Caribbean trip

This past weekend I went to the Caribbean. I left on Friday morning and came back on Monday night. I was in Curacao (http://www.curacao.com/) one of the Netherlands Antilles. It is right next to Aruba. It is also the home of Atlanta Braves Center fielder and 2005 home run champion Andrew Jones. I was there because my sister was lucky enough to get sent there for her work. Her company has a client there so they sent her and some of her co-workers down there on and off for a few months. The opportunity to visit and have free housing was too good to pass up (My sister was also in Omaha at the end of last year for work, however Omaha just never seemed a very exciting place to visit hence I never went there.) I put up some pictures on my yahoo photos site(http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/tdogg158/my_photos), as well as some short videos on my castpost site (www.tomwiesak.castpost.com)

The Island was nice. Eventhough is very far South (less than 100 miles from the coast of South America) it wasn't as tropical as I though it would be. It was very hot but a lot of the area seemed like the Southwest since there were a lot of cactuses and shrubs around and not really any type of rain forest. However, the beaches there were awesome. Both the main tourist beaches and some of the more natural beeches further from the tourist areas were all very nice.

New Orleans

With Hurricane Katrina doing a lot of damage on New Orleans during the past couple of weeks, there is a lot of talk that New Orleans will never be the same again, and the city maybe finished as a major city. I kind of disagree, because if you look at past history there were many cities that suffered much worse disasters than New Orleans and yet bounced back. First example I can think of is the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. That killed hundreds of people and destroyed much of the city, yet today San Francisco is one of the biggest metro areas in the country. Another example is European cities during World War II. Many cities suffered heavy damage from bombing. Some cities such as London, Dresden, Berlin, and Warsaw, were pretty much destroyed. Yet 60 years after WWII all those cities are thriving. The best example I can think of is a city that has gone through destruction from both natural disasters and war is Tokyo Japan. Not only did Tokyo suffer one of the worst earthquakes in modern times (http://www.eas.slu.edu/Earthquake_Center/1923EQ/) during the 1920’s but it also was heavily bombed during the end of World War II. Yet is Tokyo some ghost town today? No, by many estimates the Tokyo metropolitan area is the most populated of any city in the world. (it is #1 according to this link http://www.citypopulation.de/World.html) So my point is that many cities have suffered through destruction that is much much worst than New Orleans and they have all rebuilt and continue to be major cities, so I don't see why New Orleans can't be the same.

starting a blogger

Well, I've finally decided to start my own blogger since a lot of other people have one now. I hope to update this once in awhile but I'll probably get lazy and not update it often, but I guess we'll see. I'll still update my picture page, at http://photos.yahoo.com/tdogg158 and maybe update my regular page at www.geocities.com/tdogg158 I think I'll probably also transfer some of my random thoughts postings from my regular website to here as well.