My first post

I figured I'd start things off. I got transferred here last December 2009 for two years and after much arm-twisting (not) Debbie agreed to come along. The cats agreed as well. Given that two of my old Marine buddies are married to Australians we already had some contacts here. Plus, I lived in Tasmania for about four months in 1986-87 (that's another story), so it wasn't unfamiliar (although it's a little more sophisticated now). All in all, it's great here.

My philosophy here is to let family and friends know what we have been doing. I had been sending out periodic e-mails with photos but those got cumbersome and clogged peoples' in boxes and some servers wouldn't accept such a large e-mail or thought it was spam and sent it to the junk file.

People have been telling me I should have a blog, now I do, so Herr Kleinert, you can sleep now.

Also, I realize that some of the captioning may look askew or not be lined up perfectly - I'm still learning this.  I had it all perfect and then I decided to make the font bigger and it changed the spacing on everything.  And since I leave tomorrow for a trip out of the country, I don't have time to fix it.

My intention is to post photos from our adventures or to note things we find interesting, such as some of the Australian marketing/packaging that is either unintentionally hilarious or simply makes you wonder "what were they thinking?" There will also be the obligatory sunset and sunrise shots, the countryside, trees, strange animals, and lots of pictures of Debbie walking up steep slopes or in front of waterfalls (I have a weakness for those types of shots). It's hard to take a bad picture here, frankly - there is so much natural beauty.

Thus far, we have been to Alice Springs (stabbing capitol of Australia, if you go there you'll get an idea why), Ayers Rock/Uluru, Kings Canyon, The Olgas, the Kangaroo Valley, Sydney several times, most of Tasmania (when my brother Jim visited), and many of the local sights in around Canberra.

And yes, there are kangaroos everywhere. At dusk it's a toss-up between hitting them or the wombats with your car. In fact, a few weeks back I sent out an e-mail entitled "Wombaticus Deadicus" in which I challenged folks to determine which picture was of a dead wombat and which was of my cat Kismet - it's not that easy.

For those of you who have seen my e-mails, I will be going back and incorporating those into this blog. I will try and keep things organized so you can see what we have been up to but can also always go back to your old favorites (if you're spending time doing that, you need to get out of the house).

Anyway, I don't know how long this will last, but everybody else seems to be doing it, so who am I to argue with conformity?