Garazon’s Den

The day Alison and I have dreamed and planned for so long is now nearly here, and today marks one of the happiest days of my life. Alison booked her flight today to come to the US permanently! (Pause here for celebration and cheering! YEA!! ) Its really hard to believe its finally come. Though we never have doubted for a minute it would happen, this distance separating us has caused more than it’s fair share of aches. But soon they will all be forgotten in a single kiss when we are at last together forever.

As I have often done for many other events, a countdown script for this very special event has been added to the site, you may already have seen it there in the top of the sidebar. Well actually its in three parts which should be self explanatory, but seeing as I often don’t make things clear I should probably elaborate. The first one is a countdown until the day she leaves to go to the UK to visit family and friends for a couple of weeks before beginning her new life as an Americano! :) She leaves Cyprus on the 22nd of November. The next countdown is to the time her plane leaves London to come to the US, and of course it wouldn’t be complete without the last one; the most important one of them all to me, the time her plane lands at Norfolk where I will be waiting like I have won the lottery! :) She lands in Norfolk on December 9th at 9:28 pm. I wont be late, even if the plane is! ;) I still have some counters up on various other pages and sites of mine from past events that were very special to us, our trips to see each other and I also set a countup scriot on another site that counts the days since she and I met, as I write this now it was 939 days ago that this beautiful Brit sent me a smile and a short note asking “Would you like to write sometimes?” since we both were widows and at a point very similar in our lives. Well that’s a story already told so I will let that be and just say from almost that very day, we both knew things were going to be very different for us! ;)  Well anyway here we are 939 days later waiting only for another 39 more to pass. I can’t begin to tell you how long these days are going to seem now. I cant even begin to describe how happy I am either, Its beyond words, it truly is. I feel the hand of God in all our story and a love destined from the beginning of time.

I’ll just continue to update this post with any related news instead of making new ones. and I have to apolgize for not doing much to update the sites lately too, along with us being busy getting things sorted for our reunion, there has been a lot going on with my mom as well. Another long story that, and maybe I will get around soon to expounding on all that happened, but for now she is scheduled the middle part of November to have a rather in depth surgery to reconnect her stomach to whats left of her esophagus up in her throat. No none of this was brought on by sickness but by a simple procedure done at a local hospital in August that ended up tearing her esophagus and having to be transported out to a larger hospital. She’s coming along and doing ok, well the best she can under the citrcumstances if you consider being on a feeding tube 14 hours a day, every day since the 23rd of August! Well as I say thats another story…

For now heres the itinerary as it stands now

Outbound:  Tue 09 December 08

Duration: 12:28

Departing:  Terminal 3 London Heathrow Apt (LHR), London, United Kingdom
14:00 Tue
Arriving: Terminal 4, New York J F Kennedy International Apt (JFK), New York, United States
17:05 Tue

Continental Airlines (CO 8245)
Aircraft type - 346

Connection:

17:05, Tue - 19:45, Tue -
Change plane

Stop-over duration: 2h40
Departing:  Terminal 3 New York J F Kennedy International Apt (JFK), New York, United States
19:45 Tue
Arriving: Norfolk International Apt (ORF), Norfolk, United States
21:28 Tue

DELTA (DL 6231)
Aircraft type - ER4

Stay tuned for more updates and thanks for dropping by!

October 17, 2008, its finally official; Alison had her interview today at the American Embassy in Nicosia and all our hard work and long waiting has now paid off! Just under 5 months from submitting the petition to having this part of our dream come true! She will have to go back next week to pick it up, but she is now fully approved and she is free to come to the US! legally! lol Well come to stay legally I mean! ;) She still has some business to take care of, renting her house out for one and finding a good home for Mr. Magnificient for another! But all this waiting and worrying now about getting all these forms and certficates and evidence is now all done, well still there is her interview at customs and immigration when she enters the US, but having the visa approved was the huge step to our permananet reunion. This was such an exciting moment for us, well from getting the interview date at the embassy last week its been building until last night I was feeling just like I did the times she was leaving to come here on holiday and the day I left to go there. I could hardly sleep last night waking several times and then texting her a couple of times until whe was nearly to the interview.   From the last text I was wide awake for what seemed to be the longest time, just anticipating our future together and knowing these long aching days of being separated are soon to be a distant memory, well one that wont be forgotten either and we will make sure we make the most of every minute together, we have a LOT of catching up to do! :-)

will add some more later to this post, its early morning and I just got the call from her getting out of the interview. i really knew it would be approved, but until you hear it officially its just not the same. Well I am off to having some coffee to wake me up a bit (like I need the extra caffeine to get my heart racing faster!) and shes having lunch with her good friend Agneta now in Nicosia. It was ever so kind and thoughtful of her to take Alison today, shes been a good friend for so many years to her and I am so thankful she has such good friends around her too. And it is always thanks to God and our angels for making our dreams come true, heaven sent this love has always been, will always be. I’ll speak more later! Whooooo hooo! lol

The now famous Pots On restaurant sign. (Well before I say anything else, can anyone tell me why we haven’t yet dropped the ‘u’ from words ending in ‘ous’ like we did with those ending in ‘our’ ??? I didn’t ever notice that until I wrote the word famous just then… : )

I can remember Alison having a puzzled look when I told her the name of the restaurant we were going, and I think she even had me repeat it a couple of times. As she said it was only a couple of days later she realised what I was actually saying. (thats another thing I found out, we have a twang and use the z sound a lot) I thought somewhere on the pc I would have a picture of the place as its been a local favourite for years and I’ve been there often. Sadly they closed down a few months ago. after 20 years in business. It wasnt really a fancy place but it had a very homely feel to it and the food was usually very good and plenty of it. During the season there was always a long wait for an open table, but thankfully they had a small porch on the front with a few benches and chairs to sit and relax while you waited. Even in the off season it stayed busy as there aren’t but a handful of restaurants of any quality in Currituck County. Speaking of those benches, in this picture you can see they have a pleasant view of a nicely kept lawn and landscape, not to mention making a great place to have a sit after dinner and surprise someone with a ring! :) I tried to find a link to a website that had a picture of the place on it but I couldn’t. I did find a nice review someone had taken the time to write here

By Patricia B. Mitchell, 2004.

Penny Gallop Bowden and Hagan Fischlschweiger are co-owners of Pots On ’N’ Kitchen restaurant, located on the Currituck mainland, just over the Wright Memorial Bridge in Harbinger, North Carolina. My family and I dined here on a recent Outer Banks vacation. Tanya Neeland, a relative, was hostess that night.We enjoyed our dinner in the family-oriented eatery with the “funny” name. (It comes from a frequent statement of Penny’s mom which meant, “Please come in and eat with us. The pot of food on the kitchen stove is ready and available.”)The restaurant was established in 1987 by Ginger Gallop Bowden and her cousins, sisters Joyce Hines and Katherine Johnston. (Katherine is now 88, but still comes in to peel a pot of potatoes every morning.) I had some of those potatoes, mashed — very thick, rich and buttery. Daughter Sarah had the potato casserole made with cream cheese and chives.A large choice of vegetables is offered with the entrees, which range from fried shrimp to pork tenderloin dishes.Sarah and son David ordered the fried shrimp. David says that the shrimp and the cole slaw he chose were both the best he ever had. Jonathan had fried clams, husband Henry opted for a garden salad and a bowl of gumbo, and I chose broiled sea trout.Rather than bread, diners are served sweet corncakes (flat, like pancakes) along with the entree. Cheerful Nancy Barfield, our waitress, took good care of us.David selected Hershey Pie for dessert, which he graciously shared around with other family members who were eyeing the slice of pie greedily. (I was one of those eyers.)Wine is available. The restaurant offers a child’s menu.Lunch is also served, plus a hearty “country” breakfast. The restaurant grows its own blueberries, so fresh blueberry pancakes are summer favorites.

well you can see from the review even the northern tourists who come down find the names of things funny down here. I was reading her explanation of how it got the name, and I can attest to it being true. I knew all the women who opened that restaurant very well. I was working in the late 70’s at a small little supermarket there in Harbinger, and all these women and their families lived probably within a mile of the store, so I saw them nearly every day coming in to shop. It was a very rural and small community then, just a two lane highway then and still some dirt back roads. Ginger was also a school teacher, and both my kids had her. And Ginger was also one of the women who helped to organise the wedding reception when Gretchen and I got married. Anyway just getting t the what I was going to say this woman has a fairly deep almost coarse voice for a small lady (years of trying to quiet the kids I imagine!) and she also has a very southern country accent too and I swear I can hear her now saying to us many times to Come on over and eat, the pots on ‘n (the) kitchen (well the “the” was actually spoken, but we Southerners sometimes speak a bit lazily and dont clearly pronounce very single word as we should, and if you’re not used to it you dont hear the very quick soft ‘th’ sound we put in… why waste extra energy on long useless words like “the”? LOL) Ginger and Joyce are retired now, Katherine passed away late last fall (autumn). Alison, I remember back then telling you that Dennis’ aunt had passed away, do you recall? (Well this Katherine was his aunt. For anyone else reading Dennis is a friend of mine I have known since I’ve been here. We get together Tuesday nights for a couple of games of chess and to visit. I guess by a lot of standards Pot’s On wasn’t a very old local landmark, but it is one of the last that were owned and run by the people whose families have been here for years. Sad in a way to see it closing. Things here have changed so much since I first moved to Currituck. There’s at least 5 lanes now of highway all the way from the state line to the tip of the county, and I would guess well over 95% of the farms are gone. All being rezoned for housing or business. Well thankfully there is still a lot of woodland and I am personally blessed to have a nice lot with a bit of privacy around me still. Alison may laugh at me saying we are growing too big, but we really are. By comparison to Limassol we are “out in the sticks” Oh I wish she could have seen the place 30 years ago. We used to stand at the window or on the deck and see not one, but 5 or 7 deer every evening come walking out from the woods behind the house and cross through the yard heading into the thicker woods for the night across the street. Foxes too. I even saw bear tracks in the back once but never the bear. Whippoorwills used to sing through the whole night, oh it was so peaceful really. Well its progress isn’t it. Nothing we can do but get used to it. Well in some ways we are still out in the sticks. Theres not much here as far as fancy restaurants, or big shops, any large malls are an hours drive away. Well I’m not complaining, I like it like this. And I’ll like it a whole lot more when my beautiful Brit is here with me! :)

No its not a video from Britney Spears, just a mistake I made in not keeping up with all the security fixes for these web apps I use on the site. I guess a year or so ago I set up a couple of forum boards to use with this and our other sites, but never really got them integrated the way I would like with the blog. Anyway someone found a way to use it to access the root folder of my server and it appended every top level index file adding a list of about a hundred different porn and spamming sites to the pages. well they weren’t visible in the outcome of the page rendered but still there to be searched and indexed and it was jsut pure luck i  came across it as soon as I did, no telling what else they would have done. well i say they as it was likely a bot of some kind doing it all but it had to started by someone, and a search of the site the links went to revealed it wasn’t just an isolated hack of my site, but a widespread thing. well anyway I cleaned up all the mess hopefully, and in the process just got rid of everything but this blog app and my photo albums. I dont need the forums anyway as I hardly have time to maintain this blog, let alone keep track of things I actually forgot about having in the first place. so from here I will keep it simple and let this blog be the whole works. anyone wanting to speak outside the blog has my address anyway or could find it fairly easily.

Finally having a day off again and just catching up on mails and trying to get up with my daughter in Florida. shes in Jacksonville and that tropical storm, Fay is supposed to be coming near where she lives. Its setting rain records all around that area and of course I want to make sure shes ok and staying safe and dry! well at least safe, hard to stay dry when you get 20+inches of rian isnt it! YIKES!

Ah the wonders of a notebook and and a wifi connection! :) Sitting out on the deck now on my second day off of this three day break. A much needed one too I might add. I was worried these days off would be similar to the ones we have had all month with heat indexes near 100 every day, but my break was blessed with a couple of days of cooler temps and a nice breeze today. Unfortunately the wind is coming from the North and the house is blocking most of it, but still its nice out here. With one exception, the heat pump unit is right here at the end of the deck so its always running this time of year and sometimes a nuisance. I guess over the years you get used to it though. I was thinking to have a Skype session with my baby here in a bit, but i dont know if she can hear me over the noise. worth a try though, I love hearing my Geordie girl’s voice, music to my ears. That really is one of the best programs we have used to keep in contact. Most times its crystal clear and no lag at all, amazing to me continuously how technology has advanced even from a couple of years ago. Her I am sitting out on the deck of my home, a wireless connection on this laptop and I took the pic above with my phone and sent it straight to the pc to put in this post. And with the built in webcam I can put in my own photo of me sitting here…

Pretty cool huh? Now let me add the tags and other little tidbits and I’ll post it right to my website. Just a few years ago this would have taken half a day to do probably to get the thumbnails and edit the html.. love it, 10 minutes tops to do this all, just still amazes me  now let me get this done and get on with more importsnt things, like loving up my Cyprus Angel! She’s off too today! ;)

I used to think patience was one of my virtues and that anything good was worth waiting for, I still do believe that. but I have to confess my patience is being stretched with waiting for our I-129F (K1 visa) petition to be approved. Yes I know there’s a huge backlog and we have to wait our turn, but it just puzzles me sometimes how the government can be so quick to want and demand things on a certain time from its citizens or else face the wrath of fines or threats of punishments for failing to comply and yet at the same time can bide its time in providing the the services that those same citizens view as equally important issues to them.  For example, let your tax payment be posted one day late and see what happens! Or fforget to check the little box on your tax return stating you are filing jointly with your spouse, even though you have the spouses name and social security # and W2 listed on the return, and the govt will recalculate the return as yours alone and send you a quite official sounding mail stating you have 30 days from the notice to pay the reconfigured tax amount or face penalties up to x amount of dollars, possible jail time, and confiscation of property among other things. (yes this happened to me and I of course sent them a reply straight away begging their almighty forgiveness for not checking that freaking box and for assuming they had the common sense to realise it was a joint return when both of our names were on it and both signed the damn thing. Sheesh… ) sorry its still a sore spot with me almost 15 years later…

Well is it too much to ask for at least the same consideration when we as tax paying citizens want at least an approximate date to get an answer to our petition, or at least to get some other response than “the case is ‘pending’ ” ? Now honestly I realise there is a backlog and insufficient staff on hand to handle the amount of visa requests that have been submitted in record numbers this past year. On the other hand if i owe them back taxes(which I don’t by the way) do they give a shit if i have the money or not.. NO! … sorry again, just venting… and be prepared, it likely wont be the last vent either in this post ;)

Anyway I just think we are entitled to some semblance of human compassion if they realise that for two people who are truly in love to be separated any longer than we have to be is just morally wrong, plain and simple. Its not like we can afford to fly back and forth for visits every so often, and even if we could its not what either of us want. Do any of these people have the slightest clue what its like to say goodbye to te love of your life at the airport, not knowing when the next kiss will be, or the next time you can wrpa your arms around your other half? they are clueless in that area, or uncaring. maybe you think I’m being harsh as I do realise there are plenty of fraudulent applications made and for probably nefarious reasons too, but there still ought to be some kind of method to take the obviously genuine cases and take the as priorities. No I don’t profess to say how that would be ascertained, but I’m sure with enough thought about it something could be worked up. After all the US govt already has more information on me than I probably know myself! it started accumulating the day I was born didn’t it, with the birth certificate~ then when I was old enough to work, a social security number.. they know where I live, what car I drive, my email address, any criminal record or lack there of, you name it they know it, whether they say they do or not. Oh I’m just frustrated and venting tonight, missing Alison and wanting our days together to start now. Just hate this waiting or wasting one more day apart, even though we are always in touch one way or another, its not the same is it. All i would really like to know is about when we can expect a decision so that we can make some sort of preparations and get things moving. she has her house there to rent, her job to consider, her children and family, and then the actual move. And if we had some idea of a general date it would be of some help as we could at least maybe manage another holiday together if its going to be more than a few months, Yes she could come here on a travel visa for 6 months, but still when the petition is approved she has to be in Cyprus to get the visa! And its not like she could fly back and pick it up, she has to go for interviews and medical checkups etc, so that’s a few more weeks i imagine. Just doesn’t seem right to me to make us go through all this, and they say this is the easiest way to get your foreign fiancee here to the US legally so you can get married. for what its worth to them i am married to her already, in my heart and before God. Bureaucracy … baaaaa

Like I said just venting tonight out of frustration of not having my angel in my arms yet again one more night. it does make it easy to see why there are so many illegals here in this country though, a whole lot easier to do it that way it appears than the route we took :(

so just in the event anyone from immigration should ever read this , I really don’t fault the govt (too much) , I just want my wife by my side, I miss her. please help us and HURRY!

Well i try to keep positive and keep patient , we both do. Sometimes it gets us down a bit, but never enough that we aren’t still amazed and loving each other more with what we have. We try to keep humour in our relationship too, its a large part of it. we always still find things to laugh at and lift each other up. So in that vein I thought I would post this email I got from somewhere, not sure now where it came from or who sent it, but it made me laugh and although its written from a British perspective I think you could change the particulars in it and it would sound just like it was written here in the States..

Dear Minister,
I’m in the process of renewing my passport but I am a total loss to understand or believe the hoops I am being asked to jump through.

How is it that Bert Smith of T.V. Rentals Basingstoke has my address and telephone number and knows that I bought a satellite dish from them back in 1994, and yet, the Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date?

How come that nice West African immigrant chappy who comes round every Thursday night with his DVD rentals van can tell me every film or video I have had out since he started his business up eleven years ago, yet you still want me to remind you of my last three jobs, two of which were with contractors working for the government?

How come the T.V. detector van can tell if my T.V. is on, what channel I am watching and whether I have paid my licence or not, and yet if I win the government run lottery they have no idea I have won or where I am and will keep the bloody money to themselves if I fail to claim in good time.
Do you people do this by hand?

You have my birth date on numerous files you hold on me, including the one with all the income tax forms I’ve filed for the past 30-odd years. It’s on my health insurance card, my driver’s licence, on the last four passports I’ve had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I’ve had to fill out before being allowed off the planes and boats over the last 30 years, and all those insufferable census forms that are done every ten years and the electoral registration forms I have to complete, by law, every time our lords and masters are up for re-election.

Would somebody please take note, once and for all, I was born in Maidenhead on the 4th of March 1957, my mother’s name is Mary, her maiden name was Reynolds, my father’s name is Robert, and I’d be absolutely astounded if that ever changed between now and the day I die!

I apologise Minister. I’m obviously not myself this morning. But between you and me, I have simply had enough! You mail the application to my house, then you ask me for my address. What is going on? Do you have a gang of Neanderthals working there? Look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden? I don’t want to activate the Fifth Reich for God’s sake! I just want to go and park my weary backside on a sunny, sandy beach for a couple of week’s well-earned rest away from all this crap.

Well, I have to go now, because I have to go to back to Salisbury and get another copy of my birth certificate because you lost the last one. AND to the tune of 60 quid! What a racket THAT is!! Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot to assist in the issuance of a new passport the same day? But nooooo, that’d be too damn easy and maybe make sense. You’d rather have us running all over the place like chickens with our heads cut off, then find some tosser to confirm that it’s really me on the goddamn picture - you know… the one where we’re not allowed to smile in in case we look as if we are enjoying the process!
Hey, you know why we can’t smile? ‘Cause we’re totally jacked off!

I served in the armed forces for more than 25 years including over ten years at the Ministry of Defence in London. I have had security clearances which allowed me to sit in the Cabinet Office, five seats away from the Prime Minister while he was being briefed on the first Gulf War and I have been doing volunteer work for the British Red Cross ever since I left the Services. However, I have to get someone ‘important’ to verify who I am — you know, someone like my doctor…
who, before he got his medical degree 6 months ago WAS LIVING IN PAKISTAN…

Yours sincerely,
An Irate British Citizen.

I dont know what I did, but somehow I messed up the WordPress installation and had to reinstall it frm scratch. :( Well the good news is I have been exporting a backup file of every post, comment, image and file so its not been too bad a thing and it seems to have made the site work a bit better too. I think the culprit was a WordPress plugin, WP Super Cache, that set something wrong, or either I didn’t know how to use it. Whatever the cause everything is back now … almost Well i lost the user data, not that I had that many registered ones anyway, LOL , but you will have to get a new password. I actually don’t know if there’s a link anywhere to reset yours as I have added all the users back with their original emails so It may be if you try to log in it will show one of those”forgot my password ” tings and you can reset it. I think I remembered Alison’s and have set hers… and Mike I set yours up with the one I gave you to the sub domain ftp login, don’t know if you remember it but I’ll mail you too with it.
Sorry if its caused anyone any problems, and it sure wasn’t that you have been unregistered on purpose! I’m just so freaking happy I still have my posts! :)

God has made for me

Already posted this before but i love this song and my Cyprus Angel :)
(continue reading…)

And I pray the last~ lol First of all , apologies to anyone visiting the site the last couple or evenings and being suddenly lost in a  completely different layout from one page to another, or one visit to another! :o) if you’ve been here within the last few days you may have seen or read the post where I had some trouble with the original theme just having a few bits of trouble with the latest WordPress upgrade, nothing major but it threw off the look of the sidebar widgets just a little bit, well no one would probably have noticed but me, but its those little things get on my nerves, I dont mind if most of the posts I make are lacking any real depth or information, but I want the site to look right at least. Well I have had my eye on this template now for a long time, the link to the original is still in the footer as it is mostly their work still. The only trouble was that it wasn’t ‘widget ready’ as it was advertised to be. Well yes it had a sidebar that could be edited manually, but I wanted to be able to use the widget administration capabilities available with the last couple of versions of WordPress. Just makes it simpler IF I do change a theme, the widgets are carried over to he next template without a lot of work. anyway I confess to not having any grand knowledge of the workings of a wordPress template. Well some of it. I’m fairly adept, if I say so myself, at playing around with the CSS and even adding a few codes here and there. But when it came to understanding how to make the sidebar widgets ‘editable’ (if that’s the word) from the admin area I was clueless. Well I have had this template now a few moths I think, even had the image header set up and couldn’t wait to use it! it was only then after I uploaded and activated it I realised it wasn’t working 100%. Well i have looked and looked how to widgetize a sidebar and to be honest i was lost trying to understand what to do. So that’s the reason I had that other theme going and I made that header image that I thought was very artistic :) Well you can see where the inspiration of it came from, I had this header image already in my head and really wanted to use it. Anyway this evening I was sitting around just messing with the site and css and the thought struck me… what if I replace the sidebar php page of this theme with one from a theme that had a single simple working sidebar already in place. My first attempt was a bit disappointing though. the sidebar appeared at the top of the page and that wouldn’t do. Well i got to looking at a few of the sidebar php files of a few different themes and happened to notice that most all of them had a specific ‘id’ in the HTML division tag at the beginning… EUREKA! I changed the id to the original one called for, refreshed the page and I was ECSTATIC! :) Can it really be this simple?? Oh I love this theme, even more than the one I had up originally. Its everything I wanted, a prominent place to show my Alison Michelle and me together first, then the layout is clean and simple and, to me, very easy to navigate and view the content too. The color scheme is pleasing to me as well. I just like it period. this is the one I will keep, just pray I don’t run into any trouble by failing to fix something else I don’t know about yet. Well as always with these theme changes, if you notice anything out of whack anywhere or any errors you encounter, please let me know. I’ll see what I can do to straighten it out.

Visitors may have noticed the theme changes over the last few days. I upgraded Wordpress to the latest versiona week or two ago and something in it set off a few problems in the sidebars of the other template that I really wanted to keep. I guess its for thebest though as Ihave been looking into some that werent so heavily built by images and are faster loading. I did find one I really liked. but unfortunatley it isn’t “widget ready” as yet so I wll have to wait until its updated, if it ever is or do it my self, which I dont have the time to mess with at the moment. I was looking around the other night and found this theme I am using now, Sakura 3. It’s a really nice clean open theme, and easily editable with a minimum of html knowlege. I’ve been customising it just a bit, changing the CSS in some areas and of course the header image. I sort of like thmuted green and tan shades and like the cleaner less busy look, of course the content isnt readily visible as you eneter the page requiring a visitor to scroll down so I may have some quick exits if they dont bother to go gown a bit, but nevermind I like this. It will stay.. for now anyway :)  feel free to comment on any thing you see not dislaying correctly or any probless loading the page.