And Just Like That...They Were Gone

We’ve officially moved our blog to www.calebandtara.wordpress.com!  So, change your bookmarks and email subscriptions and stay in touch with us over there!

Please Do Us a Little Favor...

And in return you may be doing yourself a favor....

If you’ve ever in the history of our blog tried to comment on a post and had any issue, could you please hop on over to : www.calebandtara.wordpress.com and try to leave a comment on the post there?

All you should have to do is click on “leave a comment”--or “# comment(s)” if someone’s already commented--on the bottom of the post and type your comment in the box under “leave a reply".  There are lines to fill in your name, email address, website, various accounts, etc., but you should be able to leave all of that blank and just hit “post comment” if you don’t want to provide information.

Just trying to do a little troubleshooting and see if Blogger is the problem behind the number of people who’ve said they’ve tried to post a comment and couldn’t.  My previous theory was that it had to do with security measures on each user’s browsers or networks, which could explain why some can comment and some can not, but one, I can’t really test that, and two, if that’s the case, people probably aren’t willing to compromise their cyber security to comment on our blog.

So to recap:  please click on the link to our wordpress blog above and try to leave a comment.  Go to the bottom of the post, click “# comment(s)”, type something into the box, and hit “post comment”.

If this works, I may import our blog into our wordpress account and write there.

Thanks!

Take Your Wife to Work Day!

Pretending to fly

Monday marked our squadron’s first Spouse Taxi Day, something most flying squadrons do annually, since you can’t stop in and see your husband in his office any day.  These events provide an opportunity for them to share their work environment and the cool stuff they do.

Posing in the static display

I knew that we were going to wear flight suits(even smallest borrowed ones are dangerously large--I was shuffling all over the place) and explore the plane a bit and taxi.  Sort of like taking a guided trail walk on a horse instead of galloping across a field.  Not that exciting. At least, you hope it doesn’t become more exciting than it’s supposed to be.

Imagine my surprise when I learned we’d be making radio calls!  The pressure was on!  The most easily ridiculed pilots are those who constantly mess up their radio calls!

Sorry for blurriness!  Listening to a crew member explain some onboard equipment.

After we climbed around the static display, they separated us from our husbands like baby birds being kicked out of the nest and forced to get in the plane with engines running to show the waiting IP(instructor pilot) our stuff.  I was first in my group to clamber into the pilot seat and half-heartedly listen to the IP explain how to adjust the seat and what the pedals and switches and buttons did, thinking he was saying this stuff for fun.  So, again, imagine my surprise when he prompted me to put my feet on the rudder pedals and steer us around the taxiways, making difficult maneuvers like left and right turns, applying brakes, and making radio calls, all while trying to keep the plane on a little yellow line!  With some coaching and some influence from the IP’s twin instructor controls, we made it to the runway, did a “high speed taxi” down the runway--sort of like a takeoff fake-out, looped around, and let the other spouses try.

My action shot!  Concentrating hard at the controls. 

Treasure

My birthday--Caleb had to come straight from work and ended up being two hours late to the party--ha!  Fortunately there were a number of other people there.

Birthday fruit pizza--sooo delicious!

Cardboard Logs and Turkey Dogs

Well this past weekend was a first for us: our first camping trip together!  Also the first time we’ve been climbing in over two years!  Hard to believe.

One of the more interesting aspects for me was the making of cardboard logs.  Have you heard of this?  I’d never heard of it.  But we started with these boxes from furniture and some wedding gifts:

And watched The Two Towers and cut them into long strips and then rolled and tied with string until we had this:

Actually, these are the results of rolling about half the boxes, but you get the point.  Basically it was a good way to compact and discard of our excess cardboard while simultaneously providing fuel for our campfire.  Naturally they do not burn as well as regular logs and we had to supplement our supply with sticks and small logs from the forest, but they do pretty well, all things considered.

Here is our home away from home:

This was a free campsite called Luther Campground near Luther Spires, the rock formations we were climbing, just ten miles south of Lake Tahoe.

I decided to buy and try turkey dogs because they were actually cheaper than regular hot dogs, so we cooked those over our campfire and I was just mindlessly eating mine and I asked Caleb what he thought of the turkey dogs and he said he thought they tasted a little weird and then I kind of noticed that they do taste a little weird.  Know what tastes better than regular or turkey dogs?  Toasted marshmallows.  Yum.

Here is Caleb rinsing off dishes in the creek:

Here are a couple shots of us climbing:

First one is me, second one is Caleb. 

We decided to cap off our little trip by driving the highway up the west shore of Lake Tahoe, new territory for both of us, and it was really beautiful.  

I set up a beautiful shot on a beach on the south side of the lake and asked a man to take our picture and then his kid ran into the frame:

So here’s the best I could do with iphoto’s primitive “blemish” tool:

Heh heh.  

And, a parting shot: overlooking Emerald Bay on the south end of the lake.  

SO Many Pictures!

Alright, we got the rest of our pictures from our photographers today!  Yay!  Overall I am so happy with how they turned out.  I was way off on my estimate of how many I thought we were going to get; there are over a thousand.  So, many hours of trying to decide which ones to post, print, put into photobooks, Christmas card picture, etc. are ahead.  It took me several hours just to watch the slide show and look at every single image in the gallery.  And apparently a disc is on its way that has a few more shots not in the gallery.  Gah!

Here is a link to the slideshow of the photographers’ favorites.

Here is a link to our viewing gallery, through which you can order prints if you want to order prints from our photographers ($$$).   Bear in mind that this gallery contains pretty much every picture that they took that day, so not all are flattering or suitable for framing.  :-)

And here’s a shot that made me stop and laugh as I was wading through the masses:

Caleb started it.  I have pictures to prove it.

“First” Dance

Some of you asked about listening to the song we had for our first dance again since it was tough to watch the dancing and listen to the lyrics and voiceovers and everything.  If you weren’t there, our DJ recorded us saying stuff about each other a couple days before and put it in the intro and outro(is that the proper term?) of the song we chose for our dance.  

I was going to just upload the mp3 file of the song with our voices, but couldn’t figure out a way to do that, so instead I made this very simple  four minute video with the song and five lo-res pictures from our photographer’s blog.  I think it took me about an hour.  I now have a deeper appreciation for those people that make cool videos.  Not to mention movies.  

The song is “God Gave Me You”, recorded by Blake Shelton.  

YAY!!

I’m so excited to announce that the sneak peek of pictures from the wedding is up on our photographers' blog!  Click here for their post and tell us what you think!

Sometime in the next four weeks, we’ll get the best 300 photos or something like that on a disk and a link to a viewing gallery that we can share with you and you can look at them all and order prints if you desire.

California Observations and More “Afters"

Hello.  For a while now I’ve been thinking about sharing some of the little oddities we’ve noticed about our new location, and we have some exciting developments on the exterior of our property!  Also, Caleb is coming home this week so we’re looking forward to that.  Also, we are now officially less than four weeks away from the wedding.  Ack! And ahh!

Some fun little trivia about California*, most of which we find irritating: California traffic lights do not have the “left-turn yield to oncoming traffic” option.  You may only turn left when an arrow invites you to do so.  At all intersections with traffic lights, even minor ones.  Also, each and every intersection has a sign that indicates whether or not you can make a u-turn.  Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and we can’t seem to find any pattern to it.  Also, in my experience, you turn to the north (left or right depending on if you’re coming from the east or west) to go north on a highway, and south to go south.  At some junctions in this area, the situation is reversed.  That was confusing at first.  The other big thing is California’s big push for every home to have a certain percentage of light sockets exclusively wired to accommodate CFL bulbs.  That one actually makes me more legitimately angry than irritated if I think about all the implications, so we’ll just move on to more pleasant topics for now.

I’m very excited that our back yard looks almost normal now!  We still want to plant some vegetables and flowers and stuff around the border but here’s another set of before and after shots:

Unexpectedly, our neighbor alerted us to this issue with the roots of this sycamore tree in our front yard encroaching upon our mutual water line.  It was shocking to walk around the yard and see these roots all over the yard, about to pop above the ground.  So, I had it removed.  And now you can see the blooming rose bush better and there’s no shadow on the house. :-)

Before:

Now we just have to fix the mini-crater in the front!

*I should add that I do not know for sure if these statements apply to the whole state of California, as so far we have only traveled in a forty mile radius around our house. 

Our House aka May I live a Thousand Years and Never Paint Again

I hate to disappoint but I spent so much energy painting and shopping and arranging that I can not muster up much clever copy so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking, with just a few comments.  :-) 

Front of the house before:

Front of the house after I clipped the hedges: 

We’re thinking of painting sometime this year, something less drab.  We’ll probably do some more landscaping, too. 

Living/dining room before:

Living room after:

Living/dining room before: 

Living/dining room after:

Kitchen before:

After:

Family room before (poor photography, sorry!):

Family room after:

We didn’t quite get the color right here so we may repaint later.  Also, we’re hoping to replace  the futon sometime this year. 

Guest bathroom before:

And after:

At one point the bathroom was actually the same orange as the kitchen but it turned out to be a bit much for this little room.

Office before:

Office after:

Guest room--looked the same as the office before:

We’re planning on putting some nightstands and a little dresser in here sometime this year, if we get a bedroom set for the master.

Master bedroom before:

And after:

Master bathroom before--carpeted, boo:

After:

Caleb seeding the crater in the back yard:

You can sort of see the grass starting to come up!  Also, there were several completely out of control trees and hedges that I took down a notch.

So there you have it. 

Easter

Well it’s been a little while since you’ve heard from us on the blog front!  Caleb has been in Atlanta learning how to fly the C-12 and I’ve been keeping busy with projects around the house and yard and hanging out with our new group of friends, etc.  We have reached a good initial stopping point with the decoration of the house, so I do have pictures to share but to maintain chronological order, here are pictures of one of the Easter breads I made this year, before and after baking.

I think I might have actually overdone it a bit on the yeast this year, or  I need to remember to put the eggs more on top of the twists so they don’t get so swallowed up.  Also the bread sucks the dye off the eggs when they’re engulfed like that.  Still attractive and tasty, though.

Chasing the Dragon Lady

A couple weeks ago, we were waiting to get into our house and had absolutely nothing to do.  So we went to base and watched the Dragon Lady.  Now, we are in our house and I have about a million things to do.  So, I am writing about the Dragon Lady.  Life is funny, isn’t it?

Anyway, the U2 Dragon Lady, more commonly referred to as the U2, is an interesting aircraft that has been used by the Air Force to monitor anything the Air Force wants since the 1950s.  Apparently it still hasn’t found what it’s looking for.  (Get it? A u2 reference!  Ah ha ha!)

Actually I know little about their mission, other than that they take pictures of stuff and they can go into space.  Seriously, the pilots wear special flight suits with bubbles over their heads.

Being selected to pilot this aircraft is somewhat like trying to join the CIA.  With most planes, you go through pilot training, you write down planes you want a piece of paper, and they find one for you. U2 pilot wannabes apply and interview for the position after they’ve done a tour or two or more in other planes. I guess it’s a pretty lengthy and competitive process, perhaps partially because they have to make sure you’re not going to sell all the secret stuff you’d be seeing and partially because this plane is the “Most Difficult to Land Plane in the World,” which is what this post is really about. 

Funny-looking, isn’t it?  Apparently, this is the required shape for what it’s supposed to do.  

The only problem is the view of the runway that a pilot would have in any other plane is somehow obstructed by the plane.  I can just imagine a couple engineers and a pilot sitting around the newly designed and constructed U2s, the engineers saying:

 “Yes siree Bob that is a fine-looking aircraft.  Just had 150 of ‘em come off the ramp.  Cost billions of dollars.” 

The pilot climbs in and says: “Hey fellas, I’m not going to be able to land this plane.  I can’t see whatever it is I need to see to land.  Your billion-dollar aircrafts are unlandable.”  

“Well, shoot, Chuck, what are we gonna do about that?  It’d cost way too much to redesign and reconstruct now.  Say, I know: when the flyboys are coming in for a landing, we’ll have one of their buddies chase them down the runway in a fast car, and they’ll both have walkie-talkies, and the one in the car will tell the one in the plane how close he’s getting to the ground!”

“Brilliant, Bill!  You’ve saved Uncle Sam billions of dollars!”

Okay, I don’t know if that’s what happened or if this crazy landing method was planned all along, but that is exactly what they do!  I have seen it with my own eyes: several times in the space of thirty minutes.  For some reason it tickled my brain and made me laugh: there’s a big black aircraft approaching the runway and some little white cars sitting at the end of the runway.  Suddenly the cars take off, flying down the runway at 90 mph, driving really close to the plane, the pilot in the car radioing the distances to the pilot in the plane.  They touch down, another one comes in, and they do it all over again.  The sight is one of the strangest, wildest, weirdest things I’ve seen; a car chasing a plane down the runway. 

This video does a pretty good job of demonstrating most of what I’ve said, only with less flair.  

I love the part when he says “a remote base.”  Clearly he’s never been to a UPT base. 

Also, one of Caleb’s former instructors now flies the U2 so we're basically friends with a celebrity. 

The Apples Don’t Fall Far From the Trees...

Our meager CD/movie collection boxes:

Our books in boxes:

As you can sort of see we still have a fair amount of unpacking, painting, hanging, and repairing to do before the rooms are ready for their close-ups. 

And, just for fun, here’s a picture of me playing with one of Caleb’s new toys:

So I guess there’s a little sneak peek of the guest room.