Perhaps love & hate are too strong of words but I have this relationship with this blog that kind of feels that way but maybe to a lesser degree. I like writing a blog but I get so wrapped up in the rest of life that this year it has fallen sadly by the wayside and put on the back burner taking a backseat to other things like the volunteer work I've been doing for the city of Auburn. Well, both my wife Mandy & I have but her more I think.
Just last month, Mandy took advantage of some training that the city paid for to fly her to Baltimore, MD to get some hands on training with FEMA in a class labeled "E900 - IEMC: All Hazards Preparation and Response". So she was gone for a week and I worked half days and played Mr. Mom. The Hazard they did drills for, their practice scenarios, revolved around a fictitious city getting flooded due to an issue with a dam up river. How much more closer to home can you get? If you're reading this and aren't local to western Washington or the Seattle area, the Green River Valley (Auburn, Kent, Renton, Tukwila) is preparing to face this exact scenario. Get the details here and even more details and resources can be found on the City of Auburn website.
Mandy has also been volunteering in the Emergency Management office (which I've done once so far), and has helped do other things like fold blankets and organize their moulage kits for CERT drills. Lately I've been helping to manage the city sand bagging site Tuesday & Thursday afternoons & Saturdays from 10am-2pm. Mandy & I are also authorized to drive city vehicles so that also helps in events like this where I can pick up a truck with supplies or whatever.
So in addition to those volunteer efforts, I also am trying to work on creating a web site for the Auburn Emergency Communications Team of which I'm a part of as well providing ham radio communications. So I'm learning a few new technologies as part of that project trying to figure out which tools to use and what-not. I want there to be a public calendar, a forums section, news, training, contacts, etc. I may be biting off more than I can chew with this project alone but it can be done in phases. I'm still in the planning stage in figuring out layout of the site and look & feel of the pages.
I've also been trying to learn some photography ever since I took my first step into the DSLR world when I got a Canon Xsi almost a year ago. Once I can get an appreciation and understanding of how to use the camera and its features, I want to take the next step and learn digital photo editing.
And at some point down the road, I also want to learn more about database management. With the software available today, you don't have to learn with training wheels like Microsoft Access anymore nor do you have to shell out big bucks to run Microsoft SQL Server either. There's free software like MySQL and there's even a free version of Oracle for download.
So much I want to learn and so little time, or at least lots of time and poor self-management of it. Because after a day of work, then volunteering or taking care of my 3 kids, there comes a time when I want to just quit using my brain as much and sit down to enjoy some time on the drums with Rock Band on the Wii. Yeah, I should just probably focus on one hobby or special interest at a time but then again, sometimes it nice to diversify. I mean I'm still learning some of this ham radio stuff. In fact I have a D-Star conference I'm going to in 2 weeks so I can learn more about that technology. I mean I just recently accepted invites for Google Wave & Google Voice so I'm going to try to learn those too. They look fun and they're free and all about communications which is really what all of this is about. Communicating via blogs, twitter, facebook, photography, radio, internet, e-mail, and even using databases to store and retrieve information to communicate with someone some data.
So with all that, my enjoyment for keeping my blog updated has turned into a small amount of self-dissapointment that I seem to only update this maybe once a month lately, if that. But then again, there's always my Twitter updates which also get posted to Facebook so if you follow me there, you get more current info. If you only follow me here, you may be missing out on some really important stuff.
