Happy New Year 2009

It is hard to believe that I have had this blog since 2002. That is seven years of sharing stuff from the heart. I also can not believe that it is 2009. Time flies when you are having fun and as fast as time is flying by I must be having a huge party. New Years eve was spent at church with friends as we practiced songs for Sunday service. Wednesday nights are traditionally practice nights for church and then when we can afford it we go out with the gang and get a bite to eat. We did the same thing last night. Once practice was over we hopped in the Durango and took our daughter over to her friends house and then headed over to Texas Roadhouse for supper. Once that was done we headed home and spent the rest of 2009 watching the idiot box and camped out on the Internet.

I have spent some time in 2008 getting familiar with new social networking technologies by joining Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, MySpace, Friendfeed, Twitter etc.
Once you join one social network you will find that it is very enticing to join them all. One of the things that I like to do on Facebook other than read what everyone else is doing is to play my favorite game "Bowling buddies". This is a Java driven game where you can dress up your bowling avatar and pick out their clothes, shirts, pants, bowling ball colors etc. Just in the last 4 months I have played almost 400 games. My highest score is 209 and I will not stop until I reach the magical 300 mark. I hope that I do not get carpal tunnel syndrome over this but if I do at least I am having some fun. Last night Gizmo started playing it to see if she can beat my score. So far she is up to 168 so I do not feel too threatened. One of our church friends, Brie who is now living in Germany has a 220 score which means I am in 4th place while Brie is in 3rd place.

The year 2008 was the year that our family got really involved in a hobby called Geocaching. Geocaching is like being a modern day treasure hunter in which you use hand held GPS devices and go out and find a cache. Katy, Justin and I like doing it the most. Katy (Gizmo) has really gotten into the preparation part of this hobby which is to log on to the geocaching.com website and find the new caches and download the way points into the GPS. Once that is done you can also print out the logs and hints and history for each cache. We have a special plastic notebook that we keep all of our paperwork in when we hit the road. Geocaching is good for building teamwork and patience. Geocaching is cool because you can combine technology with the great outdoors and even get some exercise doing it. The harder the cache is to find the more exercise you get. There are two levels of difficulties by which a cache is graded by. One is the size of the cache 1-5 (nano, micro, large) and the difficulty in which the terrain is to get to the cache. That means that a 1-1 cache is going to be an ammo container sitting on the side of the road with a large red neon sign saying find me. Most of the time we stick with caches that are not nano or micro caches (very tiny and difficult to find) and we try to select caches that are 3 or lower in the terrain level because neither of us are physically able to climb trees or scale hills.

Team building and patience go hand in hand. Katy and I found out very quickly that it works better if I drive and she runs the GPS in the vehicle and the laptop computer. You do not have to have a laptop computer with a broadband card but it makes it much more convenient if you do have one. I do the driving and then when we get close enough I start to use the hand held GPS to get the vehicle as close as I can to the cache. Once that is done we get out of the vehicle and then we start looking for the cache. Using the GPS, hints and common sense goes a long way for finding the caches quickly. Same days are better than others when it comes to teamwork and patience. Let’s just say that it takes a lot of work from all of us. We have a good time getting out of the house and visiting the many different cache sites. We normally take some pictures along the way that we can share online as well.

Thanks to my new job and medical benefits Kristina and I have been able to upgrade our glasses for the first time in about 4 or 5 years. We are both very thankful that we can see much clearer now. Katy has been struggling with finding something more than doing substitute teacher openings here and there in Berkeley County which has forced us to make some hard decisions within our budget. Hopefully 2009 will not be as difficult on the economy as the experts are predicting but if it does we may have to make some more difficult changes in our life style. One of the things we are doing immediately is going back to being a one car family. That will reduce our car insurance bill, gasoline and vehicle taxes at the end of the year. That was a difficult decision because it is going to cause a lot of inconvenience with regards to getting around. Generally speaking we are going to have to figure out how to get by with less income and cut out all waste in our budget. We have struggled with that in the past but we are slowly but surely learning how to live within our means.

I am hoping that Katy can find a better job with more hours and I know Katy desires to pursue her Masters Degree and ultimately get her teacher certification which has been harder to do than she first imagined. We are hoping for more stability in these areas this year and we are determined to make the right choices and decisions to help that along.

We wish each and every one of you folks a very prosperous and safe new year in 2009. I hope that your dreams and aspirations are realized as you too work towards your goals and dreams this year.

God bless




James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
chiefpropellerhead@comcast.net