Ground Control to Major Mom

My New Commuter Life, Part III: Food, Folks and Fun*

08. March 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: air force reserves, ethiopian food, lalibela, nebraska, omaha, pokeno, restaurant, snow, trader joe's

*Wait a second, wasn’t that a major fast-food corporation jingle?

While I was in Nebraska, I did make some time to visit with my Pokeno girlfriends, have a nice dinner out with Shannon (who took me in at her house when the Offutt Inn was booked for the week), and enjoy a trip to Trader Joe’s!

Several neighborhood Moms in Bellevue get together for a breakfast pot luck once a month, and a dinner potluck and game of Pokeno also once a month (on another separate day). The girls elected to move Pokeno night around a little so I could join them! I shipped a box of Mardi Gras decorations to the ladies, and we had a blast dressing up and enjoying Cristi’s tater tot casserole.

We have pictures of the Pokeno ladies from every month!

Guess who???

Who else would appear for the world to see on the Internet in Mardi Gras deely-boppers? If you look closely, you can see the blinky lights…

Shannon and I also had a chance to go out together for dinner. Shannon was my adventure-buddy when I was in Omaha…she braved the 3-hours-each-way drive to the Ashfall Fossil Beds last summer! We also checked out numerous out-of-the-ordinary restaurants together, and this time around we had a hankerin’ for Ethiopian food!

Shannon did the research. She found two places, both in the downtown Omaha vicinity. One was called “Ethiopian Restaurant” and the other called “Lalibela’s”. We chose “Ethiopian Restaurant” because it was closer to the highway and the weather still wasn’t great.

The restaurant shares a business space with an Ethiopian grocery, and the grocery side was very full. The store owner — a very pretty young lady, probably in her 30s — came out and told Shannon and me that she was out of food. What? On a Friday night at 6pm??? Don’t even go there with the irony of it.

We’re hoping it was from the weather…we got back in the truck and headed up the street to the 2nd choice (what are the chances of that??? TWO Ethiopian restaurants within about 5 minutes of each other!!!).

The restaurant was rather empty, just two other couples at tables, eating their respective dinners. We ended up talking to one of the other couples, asking about what they were eating and getting some tips of what’s good and what’s not. Shannon and I each chose one entree and we grazed freely on both of them. I ordered something with seasoned lamb, while Shannon chose a vegetarian combo. I wish we had ordered two of the veggie combos, I didn’t care for the meat too much, but the rainbow of lentils (on the left) was awesome! Learning how to eat the food without utensils was also fun!

There’s a basket in front of Shannon filled with injera, a flatbread that you use as your plate and utensil. Rip off a piece of injera and scoop away!

Finally, even though I was quite tired from my 4-days in a row of work (wow, what happened to me?), I took a trip out to the recently-opened Omaha Trader Joe’s and stocked up on the family favorites!

This will last us till my next trip to Omaha! I hand-carried this home in a single TJ’s reusable shopping bag. I got crap from Jacob for not picking up some Dorothy Lynch salad dressing…sorry!

Thanks to Shannon, Cristi and Laura for helping make my weekend back in Nebraska so great!

My New Commuter Life, Part II: Just Because I Now Live in Florida….

07. March 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: air force reserves, cold weather, ford mustang, nebraska, omaha, snow, weather

….doesn’t mean I never have to see snow again, right?

Or drive in the snow again?

(As promised in my previous pos t, here’s the story of why I’ll never buy a Ford Mustang north of the Mason/Dixon line!)

On last weekend’s trip to Omaha, I was fortunate to travel in between major winter weather systems. Temperatures were in the 50s on my first day there, quite nice!

We were forecasting 1-2″ of snow on Thursday, February 24th. We told EVERYONE 1-2″, and not just us: the National Weather Service, the television stations, everyone!

What happened was pretty freakish, didn’t last that long, and happened right on top of the afternoon/evening commute home. I only caught one iPhone screen capture of the event’s Doppler radar. I wish I had taken more:

You know how folks talk about great things (or not-so-great things) that happen when “all the stars are aligned?” Well, in this case, several things “aligned” in the atmosphere to make this nearly-horizontal dark green line form across central Nebraska. I’m not going to get into the wintertime “convective symmetric instability” here. That line is HEAVY SNOW, and it dumped about 5″ of snow in 3 hours in Bellevue and in areas just south of Offutt AFB. And the line barely moved for those 3 hours. It was NUTS!

And I got to drive home in it. Whee!

I had reported for duty very early that morning, so I figured I’d be heading home around 1:00-1:30pm, but at the last minute I had a meeting that took me to about 3:00pm. The movement of this line was very slow, and I was itching to leave for the day, so after a few minutes of monitoring a non-moving line, I bit the bullet and left. If I had left when I thought I’d be leaving, I’d have made it back to where I was staying without incident. Instead, I fishtailed and skidded all the way back, with heavy snow making things all the worse.

I ending up coming back into my old neighborhood right as my boys’ former elementary school was letting out. The neighborhood is hilly, and there were cars slipping and sliding everywhere. Since only 1-2″ of snow was originally forecast, the salt/silt trucks didn’t even come out to prepare the roads. What a horrific mess!

I couldn’t get that #$% Mustang up the last hill before getting to the house. I tried several times, but it just wasn’t happening. If there wasn’t so much after-school traffic, I might have had the room to roll backwards down the hill, and get enough speed to do it. But I simply had to abandon the car about a block from where I was staying, and walk in the heavy snowfall, and on unshoveled sidewalks, to the house. I had my full winter-weather gear, and nice warm boots, at least. It wasn’t a long walk. Uphill, of course.

About 1/2 hour later, my hostess loaded a few supplies into her Suburban and drove me back over to the car. With less traffic, I was able to roll backwards back down the hill and tear with full power up the hill to the house. And here it is right after I got it parked — POINTING DOWNHILL on the legal side of the street.

How incredibly frustrating — I’m not a bad winter-weather driver. I could hold my own in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and South Korea. Even our 2 1/2 years in Nebraska, we were fine even driving our Toyota Prius. But with this Mustang, I was dealing with a very lightweight, rear-wheel drive vehicle. Ugh!

The local National Weather Service office had put out this map of snowfall totals from that one event, note how there was 5+” of snow in a narrow ribbon across south-central eastern Nebraska, but NONE in northern Sarpy and Douglas Counties. Downtown Omaha saw no snow, but 10 miles to the south was buried in 5-6″ of snow that fell in just 3-4 hours.

Image created by the National Weather Service office, Omaha/Valley, Nebraska

There were cold temperatures and snow showers for the next couple days of my stay in the Omaha area, and the snowy weather turned into a freezing rain risk that lasted right up until just a couple hours before my flight out on the 27th. Since I was heading into work each day at about 4:45am, luckily I could slip and slide around without other cars in the way. It was nerve-wracking, but I survived.

I’m so glad the next time I head to Nebraska will be well after the winter-weather is done. I’ll only have to worry about tornadoes next time…

Next up, Part III: a happier post about my fun times on this trip: trying out Ethiopian food, enjoying Pokeno with the girls, and shopping at my favorite store, Trader Joe’s!

My New Commuter Life, Part I: Getting There is Half the Battle

04. March 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: air force reserves, nebraska, traveling

I might have mentioned it, I might not have, but I kept my Reserve position at Offutt AFB, Nebraska even though I now live in Florida. I’ve received dozens (yes, dozens) of inquiries about why I would want to do that.

Three reasons why I kept this position:

1.) There’s very little else for me to do in weather in the AF Reserves. I could switch to something non-weather, which is okay, but I preferred to stay in weather. Call it the Geek in me! I expect there will more options if Dave ever gets assigned to the Washington, D.C. area after this. I’ll also only have a couple years left in the AF before I’m retirement-eligible by then. (How time flies!)

2.) This position has a lot of flexibility. I am known as an “Individual Mobilization Augmentee” type of Reservist (or “IMA” for short). In other words, I’m like an understudy-type capability to an active duty staff element. If something were to happen that the active duty element needed more people, I could get called up to help out. In my previous position in South Carolina, I was a member of a Reserve unit, and I was expected to be present one weekend per month. As an IMA, I’m presented with times on the schedule that my help would be appreciated, and I balance their schedule with my own…and I’m allowed to stitch together several “one weekend per month” equivalents and not have to travel monthly.

3.) I’d only been in the Nebraska position for about 1 1/2 years. It took nearly a year to receive all my training for this position, so I was trusted “unsupervised” only since last summer, and I feel that I owe more fruitful time to this position and the team I work with.

Therefore, around Christmastime I worked out with my active duty boss that I could give 4 work days to my shop in late Februrary, and I bought a plane ticket. For these “one weekend per month” type work periods, I’m expected to supply my own transportation, so YES, I’m eating the transportation costs in this case. Thank heavens for credit card reward points!

Right after the President’s Day long weekend, I kissed my boys goodbye, put them on the school bus and set off for the airport. Fortunately, there was nothing hindering my trip TO Nebraska, a small snow event was putting itself together for a couple days later. I picked up my rental car…as usual they were “out” of the super-ultra-mini-sub-compact cars I usually reserve, so I was offered this Ford Mustang.

I’ve always wanted a Ford Mustang, and this one was a lot of fun to drive…at first.

After I got my rental car arranged, I then went to collect my suitcase. Yes, I checked a suitcase on Delta airlines. But I traveled in uniform, in part so I didn’t have to pay to check the bag, no questions asked!

It was a good thing I was in my uniform…my suitcase never showed up. Even though I flew from Fort Walton Beach to Omaha via Memphis, my suitcase flew via Atlanta and hadn’t arrived. I filled out the appropriate paperwork, and the luggage office clerk assured me that the suitcase would be delivered that night. So I stayed up till about 12:30am waiting for it, but then it didn’t arrive. Boo!

So with my gracious hosts providing me some sleeping clothes, toothpaste and soap, and Delta airlines providing me a cute little toothbrush and a flimsy comb, I had JUST ENOUGH stuff to sleep, clean up and be presentable for work the following morning.

Did I mention my coats were in my suitcase? Uniform yes, coats no. Fortunately, it wasn’t that cold, about 35F.

While I was at work, my suitcase was delivered, hooray!

Coming next…Part II: The Ford Mustang…Worst. Winter. Vehicle. Ever.

The MilSpouse Friday Fill-In #32

03. March 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: milspouse friday fill-in

I recently discovered Wife of a Sailor while wandering through the Blogosphere looking for….well I can’t remember what.

She has helped bring together dozens and dozens of other military spouse bloggers. I had sent “Wifey” a note a few weeks ago expressing my appreciation for this project she does: “MilSpouse Friday Fill-in“. It’s been fun to read others’ responses, but this is the first week I’m taking part. On Thursdays she posts the questions, then you post the answers on your own blog and then send her your post with the answers. It draws all these other military spouse bloggers together. Very clever!

So here are this weeks’ questions, and my answers. It’s going to be worded somewhat formally since a several new readers will be seeing it.

Do you or your {spouse} ever wish your {spouse} was in a different branch of the military?

Funny this was asked, because my husband actually inquired into transferring into the Navy in the late 1990s. The Air Force made some significant changes to our (“our”, since I was on active duty at the time) career field in the late 1990s, and a lot of opportunities to be stationed overseas and in more parts of the country went away. Ironically, the Navy did similar consolidations with their weather career field about 7-8 years after the Air Force did, and the issue became moot.

What duty station(s) are on your “No Way, Hell No, Not Going, Have Fun Unaccompanied” list and why?

I can’t think of any place that we absolutely wouldn’t at least try. Especially overseas. If we can come along, we certainly will! Fort Hood, TX and Fort Irwin, CA are high up on an “almost No Way” list, but it doesn’t look like he’d get stationed there.

If you could be one age forever, what age would you choose and why?

27. I felt like I was on top of the world when I was 27, for some reason. The only things missing were the kids, I didn’t have my first son till I was almost 28.

If you were a breakfast cereal, which one would you be?

Life. Yummy AND nutritious! The name says it all 🙂

What is your morning beverage of choice and why?

About 16 oz. of homemade coffee, with 2% milk and 2 TBSP. of sugar. I had a couple years where I made this for myself EVERY morning, but I’ve been cutting back to just 1-2x per week.

Playable Angry Birds Birthday Cake

22. February 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: cake decorating, iPhone

I will admit I don’t play the game (yet), but this is an AMAZING cake! Enjoy!

Let me know when you see a playable Bejeweled Blitz cake!

Sin in a Tin. Or: OH MY!

16. February 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: cooking, food, holidays, valentine's day

Hopefully everyone had an enjoyable Valentine’s Day?

I did — Dave sent me on a scavenger hunt around the house finding one clue after another. The clues were tied into some pretty cryptic things about our marriage, such as “When we were stationed in Louisiana we learned to put this on all our food” and there was the next clue taped to the bottom of my can of Tony Chachere’s seasoning!

Ultimately it led me to my old college backpack with a pair of pretty sapphire earrings inside.

I was NOT so creative with Dave this year. I did take a suggestion from a fellow-chocoholic friend, Lisa C., and found something called Guthrie’s “Sin in a Tin” at our local Publix grocery store. I was drawn to it because it’s locally made, and we’re all about the local fare!

The cool 19th Century-styled tin is recyclable!

It’s marketed as a “chocolate pate”, but you could imagine it as a giant chocolate truffle! It’s sold frozen, but if you bring it to room temperature, you could spread it.

Spread it on what? I don’t know — on what do you spread chocolate? A cracker? A chocolate cookie?

Oh wait, read the directions for suggestions!

It’s made right here in Pensacola!

We simply sliced it and made it dessert for Dave, Timmy and me for two days. Yum!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

14. February 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: crafts, holidays, parenting, valentine's day

Happy Valentine’s Day friends!

We enjoyed a special Valentine’s Day-themed Build and Grow project at Lowe’s last Saturday!

My boys awakened this morning and were greeted with these little gifts for Valentine’s Day:

They had asked for them for Christmas, but I’m glad we waited till now, I think that Valentine Puppy sure is cute!

I’d backed off significant gifts for Valentine’s Day over the past couple years, but I’d kept these Pillow Pets in the back of my mind this year. They’re about $20 each.

I found the Valentine’s ones at Walgreen’s. You wouldn’t think of it, but you can whip together a pretty nice Valentine’s Day experience at your local drugstore.

I also found some M&Ms Star Wars gifts…$5 per kid. The lightsaber on the left in the bottom pic has LED lights, you press a button and it stays on for about a minute. More M&Ms stuffed into the handle of that toy.

CrashPlan Status: UNSUCCESSFUL

12. February 2011 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: computer, product reviews

Not a complete fail, but a “mostly” fail.

Today I officially gave up on the CrashPlan 30 Day free trial to send files to “the cloud”: the CrashPlan Central offsite servers. I had a 30 day free trial to try this out, and after 27 days, I had only uploaded 60% of the files.

I didn’t get enough time to test restoring the files after a full upload, therefore I cut my losses and will do backup another way.

Besides, with the recent news about Mozy, I wonder how much longer “all you can eat” offsite data storage will remain affordable.

By the way, until the end of February, CrashPlan is offering a 15% discount to Mozy customers who are bailing because of Mozy’s recent price schedule changes.

Paul and I attempted some file transfers to each other, but that wasn’t very stable either. Our network settings had to be very precise to maintain a connection. Paul’s fiber broadband pushed about 2/3 of his files to me, but my slower connection only allowed us to give him about 1/3 of the files. I have dynamic IP addressing — so a system reboot would change up our settings and kill the connection. We pushed our respective computers into our firewall’s DMZs, which made me incredibly nervous, and if that’s how we had to keep things permanently, that was also a no-go.

I will caveat things to say that it wasn’t a complete wash. Without paying, you can still use the CrashPlan GUI to manage in-house backups free of charge, as well as backups to friends. I’m probably going to stick with that. It’s the only GUI that allows “cross-flow” between PCs and Macs. It also allows you to attach external HDs and network-attached-storage into the setup. Other programs, such as Mozy and Carbonite, have restrictions on that.

While I’d read dozens of testimonies to how great CrashPlan worked for their individual needs, I feel that our family’s network setup simply wasn’t going to support things. We have an AT&T DSL connection coming into the house that typically allows for about 7 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload speeds. When CrashPlan was running, those speeds dwindled down to about 20-40%. Especially when CrashPlan was running on our PC and was uploading data to CrashPlan Central.

We couldn’t watch videos anywhere else on our network (i.e. via Netflix streaming, Wii or on YouTube on our computers), so I removed Crashplan from the PC and suddenly things sped up.

This morning I re-installed CrashPlan on the PC but cut it off from external network connections. I am hopeful that will be okay. I will keep it to back up our 3 computers’ files to each other, and we at least have that. Better than nothing, right?

In the meantime, I’m pricing 2 TB external HDs and will be replacing our two smaller external HDs for day-to-day backups.

How to Be An Air Force Wife, 2011 Style…

10. February 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: air force wife, military life, moving, pcs

The reason I was inspired to post about that 1957 Air Force wife book last week was because I was thinking about getting some “calling cards” of my own. I’ve done this in the past, it’s great for trading playdate information on the playground. It’s also much classier than scrawling down your information on the back of a crumbled gas station receipt at the bottom of your purse. It helps out as a reservist, too, when you can’t access your military phone and e-mail account daily, you can just hand someone a personal card to follow up on a correspondence.

I learned this idea through a Mom on a playground in Cary, North Carolina back in 2005, but it’s reaped dividends as a military wife…when you have to introduce yourself to a new circle of friends every 2-3 years.

I had placed an order a couple weeks ago through VistaPrint.com for my free** 250 business cards and they arrived on Tuesday.

You really thought I’d show the world our address and phone number? These cards are also great for “We’ve Moved” cards. That way folks could just put your new address/phone/e-mail address in with other business cards.

Since they’re free**, you’ll be shamelessly promoting VistaPrint every time you share one of your cards. I don’t mind, can’t argue with cheap well-made business cards.

**The cards are free, but you pay a small shipping fee (~$5). Plus you have to be prepared to weed through no less than 15 webpages worth of “Would you like to add XX onto your order??” offers.

Oops He Did It Again…

08. February 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: howie

Our poor little Howie tore his other rear CCL this past weekend. Nearly 2 years after he ruptured the left one. We don’t know how he did it this time, we came home from a bunch of errands Friday night and Howie wasn’t putting weight on his right rear leg. He might have been chasing squirrels (which always seems to get him into trouble)…we have squirrels here, and Howie still will run after them.

From 2010 05 29 Black Hills Day 2 Mt. Rushmore/Crazy Horse

We took Howie to the animal emergency room in Pensacola on Saturday to rule out anything broken, and the vet could tell right away it was his other CCL. He’s 11 years old now, his (suspected) breed mix is predisposed to this issue, and once you repair one CCL, the chances of the other CCL failing are increased.

This morning we followed up with our own vet and she suggested using “cold laser therapy” to trigger scar tissue to grow in quickly and we can reinforce the torn ligament precisely enough so Howie can get his mobility back without surgery!

This wasn’t presented as an option in 2009, perhaps because it’s wasn’t widely available 2 years ago. Our options here are much easier, we only have to travel as far as Pensacola, instead of Manhattan, KS to do the most intensive of our repair options.

Dave and I took a few hours to learn more about the procedure, ask questions of our vet and pet insurance company and we were happy with the pricing, the procedure, and the ease (almost too good to be true!). We decided not to waste any more time and scheduled Howie to start the first of 8 treatments this afternoon. He’ll need up to 8 treatments without more than 3 days between the treatments. It’s aggressive, but since I live 5 minutes from the vet (it’s just past the boys’ school), it’s easy enough for me.

Enjoy some recent pictures of Howie. These are all from AFTER his first CCL repair. He was hiking and climbing like he was 2 years old last summer!