Wozspace.org

I don’t honestly believe there are any readers left for our little personal blog, but I am trying to wake it up.  I am not sure if we need or want it anymore, but we still use the domain for email and things.  What happened?  Why did I quit posting? I guess I should explain a bit of history though … We set it up in the first place primarily to deliver photos and updates about our kids to our own parents and family.  It had worked fairly well for that purpose while we were living in Ghana and had the first blog on Google’s Blogspot.  We moved to Ethiopia in 2008 but the entire Blogspot domain was blocked in Ethiopia so that we could neither see our own blog let alone post to it — at least not easily.  I didn’t have much to do when we first arrived there and I set about getting around the block.  I figured out how to post from behind the block and eventually how to migrate our blog to our own domain.

We were up and running for several months, but then I started a new job with the US government and my boss said, “Oh, God, you don’t have a blog, do you?”  I answered, “Uh, not really … Not anymore!”  They weren’t technically banned for people like me, but they needed to review it and they weren’t encouraging it.  There we of course issues around publicly talking about Internet filtering and blocking and how to get around those and any personal political commentary concerning the US and the host country government.  But this blog was pretty much just pictures of our kids for their grandparents.  There was still the issue of our own security and privacy in publishing our house location and kids’ photos, too.  I decided I just wouldn’t post at much at all anymore.  I used to work with computers and websites and wanted to keep up with the tech and how to do things myself, so I installed patches and updates periodically.  Eventually, however, most of the custom code and little fixes and widgets stopped functioning.  There are disconnected galleries and comment pages and discontinued services littered on these pages or posts.  The title is written in Amharic even.  I’ll happily apologize if there is anyone left reading this — I was never that excited by Facebook and rarely ever posted there.  It was also generally blocked in Ethiopia.  Nonetheless, Facebook and other things generally filled in for the role that this blog played when I started it.

So, very long story short:  We moved to Ethiopia right about ten years ago, and we were there for over eight years.  We loved Ethiopia.  We moved back to the US about two years ago and bought a house and I found a job I really liked.  My oldest graduated from high school and started college.  It was great being close to our families.  It was a critical time for our kids to be closer to their grandparent because, in the last two years, my wife’s mother and father both passed away. Unfortunately, my wife was unable to find suitable employment in the States and continued consulting overseas for most of that time.  Months ago she took a job in a new country and we joined her here this Fall.  I just arrived and am very excited to be here.  Anybody who has talked to me in the last year or so will certainly know where we have moved.  For the moment though I am not saying where.  Someone who knew me ten years ago and still gets notified of new posts will have no idea.  I am not too worried about privacy or security, and I am not working yet, but I thought maybe I’d have some fun dropping some hints to see if anyone is still there and could maybe guess our new home.  I could not have guessed from just the photo below.

Where’s Wozo?

Book Challenge

Waving the flag for the new millennium

Haven’t had much of a chance to update in the last couple of years. 

Too much going on and too much work … that doesn’t seem to change, however, I am still hoping to bring our pages back. 

I keep updating the software as need to keep up with security and spam out.

I have been pretty busy the last several months finally graduating with a masters late in July in Rome and dealing with lots of other issues, but we are all back together in Addis.  I started to update our little website, however, I several new technical issues (or ones I don’t how to deal with anymore) with this blog … I have updated WordPress and all my plug-ins however they just don’t seem to be working well together anymore.  I may start over from scratch with a new theme, and a reinstall if I can’t fix it.   This is just a test post where I have tried various little changes to test their results.

We have moved a few times since moving to Ethiopia. Now we believe we are settled into our final house here, and are very to happy to be settled, but our friends  naturally ask what the new house looks like or what kind of car we are driving … So, I thought I’d try to answer some of those questions.  We actually don’t have any photos of the new house yet, so you might have to wait a little while for our edition of “Ethiopia Cribs” but here is a photo of what a Pajero looks like and our dogs Wubz and Michelle too.  I will have to get some pictures of our new house.

Claire's Baptism at the Bishop's house in Cheyenne in JulyClaire was christened this past July while we were visiting back home in Cheyenne. We had a small ceremony in the chapel at the Bishop's home and the ritual was performed by our friend Fr. Carr who has been acting as Bishop recently.

Claire found the whole experience quite exhausting, but here she is finding some comfort in Grandpa’s mustache.  We hosted a reception at the Warren-Nagel, but unfortunately Claire and spent most of her party sleeping on the sofa.

Tess, however, looked absolutely fabulous and ready for tea.

Our Internet access has taken a bit of a hit this summer and fall, and the updates have fallen off.  New jobs and new offices have meant that there have been few opportunities for us to update, and probably won’t be many options for Jeanne to update the blog going forward.

However, I  have had a new connection for a couple of weeks  and have been using it to update the plumbing on this site.  Upgrades have been numerous, but always have the potential to break things … anyway changes included updating theme, so you might notice that the Amharic title has morphed at least temporarily to Chinese.  I knew this was would happen and we haven’t been hacked (at least as far as I can see).

On the subject of hacking; for the time being I have turned off the ability to join the blog because of potential security holes.  We were not really vulnerable to the issues with user accounts that I knew of, but that hasn’t stopped lots of people from creating accounts and trying to hack in.

We hope to take care of these tasks quickly and get back to posting photos, but thanks for your patience while I renovate things.

Difficult to believe this big guy was my little baby only a few years ago … Jacob is into basketball and badminton, writing short stories and poetry, nerf battles and legos. At the risk of bragging too much, he is adapting marvelously to Ethiopia; of all of us, he speaks the most Amharic and is anxious to explore the sights. The third-term report card was wonderful, as are the comments from teachers, school staff and his friends’ parents – he is really a lovely young man!

Princess Claire prepares for battle

Claire loves to dress up in princess dresses, and especially in fancy shoes, but she also has her tough side!  Here she is loading up for battle.

Claire may have a bit of Jedi in her. Claire is shown here again in attack mode.  (We put together a 3 picture slide show, that you can play at full screen if you like, use the “esc” key to exit, and you can use your arrow keys to operate it.)

Claire's pancakes are delicious!

I got a new camera for Mother’s day that’s given me new motivation

"Dadda, I cookin'."

to post.  Here are some updated photos of my babies!

Jeanne recently took a trip to northern Ethiopia in the Tigray Region (click for a map, written like this: ትግራይ ክልል and pronounced: Tigrāy Kilil).  In Mekele our friends there suggested that the girls should also have traditional dresses to reflect the style worn in that region.

Our girls thought this was a great idea of course.  Jacob on the other hand thought his purple geode was a much better present – he loves it in the way only a young boy can love a rock.  The girls, even little Claire, love their dresses in a way that just goes beyond what a fellow like me could explain.  Some things are just fundamental I suppose.

I used Microsoft’s Live Writer to post once or twice on previous blogs. While it worked very well overall,  I saw a few issues and didn’t really need its help.

It will be a bigger help here in Ethiopia where bandwidth is so limited.  No need to be online to write a post, and because it looks just like the real thing, I can catch a few other types of mistakes before posting.

Live Writer was recently updated and I have been anxious to try it out.  Here are 3 photos of my lovely assistant Claire (enjoying sugar cane) to help me test it.

Among the features I rememered in Live Writer are the built-in image tools.  Effects like drops shadows etc, that were just more convenient to create right in a blogging application.

OK, I know they won’t look so great right next to each other here in my test, but this will speed up posting and might make posts prettier too, even when I dont have such and attractive model.

Jacob and Tess work to solve a mystery.  It was a mystery to Jeanne and me in any case.  We tried to understand the story they constructed around bits of bone and broken pottery they found in the garden, but their theories quickly became too complicated for our less agile minds.  They, however, were  having fun trying to piece everything  together despite their serious demeanor.

Our house in Addis

The house is not as large as it looks in this photo.  We have 3 medium to small sized bedrooms all on the main floorwith no inside entrance or stairs to the downstairs room where we  have a washing machine.  Whomever wakes up first always wakes the rest,  so it is “cozy” I suppose in real estate terms.

Still we all like the house and the garden is fantastic.  We are happy to be settling in.  Our air-shipment of linens and Christmas presents for the kids finally cleared customs after more than two months of sitting around, and so we opened presents and had ourselves a merry little “material Christmas” complete with a tree that arrived in the box.

We all spent Christmas at our old friend Nancy’s apartment.

Both girls loved their new dresses in fact so much that we had to let them open them early and wear them for high tea at Addis’s palace- like Sheraton.