May 2015 – robinchartier

in the clouds

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by photo storage lately. On my Macbook I have an SSD hard drive (the flash kind so no spinning and it’s super fast), but as a result it’s smaller than normal and fills up faster. Every so often I have to transfer my photos off of my computer onto an external drive and hope that I’m not erasing my previous photo transfers with the new ones and that I don’t lose the external drive completely the way we lost the remote to the TV 18 months ago — really. It has never reappeared and trying to guess which tiny button on the back of the TV is the volume and which causes the TV to jump to ear-splitting static is a fun guessing game that I always lose. But anyway, photos.

I read up on several cloud storage systems and decided to go with Google Drive because google is lord of the internet so it seemed like a logical choice. If they’re all up in my private business anyway, why not let it work for me? iCloud storage was too expensive for cheapie me and the others were too fancy with their document offerings, etc. So I downloaded Google Drive onto my phone and computer and guess what I found? Folders already organized by year and month with any photos that were already online (not from Facebook, but any photos that had appeared on my blog or anywhere else). Mama Google had already done my cleaning and organizing for me. (Thanks Big Brother for your 1984 ways.)

Look at these baby faces!

All these old photos that I haven’t looked at in forever because so much of our lives are portable these days! Awe, baby cheeks . . . now I need to find Camille’s baby photos and her birth photos so she can see herself. Better dig out the hard drive and save those to the cloud too. Josh hid them so the spread eagle shots didn’t end up cycling through on our computer monitor as the screen saver. “Hey, there’s Mom, naked in the hospital again.” Oops. The best part about the cloud is I can look through thousands of photos on my phone or my computer and not take up any room on my device. Yay for more free space on my hard drive!

Anyway, I’m happy to report that so far my cloud experience has been a success. I have it set to whisk away any new photos I take so I’ll only have to go back and try to sync my old backups that never made it online. That might take a while, but at least I’ll be covered moving forward!

I didn’t take these photos — a friend’s husband who is an amazing sports photographer snapped these at the boys’ soccer tournament last weekend. They started playing with a group this spring that is geared toward skills development, not just recreation.

Our photographer friend said Caleb has great “action hair.”

They didn’t win either game, but that might have been because they were all wilting out there in the middle of the day under the hot sun. It was our hottest day yet and they played 2 hours of soccer, stopping to dunk and cool down in between games.

American Soccer Club of Bahrain 2015

This was the last event for the year (and it’s getting much too hot to play!), but they plan on picking back up again in September. Calvin was still in Germany and this tournament was just for the middle aged kids (they go from 7 to 18).

Princess Camille

Cause what 4 year old doesn’t need a little extravagance in her life?

I told her going to the princess spa was a reward for doing so well at her pre Kindergarten shots, but the truth is a friend wanted to take her daughter and do a date with Camille before they move away so we would have been going even if she screamed and ran and hid behind my legs when the doctor came at her with a needle (which is exactly what I did at my pre Kindergarten appointment). But it was nice to be able to say that she earned the big girl treatment for being a good sport. (She was! Three needles and only a few whimpers.)

At the princess spa they set the girls up with foot spas with bubble bath and soak their hands pre-manicure, just like mommy.

While they are getting their treatments there is Disney soundtrack music piped in over the speakers and a pirated version of Frozen playing on the tv. Totally pirated. Elsa isn’t orange in the real deal.

They both got sparkly blue nail polish on their fingers and toes.

First a facial, then hair and makeup

My, how natural you look!

All day long: “Mom is my lipstick still on?” Why yes, dear. I can see your fluorescent lips from space.

I was suckered into the crown and wand. She hadn’t seen them, but I noticed they had quality crowns and wands (beaded on wire so they would bend and not snap) so I bought them because I had promised to replace the cheapies that I got that didn’t last. Go big or go home, right?

Fine. I admit it. I got the crown for me, Princess Robin. Where are my gloves?

We Are the Champions

I came out on top. 5 weeks solo and Josh is finally home. Gold medal for me. Really, it’s not a big deal these days, compared to the early ones where he was gone for 7 months at a time and I was home with the littles and half of my sanity, but it’s still a lot of work shuttling 4 humans around in a foreign country. Gold stars and margaritas all around. I’d like to thank my vehicles for continuing to run . . . without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I think it’s the first time we’ve had a functional relationship while Josh is away.

Instead, both cars broke within 24 hours of him landing in Bahrain. No joke. One started making weird noises (which I still haven’t heard for myself) so he took it in to the shop. A few hours later we piled everyone into the small car and were headed to dinner when Josh noticed that the temperature gauge was rising fast. Do people really look at the other gauges while driving? I check my speed and the gas level (usually), but the rest is all visual noise. Good thing I wasn’t driving or I’d keep going until it started smoking. Josh pulled over and determined the fan wasn’t kicking on — kind of important when it’s 105 outside — so we bailed and went home.

The mechanic brought back our one broke car this morning (still waiting on a part) and switched it out for the other broke car to work on that one for a few days. SOOO HAPPY that I don’t have to deal with it. I think our mechanic thinks I’m a bit of an airhead ever since I blew up the other car.

But the real champion in our family this week is Calvin, who was part of the winning football/soccer team that took the Europeans Division II title.

All week they had been underestimated — seeded 8 out of 10 teams, not mentioned in the pre-tournament roundup, etc. They started with a win on day 1 and then people started to take notice.

The best part was they upset the team who has won the title the past 4 years. The finals went into double overtime and then penalty kicks before Bahrain won.

With the team award — they went back to 1977 to take this photo presumably

All the parents came to the airport to welcome them home.

I made signs. Yay me.

Everyone came prepared with pom-poms, confetti poppers, noisemakers, balloons, etc. (Calvin is to the right of the confetti popper in the green tshirt)

I’ve never had so much fun in an airport — those poppers are LOUD!

Number 1!

Leaving a mess for the janitors to clean up — just another day in the Middle East

Happy to have our Champion home!

Throwback Thursday

I never participate in email forwards, Facebook trends, memes, etc, but since I was looking back on our first trip to Atlantis this afternoon, I thought, why not?

I can’t believe this bald chunk became a swimming fish in 4 short years.

From May 2011:

And this one is from a few months later when we made a return trip during Ramadan (August 2011). There are a few other posts around this time that you can view from the menu in the right margin, but this one has a great video of Camille on the balcony of our hotel room. I can’t believe she was ever that small. It feels like a lifetime ago: August

Feeling happy

Today went perfectly. Really, it couldn’t have been easier. Calvin wanted to practice his Arabic so he handled the passports for me and Camille was on cloud nine that it was an “airplane day” so she was chirping and skipping all the way to Dubai. We followed the signs through the airport to passport control, baggage claim, and the taxi stand in record time and 30 minutes later we arrived at Atlantis to find our friends at the check in desk just in front of us.

Since I left my computer at home I’m not going to task my thumb with too much more typing as I peck this out on my phone. Besides, what else can I say? We ate, swam, and went on water slides all afternoon, then ate dinner and wandered the beautiful hotel grounds with our friends. Then we’ll wake up and do it again tomorrow.

It all started 4 years ago on this slde. When I get home I’m going to pull up that old post from May 2011 with baby Camille in the same place.

Dinner and a view

Swimming like the fish!