Life on the Vine

I didn't want yesterday's big event to go unmentioned on my blog. Yesterday Tom and I closed on the sale of our house in Saint Louis. It was almost 5 years to the day of us purchasing the house. This is a picture of Tom and me standing in front of the house on signing day - April 15, 2005. When we found out I got the job with U.S. Africa Command in Germany, Tom and I discussed what to do about the house. After being an absentee landlord with a house in Georgia for nearly 10 years, Tom did not what to rent the house. He preferred to try and sell it. Also being factored into the decision was the fact that we don't plan on returning to St. Louis. Neither Tom nor I are from the Midwest, and aside from some very special, dear friends, we don't have any family in the area. So, in mid-August we put the house on the market and since early September it has been sitting empty, ever since the movers came and packed up all our household goods for overseas shipping and l...

Last month I traveled to Liberia for almost a whole week. The main purpose of my trip was a visit by GEN Ward , commander of U.S. Africa Command. I was there to provide public affairs coverage of his stop in Liberia, which was just about 24 hours. While there I was able to attend the first U.S.-Liberia planning conference, where U.S. military representatives discussed upcoming plans for training and other support with the Armed Forces of Liberia. Knowing I would be traveling to Liberia, I reached out to U.S. Coast Guard Commander Jennifer Ketchum, who is serving on a 2 year assignment in Liberia, providing guidance and support to the new Liberian Coast Guard. I thought the story of the Liberian Coast Guard was something we needed to share. Well, it took several weeks but I fin ally got the story done. It is posted on the AFRICOM website but I'm going to share it here too. Re-entering the Water: Liberia's New Coast Guard MONROVIA, Liberia, Apr 16, 2010 - A small team...

My father-in-law asked me last week why I hadn’t posted anything recently. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it several times but things have been busy and time has gotten away from me. In less than two months I have traveled to Africa twice, first to the Democratic Republic of Congo and then to Liberia, and I was in charge of a week long visit to the headquarters for a media delegation from Ghana. And in the middle of all that I also went to Malta for a long weekend to visit Tom...thus the earlier post of me and my heavenly hot chocolate . I began writing a blog post about my trip to the DRC, which was my first ever trip to Africa, to submit for Africa Command's Wordpress blog but I never finished it. I grabbed the draft though and will post it here. This was written in February when I was on the trip and I worked on it some when I got back. There’s no doubt…it is hot in central Africa in February but surprisingly not as shocking to the system as I thought it would b...

A few things to know before I get to the point of this post.  I am a big fan of Rachel Ray and the Food Network.  That's one thing I am missing here in Germany - the Food Network - but I did bring along several Rachel Ray cookbooks though.  Rachel used to have this show called "40 Dollars a Day" where she would travel to a tourist location or popular city and eat on the town for less than $40 a day.  A show ran several years ago where she went to Spain and in the show she went to this little cafe and had the thickest hot chocolate I'd ever seen and she enjoyed it with a churro, a Spanish fritter.  I thought, and told Tom then, that when we made it to Spain I was going to have one of those thick hot chocolates.  Well, I didn't have to wait until getting to Spain to try this luscious dessert.  Last weekend Tom came home after being gone for a month.  We had planned that I'd take a few days off from work and that we'd travel to Garmisch, here in ...

Allow me to take you back to last Saturday.  On the 13th I went on another USO tour, my third one.  This one was a "Third Reich Tour of Dachau & Munich."  Tom has been in DC the last three weeks and has one more week to go so a co-worker came along on the tour, using Tom's seat. The day started at 5:30 a.m. as we boarded the bus for a 2+ hours-long bus ride.  We got caught in a couple traffic jams - 'staus' as they are called here - so it took a little longer to get up to our first stop - Dachau Concentration Camp. Dachau was the Nazi's first concentration camp and served as a model for all the others.   The people who ran the entire concentration-camp system during WWII were trained here.  If I recall correctly it opened within 4 months of Hitler being elected to power.  Originally it imprisoned dissidents and political prisoners, and was a torturous labor camp.  It was for men only. Dachau is the only camp that operated all 12 yea...

It's been a couple weeks since I last posted so I wanted to get a message up so everyone knows I'm still around and doing okay.  Work has been very hectic the last few weeks.  I am definitely gainfully employed.  This week our Strategy, Plans and Programs Directorate hosted its annual Senegal Theater Security Cooperation Conference.  Six senior defense officials from Senegal's military traveled up to Stuttgart for a week-long conference.  The week was capped off with the visit of Lt. Gen. Abdoulaye Fall, chief of defense for the Senegalese Armed Forces.  He is the first African chief of defense to visit the U.S. Africa Command headquarters - a pretty big deal for the command.  You can see photos and story on the command's website . There's also some videos on our YouTube page and photos on our Flickr site.  The command's other social network sites are Facebook , Twitter , and the WordPress blog.  Those are a great way to keep up with w...

On Monday January 18, Martin Luther King Holiday in the U.S., Tom and I went on our second daylong tour with the USO.  We traveled about three hours from Stuttgart to Trier, Germany. Trier is Germany's oldest city.  It was founded by Augustus in 16 BC but historians claim the area was inhabited by Celts for 1,300 years before Rome even existed.  Trier was a Roman town called Augusta Treverorum for 400 years.  When Emperor Diocletian (ruled AD 285-305) divided the overextended empire into four sectors - Trier was made the capital of the west (roughly modern-day Germany, France, Spain and England). Trier is smaller now than it was during Roman times but it is still a good sized city with lots of shopping, Germany's oldest Christian church and Germany's best Roman ruins. Our first stop was the Tourist Information center where a tour guide got on our bus and led us on about a two hour driving tour with two stops.  The first was a scenic overlook point and the ...