a lot of catching up to do

i don't know if i should start at the beginning or start from today. probably today since i don't really know when the beginning is... maybe i'll start from october 2005 when jared and christy became jared and christy. although i think it started well before then.

i don't think the travels really got rolling until the summer of 2006. that's when i met jared's family in bako, jared proposed and two days later deployed the first time, i went on my annual yosemite trip and a havasupai trip with my spice girls, and i also went to india and pakistan for work. i went back to pakistan in the fall of 2006 right after thanksgiving and stayed for christmas, new year's and all the weeks in between those holidays and came home just in time for jared's homecoming from iraq. then jared met my family in florida and we got married just a couple weeks later, honeymooned in belize, and spent about 6 weeks languishing in our new home. then it was up and running again to england this time for reserve duty, jared met me there and we drove to scotland for a weekend. i wasn't even home from england yet when i got the phone call that i was going to iraq and had 10 days after i got home from england to pack up, prepare and report. enter camp shelby and my flashback in time to wwII era living conditions and playing g.i. jane for 5 weeks. bad got worse with a week in hellishly hot kuwait, or poowait as it's more commonly known in these parts, and 3 days of desert training with some unruly sailors. worse got nightmarish in the transient tents of baghdad but improved somewhat with a trailer after a month. vast improvements came another month later with a move to the green zone, a hard building to live in, and jared for a roommate. fast forward through 14-18 hour days of not much more than sleep, work, eating, exercise (a little) and precious little downtime watching the office to the return to the land of more than just work. one week at home to see mom wallaker and get a little unpacked was enough to get us back out the door for some serious vay-kay-shon. 3 weeks in costa rice, surfing, learning spanish, and basically risking our lives at the base of a very active volcano for 3 days. almost two weeks after costa rica brings me to present day... so now you know where we've been, sort of, for the past two and a half years. see future flashback posts for more detail on many of these events.

i'm doing invite only for the blog- i'm not so keen on randoms keeping up with our comings and goings. email me email addresses for anyone i may have missed on the invite list. photos in nice organized albums are coming soon. e