Moving In!

Guten Tag, alles!

Well, we are now in our new German home. We are up to eyeballs and more with boxes, but we are (Well, ok, Vivian is) wining the battle! Overall, the place is quite nice. It's not too far from everywhere we need to go and it's quite large for German standards. In reality, it is two units, with the second one being an efficiency appartment, which will serve as guest quarters for all who we hope will travel through. When we aren't hosting visitors, we intend to use it as a larger dining area for local guests.

Technology here is a bit lagging in some regards. It takes several weeks for telephone service to get hooked up and a few more to get high speed internet, So we will be off the net with limited access for a while.

It's hard to believe that we've been homeschooling going on 4 years now! Vivian's kept the kids pretty much on schedule by having lessons in the breaks as we have moved from place to place. Related to that, I've voluntrered to help out with maintaining the Stuttgart Area Homeschool Support (SAHS) group website. I'm working to get it re-established, but it will take some time since I'v lost connectivity as we moved into the new place for a while. The site dropped off-line as the previous administrator left. It's interesting how God provided there. The previous adiminstrator was Tim Boyd whose house we moved into. When I went over to talk about the website, he mentioned that their property manager would be looking for new tennants and it all worked out and now we are in their place.

In the event that you didn't get around to seeing the Christmas newsletter from this past season, here's some pics of each of the kids.

Matthew
Daniel
Ethan
Victoria

We hope that we will get to see lots of friends and familiy on this tour. There is so much to do here. I've already gone on a skiing trip with the church's mens group to Lenk Switzerland, and Vivian's planning on going on a retreat with the homeschooling moms next weekend.

My job is at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and it's been quite busy too. I went on a trip to Naples, Italy to for an Inteligence Systems Architecture Conference and in March I'm going to Florida for a confrence to rewrite service agreements between US and UK. But my biggest challenge at work is another project unifying configuration management tools for all of DISA.

Happy Birthday Ethan!

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

Ethan opened his present this morning and he was thrilled! Thanks so much!!

Ethan says "It's my favorite! Just what I wanted!!"

This is my first blog entry, and it's easy decide what to write about... I'm checking out how I like Blogger vs Yahoo 360... Yahoo seemed a bit clunky and most of our friends that blog use blogger, so there must be something to it... [added 20 Jan 07]

I just got back from Naples Italy last week!

I had a great time and learned a lot. Learned two main things from the city of Naples and Italy... You can find beauty anywhere, if you just gaze selectively, and avoid the airline Alitalia at all costs! I caught some nice images on my Flickr site at www.flickr.com/photos/vivneal. Click the Naples set to see them or just click on the thumbnail above... Below's a few from the set too, and they take you back to the images themselves.

One of the highlights of the trip was a guided tour of the underground tunnels throughout the city. Initially as quarrys, then acquaducts, then War bomb shelters. Lots of history all over!

Chaos!
Neapolitan life is very chaotic. First, the airline AlItalia was on strike when we were going down and so we had to get rescheduled on another carrier. One day on the way to the conference we weren't able to get into the facility because there was a strike and a demonstration blocking the route. Anyone would agree after experiencing traffic that it a demonstration in chaos... While we were walking as a part of the tour there was at least one near-miss. Finally, on the return trip, it took me three extra days to get home because of airline delays. What an adventure!

Neal