People In Passing

So, we had a bit of a media black out this summer. It started around the end of May when I descended into my basement and stuck my face in a bunch of books. I was studying for the CISSP certification for about two months. My nights and weekends were dedicated to the obscurity that is the depth and breadth of that study material.

Well, after burning June and July on test prep I flew down to Los Angeles and sat for the exam. It is considered the standard for computer security professionals and is taken on scantron paper with a #2 pencil. (This may give you some idea how much they trust computers.) 3 hours and 46 minutes into the the allotted 6 hours I walked out. I wasn’t entirely sure what the result would be. Two weeks after that I found out I passed. Whew… finally. I’ve been looking at that test for a long time.

Summer and I then attempted to reclaim the rest of the season in a short period of time by squeezing Camping, Hiking, Jack Johnson at the Gorge, and a week vacation into the last couple weeks of August. It wasn’t so much a vacation as a let’s-get-a-bunch-of-stuff-done-on-the-house week but it was incredibly productive! Oh, and we built something really fun…

A FULL SIZED HOME ARCADE!!!! It isn’t finished. We still need to add the trackball, cup holders, and the *very important* kegerator with taps for Player 1 and Player 2. It isn’t as pretty as some models you can buy for lots of $$$ but whatever, I learned a lot in the process.

I’ve got some other projects in development so stay tuned for updates.

Let’s move on…

I met a old woman on a plane once that told me a story about her childhood.

She told me of hiding under her house with her father when the Germans came through their town during World War II. She told me of the bombs that fell and knocked down the house around her and her father. She told me about how they waited for what seemed like days for help to come.

She could smell the gas leaking from the pipes into the small crawlspace that they had hid in.

Show told me of the look in her father’s eyes as he handed her a cigarette and took one for himself, pulled out his lighter and prepared to end their wait, when they heard the voices of the neighbors outside as they started pulling the rubble away.

I don’t know why I remembered that story this morning. I don’t know why I’m not aware of it at all times. It reminds me to have perspective on things. I pray I never have to make a decision that hard.

World AIDS Orphans Day was Wednesday.

From Scouts.org:

World AIDS Orphans Day will occur on 7 May. More than 25 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS – equivalent to the number of people living in New York, Paris, Rome and Bangkok combined. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 12 million children have been orphaned by the pandemic. In addition to being especially vulnerable to all forms of exploitation, these children face financial difficulties, disease, and stigmatisation.

Short Notice: The World Affairs Council of Oregon, the Portland Area Global AIDS Coalition (PAGAC), and Unitarian Universalist Global AIDS Coalition (UUGAC) are hosting Stephen Lewis at the First Unitarian Church of Portland tonight.

Stephen Lewis is the co-director of AIDS-Free World (www.aids-freeworld.org), and was the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from 2001 - 2006, his extensive career in the fields of diplomacy, politics, activism and humanitarian work includes roles as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations.

He is a powerful, motivating speaker that you shouldn’t miss.

Full info HERE

Details:

Friday, May 9, 2008
First Unitarian Church of Portland
SW 12th and Main

Stephen Lewis 7:00 p.m.
Action Fair 6:00 p.m. & 8:30 p.m.
$5-15 Admission (sliding scale)

I’ve now been back as long as I was gone.

In those first six months I was a vagabond traveler turning whichever way the wind blew, running my tally of countries visited to 21. Sleeping in cars, trains, busses, and on floors, couches, bunks, and beds. In the six months since I have planted and grown longer roots than I have known in my adult life and couldn’t be happier about it. I have purchased property with my lovely fiancee (we got the house!) And as of last weekend we got a puppy!

Last Saturday started off simply. Summer and I had tickets to the local roller derby. Neither of us had ever been to one before and had been wanting to for some time. I bought our tickets for the Rose City Rollers online and we were set. Picture a bunch of women racing around a track wearing old school roller skates, knee and elbow pads, helmets, tattoos, and a fiendish grin all racing around a track trying to knock each other down. Now that’s entertainment!

Also at the Expo Center was the annual Pet and Companion Faire which we stopped by before the Rollers.

Walking around the many aisles of furry, fluffy, and feathered things we knew we wanted a dog. We sat with a number of dogs and talked to them and their handlers but nothing stuck. Until Carter. Carter was passed out on the floor of the Humane Society of Southwest Washington’s booth. One ear up and one ear floppy you could do whatever you wanted to him. He was spent.

We walked him and talked to the girl that was fostering him for probably an hour and a half. Everyone that walked by said two things: “He’s soo cute!” and “Look at those paws!”

Yep. He’s a horse, or he will be. Shepherd and Lab mix weighing in at 24lbs and only three and a half months old. He is projected to land somewhere in the 60-80lb. range. Needless to say, we never made it to see the Rose City Rollers that night. We did however add a new member to the family.

Internet people, meet Carter Michael Pierce: (Michael for the late Michael Carnahan who was a lover of all dogs and dedicated his Sundays to walking them at the Humane Society)

Life changes quickly, so let’s move on.

The Iraq War turned 5 years old this week.

While driving I heard something on the radio that moved me and brought a different level of reality to the war for me. A soldier named Brian Turner writing a blog for the New York Times considers the last American soldier to die for that war. This is what I heard:

Who can say where that last soldier is now, at this very moment? Kettlemen City. Turlock. Wichita. Fredricksburg. Omaha. Duluth. She may be in the truck idling beside us in traffic as we wait for the light to turn green. He may be ordering a slice of key lime pie at Denny’s, sitting at a booth with his friends after bowling all night. What name waits to be etched on a stone not yet erected in America? Somewhere out in the vast stretches of our country, somewhere out in Whitman’s America, out among the wide expanse of grasses, somewhere here among us the last soldier may lie dreaming in bed before the dawn as the sun sets over Iraq.

As soon as I got home I tracked down the whole piece. You can read it here: “Requiem for the Last American Soldier to Die in Iraq” and I hope that you do.

I decided to cobble together all the posts I wrote while traveling last year into a single page (sorry, multi-page code is broken). The blog always lists the most recent post, so if you weren’t reading along from the beginning it can be pretty difficult to navigate through and find all the pieces-parts of the trip.

Round-The-World : Phase 1 (http://peopleinpassing.com/round-the-world-phase-1/)

I have made no edits to the posts themselves. Cleanup, elaboration, and grammatical fine-tuning still remain goals of mine. Just not today. Also, weighing in at a little over 30,000 words, I have not re-read the collected posts start to finish so I don’t know if it flows or is a herky-jerky narrative experience. Consider yourself warned.

All that said, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed experiencing and writing it.

Oh, and Happy Valentines Day too