Whether anything actually gets written or shared in the future remains to be seen, but at least the infrastructure is fresh and ready to go!

My wandering thoughts revolve around potentially writing and sharing some of the songs I’m working on, talking about good food (and the restaurants who make it), and sharing thoughts on my work/technology when the urge strikes.

If you can’t see a video below, view Kate talking and singing at the link.

And while we are putting up movies: Annaliese and Andrew just finished their summer-time sport with the FAST swim team. Here’s a “before and after” movie including their events at end of the year championships. They had a blast being on the swim team this summer and made huge improvements. Again, if you don’t see the video below, you can watch it at tangle: Andrew & Annaliese Swim Team Video.

1. What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why?

I’m geeky like Tim, but at least I don’t think about firmware as being something “fun”. So, I’ll do a little better and say that the era of my career where I got to do a skunkworks project and port Java (the Virtual Machine) to Linux from another OS was probably the most fun I’ve had in my career. It was a task assigned to me and one other employee, and making it all work in a matter of weeks with no external pressures or deadlines or even status reports was a blast! And surprising Sun at their own game at JavaOne that year was fun as icing on the cake as well =)

2A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did?

Play basketball (almost) every day of the week!

2B. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting off.

Take the family on an overseas assignment for awhile. I think we have to stop having kids for that to happen someday.

3A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why?

(a) Bass Guitar– I play now but I would love to be better at it; and I am actually working on it slowly

(b) Cooking! — I’ll steal from Tim since I’ve taken his point-of-view already and spend a reasonable amount of time cooking and enjoy it tremendously. But, it would be really fun to take it to the next level (open a restaurant?)

3B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn?

Related to above, I’d love to work personally with Norm Stockton on bass..of course, with his 4 DVD instructional course on my shelf, it’s almost as good. However, he’s an amazing bass guitarist and I’m sure taking personal lessons would be way more exciting than watching the DVD course.

4A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

talented, jokester, compassionate (submitted by a close family member) =)

4B. Now list two more words you wish described you.

financially independent? (just kidding–please don’t send me home business offers!)

5. What are your top three passions?

Passions sound really important..I’ll skip all the ones that are hard to quantify and are way up there at the top (family, church, God, etc.) and go with some easy fun ones: music, college basketball, computer/software tech.

6. Write, and answer, one more question that YOU would ask someone.

Q. Who came up with this crazy idea? And are they cataloging it somewhere for future blogger investigations!?

A. I have no idea.

There, I’m done. I now tag Kevin and Jen

This post is something I’ve been thinking of doing for years–but a few things got in the way. One, when the news first hit (in 1996-7) I didn’t really have a blog or a website. Two, in the decade since then, the inertia of going and scanning some honeymoon album photos (we didn’t exactly have a digital camera in 1994!) and figuring out if we had pictures to compare to recent Montserrat images since the volcano became active, has kept me from making much progress. But, with the new year bringing news of another large set of rumblings and activities, I decided it was a reasonable time to do the work.

The Background

In December 1994 Margaret and I spent our honeymoon on the wonderful island of Montserrat. Towards the end of the week there, we hiked the tallest mountain (Chances Peak, ~ 3000 ft.) and hiked (down) into an infant volcano. Our guide, “Archie Bunker”, (yes he asked us to call him that) said as we hiked into the volcanic area: “did you know that in 24 hours, through a set of earthquakes and geological activity, that this infant volcano could become active and built itself into a mountain?” It seemed a bit exaggerated–little did we know that in 1995 that very thing would happen.

Plymouth Destroyed

In 1997, the main town of Plymouth was basically destroyed in what was the first large eruption of the now-active volcano. At the time, many residents left and a safe zone in the north portion of the island was marked out for those that stayed. It was major international news and even caused a British government official to quit over a “row” regarding details of payments provided to families repatriating on other islands. Since then I’ve seen Montserrat rarely in the news until January 2007. I’ve now found the Montserrat Volcano Observatory website and what follows is a series of photos combining scans of a few photos from our 1994 trip and photos from the albums on the MVO website. (If the MVO website gives you fits, give it a try later..seems they have been hit with a lot more web activity than their bandwidth or servers can handle!)

For reference, use this map of Montserrat for a reference to the following images.

Here is a picture of me standing in front of Chance’s Peak, around the village of St. Patrick’s. Left of Chance’s Peak is Gages Mountain. As you can see, no volcano in this picture!

Here is a 2006 image of with Gage’s Mountain to the left, Chances Peak to the right, and the volcanic rim in the middle. This picture is not from the same vantage point (on the map it would be from the Gages area, more NW than the 1994 image above), but you can see that the terrain has changed quite a bit and that the volcano basically is another 3000 foot mountain next to Chances Peak!

As mentioned above, the town of Plymouth has basically been slowly going “underground” due to flows from the volcano to the west, basically obliterating what was once the bustling hub of the island. Here is the center of town in 1994:

In 2001, the MVO published this image of the central clock tower:

By 2003, the top had been “popped off” by the continued flows..the MVO caption adds: “The top of the clock tower – which once stood 55 feet high and has been a symbol of the gradual inundation of the former capital of Montserrat – lies in the foreground on the right hand side of the picture. Photo taken 30 December 2003.”

As far as our 1994 visit to the volcano itself, here are a few pictures of the trek down into the volcano. “Archie” and Margaret descend (we are basically at the base of Chance’s Peak..or that general area) into the volcano crater area. Yes, it was smelly and there were hot sulfuric springs running through the area.

When you reached the “volcano” itself, it was barely a couple foot tall hill of sputtering gray matter:

Well, that’s all for now. Here’s a closing picture of the young newlyweds with the volcano! If you look closely you can see sputtering gray matter in mid-air. I guess we won’t be going back to Montserrat anytime soon, but it sure was a fun week in a very quiet and relaxed island that has seen a lot of changes in the 12 years since our visit.

Katarina movie (Quicktime, 14.2MB) If your computer is unable to play this movie, please see the free Quicktime download at Apple.com’s Quicktime download site

Although she came a bit late–6 days after Margaret’s due date–we were excited to have Katarina Emilie arrive on Friday, Nov. 10th, 2006 at 6:14pm EST. Partially due to being a bit late, she turned out to be our largest baby yet, weighing in at 9 lbs. 15 oz., and was 21 3/4 inches in length.

Margaret had an interesting week of waiting after the due date came and went, including several nighttime hours-long sequences of real contractions that led to nothing. But finally on Friday, after contractions that started in the middle of the night, Katarina had had enough and was ready to come out. She did most of the hard labor at home; then we finally went in to Margaret’s doctor around 5pm to see if progress was happening, and needless to say they quickly got us over to the hospital when they found out how far she was along.

At the hospital we were told that all the birthing suites were full, but they were looking for a room for us! It turns out we were put in the “PACU”, which after some googling I found out is the “Post Anesthesia Care Unit”–usually used for a minor recovery room [Note: it's also a kind of fish..learn something new from Google all the time!]. It mostly looked like a large closet to us and had a couple standard gurneys in it as well as the medicine dispensing closet for the whole ward and no bathroom! Thankfully, everything went very quickly from that point and Katarina arrived barely one hour later, delivered by a doctor sitting atop a standard gurney since a birthing bed wasn’t available.

Margaret and Katarina are doing wonderfully. They came home from the hospital yesterday and are settling into life here at home. The kids were really excited to get to “meet” her at the hospital on Saturday. At the top of this post are links to some photos from the weekend as well as a video I put together of some footage (all of it post-birth–don’t be worried!) we took over the weekend as well.

During a visit from our good friends the Muresans, we attended another fun Rhythm on the River jazz concert down in Scottsville (on the James River). Soon after we arrived, a photographer came around and started snapping pictures. After taking the picture below, he came over and asked for permission and the girl’s names for the paper; which turned out to be The Hook, a Charlottesville alternative events and info weekly. In a week or two we found the picture on a page of photos depicting the Rhythm on the River event.. so, famous again, twice in one summer!

Note: Click on the image for a larger version

Maybe I can even get Margaret to update it once in awhile. Of course, even with an easy to use blogging interface, this site may remain as crusty and un-used as it ever was. We’ll see!