. Otherwise I end up with a bunch of grammarbroke sentences and sound stupid. Reading too, I can’t read if there is noise in the background.

So there were cool pictures of Vietnam all over the restaurant, but the one at our table was particularly nice, and Maria took a picture next to it. 

What else… Afterward we went to Menchie’s, which is a frozen yogurt place. We walked along the beach a ways and sat on a wooden bench. Maria was too bummed that Anberlin didn’t come to really enjoy the date much though.

You might be wondering why I am not putting Maria’s umlaut in. That would be because I don’t know how to on this computer. I got a free laptop in the mail from Google. It is called the CR48 and it runs Google’s Chrome operating engine. It is a push to call it an operating engine though, as it only actually runs Google’s Chrome browser, and everything has to be done through a browser window. They gave about 30,000 of them away for free, out of several hundred thousand applicants. I don’t really know if there was rhyme or reason to who got one, or if it was like a big lottery. Anyway, I got a free laptop out of the deal, but it is a bit of a rough laptop usage wise. I couldn’t even figure out how to rotate the above picture!

One last picture, this one from Seporah’s school. They had a family fun fair and the girl’s got to play games, eat hot dogs and get their faces painted. They even had bouncy houses.

 

Things sure are slow around here. Märia has pretty much moved over to Facebook exclusively. It is just way easier to post a 2-4 sentence funny episode with the kids. A blog post just seems to entail a longer, more time intensive project than a Facebook status update. Jason has posted a few funny anecdotes, and I haven’t said much. Life gets busy.

So school is going fine. I am taking four history classes and an anthropology class. My history classes are focusing on Nazi Germany, Europe since 1945, East Asia in Antiquity and Modern East Asian Economy (joint History/Business course). Anthropology is about what you would expect.

So my knee is fine now. The doc gave me meds and it cleared up remarkably quickly. I haven’t run on it since the last time it swelled up on me, but I intend to run on it again soon. If it swells again then I may be done running. We shall see…

I am not sure what I am going to do about this site… Part of me wants to set up a plugin that automagically moves facebook/flickr/twitter/whatever updates to this page and part of me wants to archive it (as the old pages are archived above^^^) and provide links to our various Facebook/etc social networking sites…

We shall see…