Karen is Germany Bound

On June 6th Karen will be heading for Ramstein Air Base. She will stay at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (http://www.landstuhl.healthcare.hqusareur.army.mil/ ) which you see pictured here. Karen's lodging will be a short distance from the medical center. This is the largest military hospital outside the continental United States. It is also the treatment center for wounded military members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. If you go to Google/maps and search "Landstuhl" it will key you into the German village, Landstuhl. Then search "Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and you can actually see the medical center. Lodging is just adjacent and is literally surrounded by woods. Unfortunately, the Incirlik commander, has just decided to change the leave policy and will only let father's take 30 days of leave. We figure that means I can only arrive about three weeks before the due date since it's possible we can be delayed trying to obtain Katie's passport before returning to Turkey. So I probably will flying to Germany around June 28th or July 4th.

Katie is now kicking and moving around a lot. Karen is excited to actually soon get to see the person who has been kicking her. They assigned Karen a "storknesting buddy" and she has offered to show Karen a little sight-seeing if Karen feels up to it. I know Karen is hoping to go to Peris for a meal also. Katie will be quite the world traveler before she is even born.

A lot of people coming and going at my job. Our friends Joe and Melissa Thompson left last week bound for Eilson AFB in Alaska. Canisha Carson showed up here to take Joe's place. When I return from Germany in August, our two officers will be getting ready to turn over their positions. After that's over, we will only have 10 months left!

I did great for my fitness test this year. Last year I weighed 225, measured a 38 inch waist, ran the 1.5 mile in 13:20, maxed out my 1-minute push ups at 42 and did 30-something for my 1-minute sit-ups. That's a barely passing 77 points for a 41-year old. This year, I increased my score 10 points to an 86: weight 209, waist 35, max push-ups at 42, max sit-ups at 47, and the one I am most proud of - I did the 1.5 mile run in 11 minutes and 15 seconds. I have to give all credit to Joe Thompson who motivated us all via the CrossFit program( http://www.crossfit.com/ ). Gotta go - they are closing the library.

Katie's Nursery at Incirlik

Welcome to Katie's Nursery. Remember to let these load fully. Sometimes you have to click on the play button twice but make sure you have given it plenty of time to load before trying a second time. The video will start off sideways but quickly adjust.

And everyone keeps asking to see Karen's Buddha-belly. So here she is:

Touring the Dwyer's Home at Incirlik

OK, this file something like 32mb so I don't know how well it will work. For starters - turn your volume up both on the blogger video window and your personal speaker. These videos do have an excellent narrator. If you can't hear him - turn it up! The video is over two minutes in length. So give it time to load. I'm trying to load it to the blog as I type this. I'm not sure which one it is. Karen and I did one video of the house and one video of Katie's room. The video is currently processing message 420 as I type this. Hopefully, it won't be too big for the system.

5 minutes later now. Processing message 532. Oh wait, I think it is done at 562 messages to transfer the video. So now I will see if it plays......

Yeah. It seems to work on this end. OK, that is a tour of Dwyer House Incirlik. Notice we skipped Katie's nursery. We will try that in a second post.

A couple of other pictures of the house. First this is a picture of our street below. Kastamonu Court may look very elegant. And it is pretty don't get me wrong. But see that nice looking building in front of you. No that's not a mansion. That's four separate homes holding 4 couples to include 6 kids, three dogs, and a least one cat. We live off to the right of this building complex.

And here is our house. And only the little half. The tall half is somebody else's house. If you look close you can see Slinky, or The Ghost as Kori and Ryan like to call him: