"Now That's a Lot of Music" Vol. Road Trip '09

Bridget:

So, a few months ago, Craig came up with a brilliant plan: each of us had to acquire 10 new CDs for the road trip...any genre, any artist, just had to be new to us. The deal was we couldn't listen to any of the music until the trip began. Do you know how hard it is to buy new CDs and have them sit around the room begging you to play them? Brand new, colorful album artwork promising fun, new melodies and good times to come. Well I can happily say that the wait is over! Here is the final list, all successfully uploaded to iTunes and ready to be played again and again:

Bridget's 10:
Dave Matthews Band: Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King
Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds: Live At Radio City
G. Love: Lemonade
Michael Jackson: Number Ones
The Gabe Dixon Band: The Gabe Dixon Band
Justin Nozuka: Holly
matt pond PA: Several Arrows Later
James Morrison: Songs For You, Truth For Me
Tristan Prettyman: Twentythree
Donavon Frankenreiter: Donavon Frankenreiter

Craig's 10:
The b Foundation: Trouble Standing
New School Dropouts: Bring Back Shaka
Braddigan: Watchfires
Current Swell: So I Say
The Low Life: Thixotropic
matt pond PA: The Green Fury
The Push Stars: Paint The Town
86 the Effort: Get Live!
Brett Dennen: So Much More
Keller Williams: Dream

Before and After

Craig:

Anyone who watches Wheel of Fortune knows that "Before and After" puzzles are the easiest ones to solve...well for the Brizzle anyway. But Pat Sajak aside, I would like to take this opportunity to write about a different kind of before and after. When you are about to leave on a trip that really does not have a return date set, there are a lot of packing issues that must be resolved. If you are me, you must decide which four of your fourteen jackets you want to take, or which pair of shorts you would rather wear. Do I have enough khaki pants for every occasion? Do I have the perfect jacket for every weather scenario? What if it starts to rain while hiking through a mountainside vineyard? These are all excellent questions. After a while, you just have to buckle down and leave some stuff behind. Here is the before picture:



And after about eight hours of diligent packing and organizing we finally came to this end result:



Thanks to the nice folks at North Face (they make an excellent duffel) we were able to fit all of our clothes into one duffel bag. The other duffel has camping and dive gear, and the two small bags have jackets, shoes, electronics, and any other little thing we deemed necessary for NZ life. Not too bad I would have to say. And whatever did not make it into the four bags will be stored at D & S storage in Wayne, NE (Thanks, Mom and Dad).

Parting shot: my best new kitty friend...Elberta Bojangles. Once roaming the alleys behind Bojangles in Elberta, GA, she is now living in the lap of luxury with our good friends Robbie and Bryn.

Good bye to the canoe club!

Craig:

Greetings everybody! As part of my first official blog post, I would like to take the opportunity to explain what I have been up to for the last six years. I left for Navy boot camp in September 2003 and after nine weeks of fun I entered the Nuclear Propulsion Training Pipeline in Charleston, SC. I graduated Nuclear Power School in August 2004 and went on to Prototype Training in Ballston Spa, NY. I left there in July of 2005 and was stationed in Kings Bay, GA aboard the USS Wyoming, a ballistic missile submarine, to be an Engineering Laboratory Technician. And after 4 long years of naval service, I am proud to say that I will be honorably discharged from the US Navy on September 21.


Here is my naval career by the numbers:

Years of service: 6
Number of days spent underwater: 392
Strategic Deterrent patrols completed: 6
Birthdays missed: 1
Number of Nuclear Reactors I have seen: 3
Total Amount of Radiation Exposure I received: 211 mrem
Number of Foreign Ports visited: 0
Number of Domestic Ports visited: 1 (Kings Bay, GA)
Longest period of time without seeing the sun: 52 days
Number of Ballistic Missiles launched from my boat: 0
Number of Fictitious Ballistic Missiles launched from my boat: 312
Number of real fires on my boat: 0
Number of fictitious fires on my boat: 87

So US Navy... I say good bye to you on good terms. I learned a lot, made many new friends, experienced a lot of new things (like pepper spray and tear gas), but it is time to move on. Moving on to bigger and better things. There are waves to surf, sunsets to watch, foreign countries to visit, underwater coral reefs to explore, seas to be sailed, and mountains to be climbed. So I leave you with a picture of the good times to come!