Thursday, June 30, 2005 Man, I was so productive yesterday it was ridiculous. Honestly, if I was going to leave for Benin tomorrow it wouldn't be a problem. I bought a backpack, and filled it yesterday. 45 pounds down, some more to go. The backpack I got was totally sweet (and from Big 5, so thanks to a generous gift from my friends at Andiamo, gratis). Standard looking internal frame backpack, but... it has more pockets and zippy things, and neat little things than any backpack I've had before. For example, I was poking around at it, and felt a strange cloth thing in the base. I thought maybe it was stuffing, so I unzipped the compartment below and there was a freakin' pack cover inside! Not only a pack cover, but a pack cover attached by elastic to the backpack! You can't lose it!! Okay, maybe I'm too excited about that. In any case, I'm feeling pretty good with my progress. As such, of course, I've completely wasted today. Ah, feels good.

Oh, my Mom has this Diet Coke with Splenda hanging around, and I'm frightened... I actually like them. Bizzare.

One other item of note is this. Nothing really amazing, but I thought it was neat to see my name in a press release.

Well, today is the day of laundry... which means I've got a lot of folding ahead of me. Wish me luck.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005 Whew, back from my last 1176 mile drive. It was quite the experience. I'd never really been in tune with the whole military ideal, I mean none of my family has had much military experience and those that have don't really talk about it. So, coming to an Air Force base was to be quite the experience. Let me say it was completely different then I had expected. I guess the picture in my mind was rows and rows of those half-cylinder barracks and a few planes. Man, I was wrong. They have a freakin' Burger King! On base! They have a huge grocery store (with booze and meat that costs about half of what it does on the outside), a gas station and even a Wal-Mart like thing. It's crazy! It was good to see Reed again after it having been so long. All in all it was a very relaxed weekend, which was nice. The past couple of weeks have really been running around and always having to do something. This weekend was lots of sitting around and doing nothing. Which, while I didn't know it at the time, was exactly what the doctor ordered.

While I was up there I got to watch some anime, most specifically Twelve Kingdoms. It was pretty cool. No doubt Tim thinks it's crappy, but while the first 12 episodes or so episodes felt like Fushigi Yugi (let us never speak of that weekend), it actually got really good. There are better synopsis online then I can offer, so I won't bother. It was good though.

So now, it's time to begin the mad dash of packing and craziness! Today I'm going to try and plan my attack for the rest of the week. I really don't even know what I have left to do. Whew... we'll see. Oh, I added more pics to the gallery.

Thursday, June 23, 2005 Well, I'm finally back to a place where I can get some work done. I said I'd do it, and here it is. Blogger officially (appears) to be working, even the sidebar doesn't totally freak out (after some initial snaffu with the blogger XML). You'll have to pardon the length, as it's been sometime since I've blogged.

So, anyway: double trouble. I got gallery installed and even put up some pictures. Once DNS propagates you'll always be able to see my life (and get an RSS feed) at gallery.lostinbenin.com For now though you can hit up http://lostinbenin.com/gallery There are a few cool pictures I suppose. I'm still playing with my camera to get everything figured out, those are about the best 25 out of the around 200 I shot over the weekend. Please note that if I posted full quality pics I'd run out of webspace rather quickly, so I'll probably be posting in nothing much greater than 1024x767. If you really, really want a full quality image, e-mail me.

Speaking of shooting, I'm thrilled with this camera. The battery life is incredible (of course that will be temporary with successive recharges). I literally charged it last week, shot all weekend and had to try all morning to get it to run out of charge. I am very impressed. That said, I'm also pleased with the picture quality overall. Sometimes getting things in focus can be a challenge, but that's to be expceted with a camera this small. The big surprise though is how sweet it is to take movies! Even in 320x200 they are crisp, and the audio is pretty good. I'm really digging this camera. All in all, a very sweet deal.

Yosemite was really fun, good food, good beer and fun bouldering.

Visiting dad was equally, if not more awesome. Again, good food, good beer (for me in any case, I don't see how they can drink that non-alcoholic beer *blech*) and fun times all around. It was very laid back, and fun to hang out with everyone up there. I have to admit I was a bit nervous about the whole thing. I haven't spent a large amount of time with my dad for a while. Compound that with essentially meeting a new family (while I met them all at the wedding, it wasn't much more than brief hellos) it was quite the scary prospect. Turns out though I had nothing to worry about. They were totally cool to hang out with, and I'm proud to have them all in my family.

So now what? Well, the sane people of the world would be packing... like most of the people over at crew.lostinbenin.com Not me though. I'm going driving to Tucson, AZ to visit an old friend. But first, to Santa Paula to visit my Grand-dad. Looking forward to both.

Now, onto the last item of business. Party! If you know about my party, please RSVP!!!

Friday, June 10, 2005 lostinbenin.com Well, not much to report yet. I opened the shop a little early, so don't be scared. It isn't all finalized quite yet. So expect to see some things coming up soon. I actually don't have the official blogger template setup quite yet, but this will do for now. Of course, you know I'm going to be hounding you all to register so I can continue to be in contact with you. If you're going to bookmark a page, I would suggest this one. There will be an XML feed shortly, and this will be the most dynamic page. That's all for now!