My Life

Looks like Mel and I will finally venture across that large body of blue H20 in March. Mel is defending on the 4th of March which is only a week away! Its hard to believe, but we will be leaving in just under 3 weeks for Thailand. I just received my VISA back from the Thai embassy.

So for those curious readers out there here is the breakdown of how things are suppose to go:

• Mel defends on March 4th at 9am in the morning. After that there will be a get together somewhere in town until later in the evening where most likely we will make our way to Columbos. After that, specs?
• We fly out of Bozeman on the 15th of March in the morning to Hawaii
• Spend 2 days there getting Mel’s stuff shipped off to Thailand and going to the Dole plantation, shrimp stands and the Battleship Missouri museum
• Fly out of Hawaii to Bangkok on the 18th of March
• We have a Hostel booked for 14 days right now and will be apartment hunting during those 2 weeks. Mel already has some options for apartments, we just need to go see them
• I have a 60 day Tourist VISA right now, which I should be able to extend an additional 30 days. Hopefully by then we will have found me a job over there. I’m hoping to keep working for the University for these 3 months to transition myself out of my current role and get Google Apps in place for Faculty and Staff as well as some other big projects that will aid the university.
• At the end of my Tourist VISA I will most likely come back to the States and figure out my apartment situation as well as what I’m doing with my stuff(there is still stuff for sale by the way. Go here. Do note that there are tabs at the top for movies and games too!)
  • Options that I have for staying in Thailand longer include
    • Getting a job and getting a non-immigrant VISA which is a year long VISA that can be renewed
    • Applying to a Thai language school to learn Thai which should get me a 10 month VISA
    • Applying to teach English which should get me a 10 month VISA

So here is the most important info on the land that we will be exploring

• Spiders
• Its warm

I guess that is pretty much the gist of things to come for now. I will make sure to post pictures and videos here as our journey proceeds.

If you have questions please feel free to ask.

Mel and I just got back from Maui so I figured I would toss up all the latest happenings.

For those of you who don’t like to read lots about boring people’s lives here are all the pictures

Hawaii

continue reading…

Here are the pictures from today so far

Pictures

Short post as we have to get on the fly-fly and jump the Pacific puddle to the volcanic land

I took a recent vacation to go to my Godparents’ daughter’s wedding in Wisconsin. I learned that sometimes flying can be very stressful this trip.

continue reading…

Last week was quite the week. Monday I scheduled an appointment to find out what was wrong with my abdomen.
I found out that I had a hernia and I have to go in to see a surgeon on the 9th to see if I need surgery or not.
Nate and I also were moving out of our apartment last week was just a terribly painful experience(not like physical pain, but mentally)
Our lease was until the 31st of August and as a courtesy thing Nate and I said we would move out before the 27th which was apparently too pressing on our Landlord as he kept pushing us more and more to move out even earlier. Legally, of course, he is not able to do this, but we were planning on being out anyways so whatever. The real pain was him constantly poking us about getting out. I started cleaning last Tuesday night and it took like 2.5 hours to just clean my room. I decided that I was going to take Wednesday off of work to clean the rest of the apartment only to find out that our landlord had his “cleaner” ladies in there already cleaning the place. This angered me a bit as I was fully planning on cleaning the apartment myself so we wouldn’t have to pay anything but the carpet cleaner.
It was a good thing that Mel and I were slated to head back to Glendive on Thursday for a vacation.
The good thing was that not much was happening at work the whole week until Thursday of course. I came in at 6am for our Thursday morning maintenance. Everything that we did in the morning went really well. We were suppose to leave for Glendive at noon, but of course all hell broke loose at work and our file server / backup server died out of nowhere. This was pretty exciting trying to get it back up quickly so I could get out of town. I managed to patch it together and left work around 1:30.
We unpacked my car(stuff from the apartment) and packed it in a record 30 minutes. Then decided to head downtown to Paulie’s Hot Dogs for lunch before we headed out. There is a Natural Dog store next to Paulie’s that we hit up as well and got some dog treats and a toy for Wilbur.
The ride home was pretty nice and Mel and I had a wonderful time there. Friday we went for a bike ride around Glendive, out to Makoshika park, out on a frontage road and then back. There was a 15% hill in Makoshika that was steep enough to get both Mel and I off our bikes. I blame our health issues at the time really, as it was a tough hill, but not tough enough to beat both of us! Mel really liked Makoshika so I took her up there in the car later and we went on a few short hikes(pictures will follow as soon as I finish moving and get a second to get them off my camera)
Saturday we took the dogs out to our piece of land and Mel got a glimpse again of the badlands and also what Prickly pear cactus tastes like. Its sticky and tasteless, FYI.
Then we all headed to Beaver Creek Brewery in Wibaux. The brewery didn’t open until 4 and we got to Wibaux at 3:30 so we headed to the Wibaux county fair which happened to be going on. I think we were early for that too as there wasn’t anything going on so we walked around the exhibits and then left. Later Mel and I found out that my Mom and Dad bought us a present. There was a boot that did wooden carvings and they bought one that had both of our names on it. We plan on staining it soon and will post before and after pictures.
After the fair we made our way to the brewery, which was super fun as always. We all had a good chat and then headed back to Glendive for dinner at home. Mom made huge, no really, huge steaks and we stuffed ourselves.
That was pretty much our weekend in a nutshell. Its hard to express how much I enjoyed the weekend in a post, but it truly was awesome.

I’ll get the pictures up soon.

Thank you weather for being nice finally, except for those stupid storms that occur from about 4pm to 5pm.

Its finally been pretty constantly nice out for the past week. Wow, I had no idea what 3 days of going to work from 7:30 – 5 and then playing Ultimate from 6-9:30 could do to a person. Its pretty apparent today that its going to be a “get in shape” summer if that continues. Tonight I have a free night. What shall I do? Go for a bike ride or do laundry or sleep. I’m doing a really good job of procrastinating the whole laundry thing. It’s only been a good 3 – 4 months since I last did that…wait I should post stuff like that publicly.

Leaving for Cheese land next week on Tuesday for a week. That should be good to get away, especially after having one of those special “Mac” days where anger builds up rather quickly over the course of the day trying to get them to work well in the labs.