My Soldier and the Japan Relief Effort

This is my soldier.



(Forgive the serious face, its a military thing.)

Last Thursday he called me from work and said "Hey, guess what I just heard?"

Now a civilian wife probably wouldn't think much of this statement.

But me, being a military wife, first thought "He's going to deploy".

I replied, "What?"

Stephen: "I was just told to be ready in 72 hours to deploy to Japan for 2-3 months."

Me: "Oh"

My thoughts were going a million miles an hour trying to think of all the ways that this affects us and our plans.

I was a little upset at first, but not distraught.

Hey, I was expecting to hear that he would be deploying to Afghanistan for a year.

Three months in a non-war zone didn't sound so bad.

Also, its not like him being gone is anything new.

He has been gone twice in the last 3 years on training for two months at a time.

(These were the thoughts going through my head when he told me)

Stephen then told me how excited he was to be doing some real field work and to be a part of the relief effort.

So, though sad to be separated, I am happy he gets this experience.

So I dropped him off at the airport on Monday with a brave face and off he went to Japan.

He doesn't know where exactly he is going or what he will being doing there yet, just that they needed a chemical officer.

He was pretty sure he personally wouldn't be working on any of the radiation clean up but be doing more staff work.

I haven't heard from him yet but I am not surprised. For him to use his cell phone it would cost $3 a minute so the plan is to use skype but he may be somewhere where he doesn't have access to the internet.

So now what am I going to do?

(Being that a homemaker doesn't have much of a job when her husband is gone)

Well the deployment timing was good because I had already planned on taking a trip to Seattle to visit my friends Nick and Anna for 2 weeks.

So I leave, hopefully, tomorrow.

I say "hopefully" because I am making my first attempt at a military flight and I don't know how it is going to work out.

So I will be taking a vacation from the blog and my Etsy shop but when I get back, I will have lots to tell you and new items for my shop.

So I'll see you when I get back!

Bye!

I'll leave you with a happy picture of Stephen in uniform from our wedding day.

(This picture is of when he first saw me in my dress)

Audio Books

Before two months ago, I had listened to a few audio books in my life.

These I got when taking a long drive alone, like when Stephen was in Oklahoma and I drove to visit him from Missouri.

Or when I was in college and drove from Santa Cruz to Napa.

But other than that, I had not given much thought to listening to them.

That is, until two months ago.

Two months ago, I decided I wanted to get an audio book from iTunes.

I found myself dreading walking the dogs because of boredom (and the fact that they go nuts when I take out the leashes) and thought listening to a book might give me some motivation.

So I bought Dracula from iTunes.

(Awesome book by the way)

I was hooked.

I had a long list of books I wanted to read and not much time to read them and suddenly I realized, I could listen to them!

All day while cleaning, doing laundry, cooking, embroidering, I could be listening to a book!

I was instantly upset that I hadn't thought of this sooner.

But oh well, now I was going to be the best read housewife ever!

Luckily for our bank account I came across Librivox.org in which you can get audio books for free.

Volunteers read the chapters so you will have many different readers for one book.

Some of the readers are good, some really bad.

Some readers just don't fit the book.

For example, one chapter of Vanity Fair was read by a person with a Jamaican accent.

Or the few chapters of Little Women that were read by a man.

But hey, its free.

In two months I have "read"

Dracula

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Little Women

Little Men

Jo's Boys

All 9 of the Sherlock Holmes books.

Adam Bede

Treasure Island

and just finished today

Vanity Fair.

Can you tell I love 19th century British literature?

Can you tell I am getting a bit carried away?

Well I need to download a new book to listen to now.

Happy reading!

Coincidences

Strangest coincidence ever!

So I had my first real sale today.

(By real I mean, not bought by my mom or other friend, relative or acquaintance)

The customer was from Austria and a total stranger.

I thought that was cool.

On the invoice it had her email address which was her name @the-impossible-project.com

Crazy!

Now I realize this means nothing to you.

Let’s back track to just yesterday.

One of my favorite blogs is Pacing the Panic Room.

It is a blog by a photographer that I have been reading for months now.

(By the way, he has the most adorable maternity series of his wife Cole)

Well I was reading his blog yesterday and he had just posted about something called “The Impossible Project”.

(starting to see the connection yet?)

This blogger has recently started taking pictures with a Polaroid camera and The Impossible Project is...well, here’s their explanation:

“In October 2008 The Impossible Project saved the last Polaroid production plant for integral instant film in Enschede (NL) and started to invent and produce totally new instant film materials for traditional Polaroid cameras. In 2010 Impossible saved analog instant photography from extinction by releasing various, brand new and unique instant films. Therewith Impossible prevents more than 

300.000.000 

perfectly functioning Polaroid cameras from becoming obsolete, changes the world of photography and keeps variety, tangibility and analogue creativity and possibilities alive.”


I think that is pretty cool.

I am all for saving extincting forms of art.

(Yes I know extincting is not a real word, but it works ok)

(You still tracking with me?)

(Do remember what the point is?)

(Don’t worry, here it is.)

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw my customer’s email and discovered that she is a part of The Impossible Project which I just heard about yesterday!

Now tell me that is not a really weird coincidence!

The end.