1) Acquisition went through so get to do all the wonderful stuff associated with it… various paperwork , reading *lots* of company materials on policies and changes, benefit choices, townhall meetings, etc…. not to mention normal work.
2) Various PHPC stuff. I have to admit I have been not been as diligent with this as I normally would but the others have been nice in pointing out necessary stuff and yelling at me when needed. Thank goodness.
3) PHPWomen stuff. Again been dropping the ball on this but Elizabeth Naramore has things well in hand so I am not worried about it. She kicks me when I need it.
4) Kid’s college stuff. Kid is applied to the college of her choice for a Nursing degree, ACT/SAT scheduled, FAFSA and FFAA completed, a couple of scholarships have been applied to, still need to push her to apply to more. Who’d a thunk it would be so difficult to get a kid set up for school.
5)Hubby and his motorcycle. Yeah after much discussion, checking out of the local dealership and checking of the budget – he got a motorcycle. His retirement present to himself and for a mid-life crisis – there are worse things. See it on his facebook page if you are interested.
6) Discussion on a graduation present for the kid. Current plan under discussion – her and a friend doing a 5 day stay at Disney with park hopper passes. 3 previous plans rejected thus far for various reasons
7) Planning the logistics for the party for Kid’s graduation. Currently have about a dozen family members coming in from around the state and California.
The great Khan dog is showing his age and limping around from arthritis. After the vet visit he is now on 3 pills (vitamins, anti-inflammatory, and pain reliever) and is to be strictly restricted in his movements. So no going out with our younger dog, no running, no jumping.
9) Oh and I have to start the garden this month so next month I can start planting in it supposedly. Gardening is new for me so we are learning and faking it to start. With how much I spend on produce, I am hoping it is cheaper in the long haul. Hoping to start prepping the area for it this weekend so wish me luck.
10) The solar panels. Don’t *even* get me started on that!
11) Preparing for Hubby’s military retirement. Not really a lot to do but budgeting, saving, paying off bills, planning for the class on retirement and just all around getting ready to lose almost half of the current household income.

All this – and still have to do all the normal stuff of life – cook dinner, clean and dust the house, work on home improvement projects, check on the kid and her school work and after school activities… you know – life.

Well this past weekend we attended a local colleges seminar on admissions and financial aid that really opened her eyes to all the things she needs to be doing. Since then we have filled out her FAFSA, the states version for financial aid, started looking at scholarships/grants to apply for, and scheduled her ACT and SAT tests.

She still has quite a bit more to do to have everything done in time, but at least she has started.

For 2009 I was supposed to try and meet a couple of personal and professional goals. Some of the goals I like to think I have met include:

1) relearning how to balance my work and family. When I started working at MySQL I felt so completely inadequate in my new role that I completely submersed myself in it to try and get myself to someplace that while not comfortable, at least didn’t leave me feeling stupid all the time. I found that place after about a year, but by then I was so consumed with work that I had little time for anything else. 2009 was the year I wanted to take back my personal time.

Now that I have again found that balance, for 2010 I want to get back to my roots and turn my hand back to so PHP coding again. I am massively rusty, but I do miss it so it should be fun.

2) speaking at conferences. I am always telling people to submit talks to conferences but never seemed to have the time to do it myself. Yes I was being a hypocrite.

For 2009 I swore I would submit talks to any conferences I thought I might actually be able to get the time off of work to attend and as luck would have it – they liked me… They really liked me. Crazy people – must be stoned or something.

In 2009 I was accepted to speak at 5 conferences (6 if you include the Microsoft summit) and after being ill before the first one – had a fantastic time. I will definitely be continuing this for 2010.

I have been honored to already be accepted to speak at this years spring conferences – TekX and Confoo. Unfortunately though I have had to withdraw from the Confoo conference due to work requirements, but I will be attending TekX in May. And if I am brave enough, I am also going to try and submit to the MySQL User Conference.

3) install solar panels on the house to reduce our carbon footprint and our electricity bill. Took us a while but it is finally done. The solar panels are in and the solar water heater is working. We are currently waiting for the local electric company to come and install a 2 way metering system.

4) Help my daughter. While not on the original 2009 TODO list, it immediately went to the #1 slot when her father passed this fall. This will be an ongoing thing that may never have an end. But she is worth it.

5) hold semi-regular meetings for the PHPWomen board. Trying to coordinate 7+ people around the globe for meetings is a pain – but we managed to do it a number of times this year to discuss ideas, catch up on projects and touch base with everyone. Not bad.

Ok – time for the listing of things I did not do this year that I wanted to. This list could easily be couple of pages long but we will shoot for a condensed version.

1) get back into writing. I love to write and for some reason, just haven’t had cause to write in a while. Need to contact some people to see if they need any new articles… Wonder if E3 would let me do something for PHPArch maybe…
2) didn’t learn enough for work – still need to get more into performance tuning, benchmarking, cluster and server administration. Always so much to learn, and never enough time (remember trying to balance work/life).
3) PHPWomen – oh let me count the ways… I really wanted to have the paperwork filed for 501c3 this year, never quite made it. Wanted to also have a birthday party for PHPWomen during Zend Con but due to unforeseen circumstances that didn’t happen… also forgot to try and have a “Go Pink” drive for breast cancer.
4) help get the PHPCommunity organized with the provisional board. laying the foundation for hopefully better to come.

This listing can keep going on and on – but now seems like a good time to stop. Here is to hoping 2010 is a great year!

We got there late on the 20th with me forgetting to bring my sneakers (no one was really surprised by that for some reason ).. so we just went to sleep. On the 21st we went sightseeing of the tourist area eating our way up and down the streets (excellant backeries and pastry shops along the way). Unfortunately the weather wasn’t the best – rainy and kinda cool but since we were just shopping it was no big deal. We then walked to a large shopping mall on the edge of the tourist section where Jason and I both bought some new sneakers as well as a few other things. Basically we shopped until we dropped.

On the 22nd we dove the great barrier reef. Again the weather wasn’t the best – but it was warmer and drier then the day before. We rode the boat (there were ~15 people on the boat) for about 2 hours to get to Hastings Reef. I had problems sinking – probably because of the wetsuit’s extra bouyency (we normally dive in just our swim suits and a rash guard shirt). I added 6 more pounds and still had to swim down and control my breathing to stay down. We unfortunately didn’t stay down as long as we would have liked… I was sucking air hard and my tank seemed to be a short fill – Kayla did way better then me. After that the boat took us to our second dive site (Turtle haven) . There we had lunch and our second dive. I forgot to grab another weight so I again had to swim down and control my breathing but I did much better with my air consumption – so we stayed down quite a bit longer then the last one. We have plenty of pictures from the dives and I will be posting them later. Anyway – after the dive we rode the boat back in to Cairns, ate dinner and passed out. It was a good day.

On the 23rd we originally were scheduled to go on the 4X4 Eco tour of the rain forest. Unfortunately the tour guide became sick and rescheduled the trip for the 24th. So since we found ourselves with a free day we explored some more of the area. It was cool since we managed to find a number of smaller shopping areas tucked away that we missed the first time as well as a farmer’s market that was really cool to walk through. Jason found a wonderful bakery in it. Wondering and exploring took up the morning and early afternoon and we all managed to find souveniors for ourselves. The later afternoon was spent in the hotel swimming pool and taking a nap. Nice and relaxing.

The 24th we spent the whole day on the 4X4 tour of the rain forest. We went up and down and all around in the rain forest. Our tour included driving on restricted access roads that the tour company is the only one to have access to. It was really cool seeing the white cockatoos in the wild, climbing around a creek worrying about leaches, seeing how big the termite mounds really are, checking out animal tracks on the road and trails, and seeing the shear cliffs and overlooks on the side of the road. Kayla saw a kangaroo but was so overwhelmed by it – it took her a while to articulate it… and by then it was gone for the rest of us. Again we have lots of pictures that will be posted later – though our battery started yelling at us 3/4 of the way through and ran out before we made it all the way back. Got back to the hotel room ~6PM. Which was nice since our flight was scheduled to leave at ten after midnight. So we had time for dinner and organization of our stuff.

We go back to Guam at ~5AM on the 25th, went out to grab some breakfast since we were starving, and then back home. And just to make sure we never forget our trip – we came home to find that someone had stolen the tailgate from Jason’s Jeep while we were gone. So we spent our first hours home making a police report for it.

All I can say is that it was well worth it. The whole trip was incredable and allowed us to take off a couple of items in our “life’s TODO list”.

Oh well. all in all it wasn’t a bad trip. To bad we forgot the memory card for the camera – standing at the top of the mountain – you could see the whole island as well as Tinian.

The only problem is that she is technically only supposed to go to a max depth of 40ft. Honestly thought she could go 60 -100 ft but guess not. Need to make sure the Australia dives aren’t to deep.