What a crazy few months this has been! For those who don’t know, back in October while we were away on vacation (more on this shortly…), a pipe burst in our basement. The good news is the damage was isolated to just one corner of the basement. The bad news is, that corner is where my file/web server lived. Up on a shelf, battery backed-up, away from harm – or so I thought. Water hit the server and nothing else, killing 2 of the 3 hard drives in the computer. The drive with no real data on it survived, whereas the data drive and the backup both fried – killing every single piece of data I have ever kept. This included my website, every single photo we have ever taken and a bunch of other personal files. I was with no exaggeration: heart broken. Thankfully a local data recovery lab was able to recover 100% of my data!!! It was the happiest I have ever been to pay 1100$ for service. Over the last couple months I bought some new equipment to finally rebuilt the server that you are reading this from now. Only thing left to do is rebuild the photo server – which is coming soon! So with that sad tale hopefully behind us, time to move on with some much abbreviated updates!!! I know this will be a long post, so please bear with me.
As I mentioned before, we were away on vacation. Early in October Shannon, the kids and I joined Jeff and Cathy on a wonderful Disney Cruise. In part as a fun vacation and also to celebrate Abby’s 10th birthday! This is Shannon and my second cruise, first for the kids. And first Disney cruise for all of us. It was as you would expect from Disney – pretty amazing. The ship was gorgeous, the food was great and plentiful, and the service was second to none! We were at sea for a week.
Due to some tropical storms the weeks prior, our trip had to be someone re-routed. We ended up with 4 stops: Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Jamaica and finally Disneys Castaway Key. Each stop had it’s own amazing adventure. In Cozumel we swam with the dolphins and manatees. In Jamaica we went to the Chaka resort where we did a tube ride through a rain forest and swam on a very cool multi level pool where the kids were able to jump off the face of a rock wall into the pool. On Grand Cayman we went out snorkeling with the sting rays in what felt like the middle of the ocean. And finally on Castaway Key we had a “quiet” beach day full of snorkeling, swimming, sunbathing and bicycle riding. Each excursion seemed to out-do the previous. The days at sea were a nice quiet break from the ports. The weather was fantastic each and every day.
Once we were back on dry land, we ended up staying a couple nights at the Disney Swan Hotel and spent the first afternoon just exploring the Disney grounds and the Downtown Disney area. The second day the kids joined Jeff and Cathy at a fun day at Animal Kingdom while Shannon and I ventured over to the Magic Kingdom. We spent the morning doing an incredible behind the scenes tour of the park. Big bucket list item checked off there! Once the tour was done we wandered the park much like we did many years ago – just the two of us jumping on and off rides all afternoon and just enjoying the park. Later that evening the kids and in-laws met us at Magic Kingdom around 7pm and we watched the parade and firework displays. Jeff and Cathy were pretty zonked at this point and headed to the hotel, but the kids, Shannon and I kept going! We hit up a bunch more rides and played at the park right up until it closed at midnight. Back to the hotel for a short night sleep and then finally back on the plane int he morning to head home! Thank you so much for such a great trip Jeff and Cathy! It is one we will never forget! And to my baby girl, I hope you had a wonderful 10th birthday! Mommy and Daddy love you so very much and hope you had as much fun as I did!!!
Christmas has also came and gone since I last posted. Normally I like to break things down but given the length of this post already, I will simply say that it was another great Christmas! With so much time being spent with family and friends. Good times, great people and lots of love (and way too many presents!). Thank you everyone for everything! I will have the photos up in the near future. Just need to finish some server work first!
I am having a bit of writers block at the moment, so I think I will cut the update off here. There is so much more detail I could put into all the above but I’m just going to keep it semi-short. In the next post I will try and cover a bit more including some vehicle updates, house updates, 2018 plans and much more. So stay tuned !