Our new home

Kara and I have now moved into our new home. Wow that is weird to say. After all the talk and planning we moved in. It the actual moving in was actually very easy. It helps when the place come fully furnished. It feels a lot like when I first went to college. New room, a couple of days to prepare before you start classes and a bunch of orientations. I feel like we have gotten adjusted for the most part. Driving no longer frightens me but it still feels like I’m racing the whole time. No more lazy drives between College Station and Conroe anymore. The grocery stores are about 80% of what a Wal-Mart is. They have everything you need just not as much variety. It allows you to get by but in ways forces you to adjust.

Adjusting is an interesting concept given the circumstances. It is very easy to stay in a very American bubble if you want to. You actually have to make some effort to adjust to this culture if that was your desire. Of course this is only after less then 5 days, but I think there is some validity to the argument. Other then the basic eating and living not much else has happened here. I’m looking forward to my first day of work tomorrow and hope that things keep on going as smoothly. Of course I know better then that.

I did find out that I will be going to LA at the end of August. How’s that for jacking with your internal clock. It’s only a 10 hour difference, I’m sure it will not be to hard to adjust. I’m looking forward to the training though. It will be on the fundamentals of XML. I will working with a new toy and will need to know this stuff apparently.

I’ll keep the Blog a little more up to date then I have been.

Fish and Chips

Well Kara and I have left the US and made our way to London for a short visit. It was a lot of fun but it was not the London that I was expecting. Of course most of my perception came from Mary Poppins. Everybody spoke proper English and dressed in a professional manner. I knew that wasn’t going to be the case, but I wasn’t expecting what I saw. It reminded me a lot of New York City. There were types of people on the underground (yes, I said underground). They looked like they came from all over Europe and the world. You could definitely tell the difference between and Englishman and an American. I don’t know if it is the weather, geographic area or what. There is a definite difference.

I also realized something else that may seem painfully obvious to most. England and the US are two distinctly different countries. We may speak the same language about 90% of the time, but we are two very different independent countries. They are not our little brother like I thought even though I knew better.

While in London we did some site seeing and got to see a few of the places that I’ve only heard about growing up. We flew into Gatwick airport. There are three airports in London. Gatwick and Heathrow seem to be the major international airports there. If you are going to fly and stay in London Heathrow is your best bet. The train fair in is about a 1/3 of what it is from Gatwick.

We stayed in the Wharf district which is about 3 miles East of central London. We stayed at the Britannia International for less then $100 a night. We got a nice room for this amount while if you stayed in Central London you would get a cramped room and share the bathroom for the same amount. The Wharf district is beautiful in terms of the enormous buildings it has and how modern the whole place is. This compared to the unique architecture of London where the buildings are large for the time when they were built one to several hundreds of years ago.

The main attractions we saw were the London Eye http://www.londoneye.com. This is an observation wheel that is around 135m high. We got some cool pictures while inside.

We saw Parliament, Big Ben, The London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus and The London Tower. Unfortunately Parliament, Big Bend and The London Tower were closed when we were in the area. We were happy to just see them and we’ll try to visit next time we are going through. We’ll have some pictures posted as soon as I can get the right software loaded on my computer here in Qatar.

Visiting San Antonio

I just got back from San Antonio and have to say that it was harder to say goodbye then I expected. Kara always tells me she never sees me cry. This was the closest that she has seen so far. For the most part I just don’t think about it until after the fact. It’s a good way not to get all emotional. By the time you realize you won’t see your parents for a year it’s too late to make a big deal about it.

While I was in San Antonio it was fun. We did all the things you do in San Antonio and got to spend a lot of time with family. I have decided the best way to get a conversation going is to play a game. It’s hard to discuss what’s going on while watching TV.

Things are really starting to get real. So instead of droning on  about how this is going to be so cool and different I’ll just leave it at that. Things are going to start looking a lot different and that’s OK. I keep telling myself it is a lot like working on a farm when I was 15, going to college or joining The Corps a semester later. I’m going to be uncomfortable, hesitant and wanting to reverse my decision. Eventually I’ll deal with it and the world will be full of shiny happy people.

Thanks for reading, I’ll be posting pictures of Kara in Iowa and both of us in San Antonio soon.

Saturday and Sunday Kara and I will be in England. I’ll let all of you know how it goes.

Keeping it real on the North side of C-Town

Fahrenheit 9/11

FYI: This is not a personal post, just a critique of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and some ranting from my political view point.

I just finished watching “Fahrenheit 9/11”. It was sold out when I went to the movies so I borrowed a copy from a friend. The details aren’t necessary. I would definitely suggest watching it. When I went to the movies I saw a guy wearing a shirt that says Michael Moore hates America. I wondered to myself if he had even seen the movie. There is a lot of people who speak out against this movie without even seeing it. Doesn’t that sound a little ignorant? Of course this guy was just expressing his first amendment right as well.

Briefly the movie opened up by saying W. was an idiot. Moore didn’t really say that, but he was implying it. This was punctuated by a shot of Bush continuing to read to a book to a class of elementary school kids for seven minutes after he was informed that a second plane hit the WTC. There could be a reason for this, it’s just what was in the movie.


This is probably the only place I would out right disagree with Moore. I bought into the whole WMD bit but I also knew nothing short of Saddam jumping out of the window of one of his palaces was going to stop us from going over there. Not the UN, not Hans Blix, nothing. Where I disagree with Moore is Bush maybe crooked / clueless but Iraq needed to happen. W. may have gone in for the wrong reason but there was good that needed to be done. Of course I preface this by saying that this war did not cost many anymore then the time to put a yellow ribbon on my website. It’s easy for me to say it was a good thing while I sit at home and critique the action from my couch.

Moore called Iraq a free and sovereign nation. One that never did us any harm, so why were we bothering with it? For somebody who for the most part does a good job of not spinning things this was a pretty dumb statement. There are very good reasons for what happened in Iraq. Just read your history books. It boils down to we gave Saddam the weapons to fight people we didn’t like. He used them in a way he wasn’t supposed to. We called him on it. We had him contained but he was still dangerous to us. While we were containing him with sanctions he was killing his people. Our choice was to lift the sanctions and let him be dangerous or not do anything and watch hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die every month. Or we could remove him from power all together.

I think Moore could have still proven his point without making Iraq look like Disney Land prior to our invasion. Watch the movie and make up your own mind. I come to a different conclusion based on what is presented but I still think he does a good job.

The only thing that I haven’t been able to figure out is why Bush was so bent on going to Iraq. I doubt he really thought there were WMDs. What really makes me mad is in all his planning he didn’t look past reaching Baghdad. Maybe he did, but he didn’t heed the warning of military advisors stating how much it was really going to take. Basically he was feeding it to us in doses that we could accept. Kind of like cutting the dogs tail off one inch at a time.


For a brief overview of what Moore said in the film Click Here

For Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11Click Here

For a good and brief review Click Here