Wedding Plans

Ryanna and I have started planning the wedding and have a date. Mark May 26th, 2007 on your calendar if you want to come. If you want to make sure that I send you an invitation, please send me an e-mail (lladnar1@gmail.com) with your address.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I had a great Christmas and got some really cool presents. It was great to spend Christmas with my family again. I was able to a couple of years ago but this year felt a lot more like it used to.

I got some really cool presents this year. One of which was an iPod dock for my iPod which has a radio, alarm clock and much more built in. I also got a home brewing kit to make some... um... delicious beverages.

My favorite present of all is:



Ryanna! Thats right. I'm now happily engaged to the most amazing woman I've ever met in my life. I'm very lucky to have her and can't wait till we are married.

For those of you who haven't heard the story before, here it is. This February, I traveled to the Philippines to see my parents who were going there for a wedding of a friend of ours. Before my parents left the US, they asked me if there was anything that I wanted them to bring from the US. I am in a habit of always adding something silly to the end of the list so I jokingly asked for them to bring me a "girlfriend." Well, when I arrived one of the first things out of my mom's mouth is "There is a gal here from Duncanville that you HAVE to meet!" Now, my mom is constantly trying to set me up so I'm a little used to this but it surprised me that someone else from Duncanville was staying at the guest house. So I went in and met her and her friend and thought they were nice but didn't think much more about it. They were in the Philippines for 6 weeks volunteering at the school in Bagabag while on their trip around the world.

Amazingly, even though we both had lived in Duncanville for over a decade and are the same age, we had never met each other before. We know many of the same people and she even went to Mexico with my sister in 1999. She also lives a couple of houses over from where my sister-in-law lived with her family till recently.

The next evening, I went down to the common room to check my e-mail and found Ryanna (the woman my mom was talking about) was also checking her e-mail. We struck up a conversation for the next several hours and I was really surprised by how much we had in common and how much I liked talking with her. At the end, I got her e-mail address and told her I'd look her up when I got back to Duncanville... in 10 months. She later told me she wrote down that she thought I was an interesting guy but she didn't think I would actually contact her.

The next day was Sunday and I went to a tiny local church of the friends who were getting married and while there, the young adults rather forcefully invited me to the Valentine's Day party that evening. I didn't really want to go alone so I invited Ryanna and her friend to come with me. They agreed to go so we went.

While at the party, people continually mistook me and Ryanna for dating but we kept insisting that we had just met. They played lots of couple games, the most infamous one was the orange game. The girl is blindfolded and handed an orange while the guy puts his hands behind is back. The girl has to peel the orange and feed it to the guy the fastest. I had the bright idea of having Ryanna put the whole peeled orange in my mouth so I could chew and swallow faster. She did and when I bit down, orange juice went straight down my throat the wrong way and I started coughing orange juice all over her. She was very gracious and forgiving of me, which I was very grateful for.

The next day, Ryanna and her friend went up to Bagabag, a city 8 hours drive away (although they flew). My parents and I were in the Philippines for 3 weeks and were trying to figure out what we wanted to do for most of the time. We were discussing going to the beach, Nasuli or Bagabag. After Ryanna and her friend left, I realized that I could use the time to go and get to know here a little better so I told my parents that I wanted to go up to Bagabag for the week. They looked into some flights but there was nothing that was going to work so it wasn't looking likely. We were sitting around that afternoon and someone walked into the common room and recognized my dad. Turns out his wife worked with my dad in Dallas and he was in Manila to pick up a singing group and bring them to Bagabag. They weren't ready to go so he was going to be driving up there by himself that evening. I offered to go along and he was happy to have me go.

The next morning I was all alone in the Bagabag guest house not really sure where Ryanna and her friend were and what I was going to do. I went off and found the internet guy so I could hook my computer up and check my e-mail and found him laying cable in front of one of the houses on the base. Having nothing to do I helped him and wiled away the morning chatting with him. Right about noon Ryanna and her friend walked out of the house we were working in front of and seemed very surprised to see me. Hannah said hi but Ryanna looked really shocked, said they had to get to someone's house for lunch and ran off. I figured that either she liked me or thought I was stalking her. Since I hadn't seen her very much I also figured it wasn't the latter. I stopped by that night and found out I was right.

We ended up spending a whirlwind few days together in Bagabag before I returned to Manila for the wedding one girlfriend the better. However, it looked like it was going to be another 10 months or so before we could see each other again.

It turned out that Ryanna was able to visit me in Aceh, Indonesia for 5 days on her way from the Philippines to London. It was great to see her again then and deepen our relationship. Next, I traveled home at the end of June to see her for 10 days before returning to finish out my contract. I was still committed to traveling with Stephen up to Russia so we arranged it for our girlfriends to join us for a couple of weeks through Laos and China. Finally on November 29th I made it back to Duncanville.

Since then we've been getting to know each other even more and on Christmas eve, I asked her to marry me and she agreed. We're hoping to get married sometime in June.

So... Merry Christmas to all of you and thanks for reading my blog all this time!

New Job!

I've only been back for about three and a half weeks but I've already got a job. I've agreed to work for Professional EDGE, a computer consulting firm that I interned at while I was in college. They are very happy to have me back and I'm excited to be working for them again. I'll be doing a mishmash of different jobs that can be defined as "Computer Consulting" and are in the general area of anything a business might want in a custom computer program. This will probably involve a lot of programming and other support. As with my previous jobs, I can't post specifics about what I am doing but I'll keep you up to date as much as I can.

Long Live Turkmenistan!

One of the countries I did not visit in Central Asia is Turkmenistan. It sounded like one of the wackiest countries in the world with a very active personality cult for their leader, Turkmenbashi (Head of the Turkmen) or Saparmurat Niyazov. The personality cult included only government run bookstores that sold little besides books written by him, cities, seaports and many other things named after him (including a meteorite!) If you want to get an idea for just how weird the country is, read Lonely Planet's Central Asia book in the section about Turkmenistan.

Well, the reason that I mention all this is that Turkmenbashi died last night. There is no clear succession and he was leader for life since the founding of the country. It will be interesting to see what happens when a person like him dies after having such a strong personality cult following. I would imagine it would be similar to Castro and Kim Jong Il when they eventually die but we'll see what happens to the country. Often throughout history when a popular and strong leader dies, the country is thrown into turmoil.

A Day of Weddings

This Sunday was a day full of weddings. After church we went to the first one. My sister-in-laws father got married to another widower. It was a great ceremony and they looked really happy together. After the reception and a 30 minute break, we went to the next one. The second one is the sister of some friends. After that we went home and watched the end of The Santa Clause 2 which has a wedding (sorry if I spoiled the ending!) It definitely felt like a theme for the day.

In fact, while I was traveling on the last trip, it seemed like everywhere we went there were weddings going on. In Central Asia, the big custom is to get your wedding video made around the national monuments and famous buildings. While we were sightseeing we constantly had weddings going on around us. At some places we could count 7 brides or more. Also, along the roads people were videoing the processions from the back of hatchback cars. Seems like lots of people want to get married all over the place.

Yoda, Spring 2002 - Dec 11,2006

As you can probably tell from the title, Yoda didn't make it. We went to the vet to visit him this morning and he could barely move. In the two hours we were with him he only was able to lift his head three times and couldn't stand or wag his tail. None of the medications were working so we decided it was time for him to go.

The vet determined that his bone marrow wasn't producing red blood cells for whatever reason and that there really wasn't any chance of him recovering. Ben was able to come down and say goodbye since it was his dog.

We found Yoda when he was a mangy little puppy and instantly fell in love with the funny shaped puppy with one ear up and the other ear down. He had his mischievous years but in the last year or so he was turning into one of the sweetest dogs I had ever known. When I got home a couple weeks ago, I was excited to have such a good dog around. Yoda, with his youthful playfulness, has also helped keep Buster healthy and more active.

He will be very missed, especially since his life was so short.

Dogs

My parents have two dogs. One is 13 and the other is 4. I was worried that I wouldn't make it home before the older one got too old but he's still happy and energetic. I took this picture a few days after I got home. The big white dog is the younger one and the smaller basset is the older one.

Well, the day after this picture was taken, the younger dog got an eye infection. I don't just mean a little eye infection, it looked like his eye was about to explode. I finally took him to the vet on Wednesday and the vet was very concerned and said stuff that sounded really serious. I got some medicine that might help and treated him for a couple of days. His eye got better but he got weaker and weaker. He also lost control of his bladder which didn't make my parents very happy. When I brought him back to the vet two days later, I practically had to carry him out to the car. The vet was even more worried that he had some kind of anemia which could be caused by leukemia, cancer or some auto-immune disease. We decided to leave him at the vet clinic so they could try and treat him as best they could but we opted not to spend thousands of dollars on blood transfusions and the like since they probably wouldn't help him anyways.

We've now waited all weekend and have only heard that he is resting but not if he is getting better at all. We'll head up there today and hopefully we will know whether he will live or not.

The odd thing is that I was expecting this from the older dog, not the younger one. The older one is still as happy as can be, except he misses his brother.

Conclusion

We have thoroughly enjoyed this trip and are glad to have shared it with you. I'll try to keep posting to my blog about my life which is still interesting, at least to me. I love hearing from all of you so please feel free to send me an e-mail anytime.

Now I'm back in Dallas trying to set up my life again and get over jetlag. So far I've gotten a cell phone (with 3G, internet and TV!), gym membership and am still looking for a car and job. Its good to be home.

Postcard from St. Petersburg

We arrived in St. Petersburg after an overnight train from Moscow for our last destination. It proved to be one of the most beautiful and amazing cities we had been to on this trip, well worth the effort of getting there.

St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great of Russia and was designed after European cities, created to Europeanizing the Russian Empire. It was the capital of Russia until the Soviet Revolution which actually began in St. Petersburg with Lenin.



Located in St. Petersburg is this statue of Peter on a bronze horse. He was an avid horseman and hunter. He also started the Zoological museum which is one of the top three in the world and its prized exhibits are his horse and dogs.

Being the financial, industrial and political capital of Russia for hundreds of years, St. Petersburg has tons of beautiful 19th century (and before) buildings all over the place. The next picture is just a representative picture of a building from around the city. Interestingly, the Soviets moved the capital to Moscow and more or less ignored St. Petersburg for development so it still retains its 19th century charm.



St. Petersburg is situated in the middle of a bunch of rivers and consists of a bunch of islands with canals through them. This means there are over 900 bridges around the city. At night the whole city is beautifully lit up. This is one of the main bridges in the town. It is good that they light it up so well because at the time we were there, the days were only about 6 hours long, leaving a lot of time for night.



We spent a lot of time trying to see just a few of the millions of museums. In fact, there are museums to everything, including chocolate, horses, small dolls and anything else you can imagine. We tried to stick to the main ones since we only had a few days but did manage to make it to the Dostoevsky museum. This was actually a small but well laid out museum all about the life and literature of on of Russia's greatest writers. You can even see the houses where The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment were based.



This photo is of Peter and Paul's Fortress at night. It was the first thing built by Peter and was a fortress to ward off the Swedes. It was very similar to Georgetown from the beginning of our trip, including a similar layout and never having been tested in battle. There was lots of information on the founding of St. Petersburg and the Russian space program including a real size replica of Sputnik and newspaper clippings from around the world when it was launched.



We also went to the Armory which had weaponry, especially artillery. You can see the evolution of artillery from the beginning to modern soviet stuff. There were some cool experimental weapons like the first rifled cannon barrels with projectiles and square cannons.



Finally, right before we left, we went to the world famous Hermitage. Unfortunately we weren't able to stay for very long, only two hours. We did get to see most of the great art though. Return of the Prodigal by Rembrandt was truly amazing, well worth the visit. We didn't make it to all the other stuff which is huge, like the Smithsonian.

The one negative about St. Petersburg is that there seem to be pickpockets everywhere. We were mostly successful at fending them off. If you want to know more, ask Stephen.

This concluded our trip. I headed back to Dallas and Stephen headed to London to see his parents for a week before heading to Portland.