Justification for my blog name

Oceanside, California, USA
Okinawa, Japan
San Bruno, California, USA
Weimar (two different addresses, three different houses), California, USA
Shin'ichi-cho, Hiroshima-ken, Japan
Tejar del Guarco, Costa Rica
Tuxtla Gutiérrez (three different addresses), Mexico
Düsseldorf (three different addresses), Germany
Essen, Germany
Bornheim, Germany
Ratingen-Lintorf, Germany
Ratingen-Hösel, Germany
Mühleim an der Ruhr, Germany
Lakeside, Montana, USA
Muizenberg, South Africa
Larnaka, Cyprus

So these are just the places where I've actually lived long enough to receive mail. (Well, I can't say whether I received any in Okinawa, Japan--I was three years old and don't remember. But we were there for two months.) I didn't count week-long summer camps, where I also received mail, but I also didn't count the two months in Thailand nor the two weeks in Peru in 2006, nor any place that I was only visiting "for the fun of it", as it were, such as visiting my brother in New Mexico or friends in Switzerland, etc.

Okay, here goes with ALL the countries I've visited:

North and Central America:
United States (still the single country in which I've spent the most time, living there most of the time until age 20, with numerous visits back since then)
Mexico (11 months with an exchange program and one one-week visit)
Costa Rica (ten visits, ranging from two weeks to seven weeks, first time as an exchange student)
Guatemala (one day-trip and several plane changes)
Panama, Honduras (only plane stops--don't really count)

South America:
Peru (two weeks to visit a mission we were considering joining)

Europe:
Germany (just under 17 years altogether, 17 1/3 years from when I moved there to when I left, plus one visit since leaving)
Cyprus (current location, moved here 20 months ago)
United Kingdom (England five or six times to visit friends, usually five days each, and once for two weeks, Wales once only because I took the ferry from there to Ireland)
Ireland (several days while traveling around Europe by train one summer)
Norway (once while traveling around Europe, twice to visit people)
Sweden (really shouldn't count--drove through on a bus to get to Finland from Norway)
Finland (a couple of days to visit a friend)
Denmark (once while traveling around Europe, one day in Legoland)
Netherlands (many times: lived less than an hour from the border when I lived in Germany)
Belgium (one day in Brussels, several days house-hunting, and other times passing through to get the ferry to Dover from Calais)
France (once on vacation with the family I nannied, many times passing through by plane, train, or automobile)
Switzerland (half a dozen times at least, the longest a two-week backpacking trip with my aunt)
Austria (two days once, and drove through from Switzerland to Germany once)
Italy (three days in Venice)
Spain (one week visiting friends)
Czech Republic (only changing planes)

Africa:
South Africa (four months with YWAM)

Asia:
Japan (two months while my dad was in the U.S. Marines, one month as an exchange student when I was 15)
Thailand (two months with YWAM)
South Korea (really only changing planes on the way to Thailand, but got to go into Seoul during the 12-hour layover)

Not exactly an introduction

Friends' reports were correct: this website is very easy to use and photos upload quickly. It took two tries for me to convince Blogger that I wanted THIS time zone, but it's now set correctly. The only question I have is that since I corrected the time zone and it re-dated and re-timed my first post automatically (and correctly), does that mean that if I post from a different time zone, my choices will be either to let the computer think I'm still in Cyprus, OR to have it reset the times for ALL previous posts?

In the meantime, I've now posted a profile photo, a photo that my friend Peggy took of me a few weeks ago, while I was breastfeeding my two youngest children at the computer.

(I had two breastfeeding children when we first got internet connection and e-mail almost 11 years ago and my friend Amy sent me a list of common abbreviations--LOL, DH, DD, DS, and so on. I printed the list out for easy reference, and one day I read NAK in an e-mail from her. I couldn't remember that one and wrote back, "What does NAK stand for? I don't have the list within reach and I'm nursing Jacob and don't feel like moving." She of course wrote back ROFLOL because I'd not been able to look up NAK because I was NAK: Nursing At Keyboard.)

Anyway (I say "anyway" a lot, which I have to, to get back on track after my paranthetical comments, which have a tendency to be longer than the original ones), the photo seemed a good choice because I'm not often on the computer and NOT NAK, although I don't usually have both children at once. Ironically enough, I started the last paragraph with my 11-week-old in the bouncy chair and my thisclosetotwo-year-old climbing on my husband, but I'm now NAK tandem while I sit cross-legged on the couch, the laptop balanced between one knee and the piano bench... (Baby in the cradle hold, older child in the football hold, for anyone who's interested. In the photo, they're the other way around. I also often have both in the football hold, but the little one is now too big to comfortably have them both in the cradle hold at the same time.)

I'm trying to remember if I had a point? I think I was going to list the places I've lived, but I don't think I feel like it now. On e-mail lists I always signed myself "Sheila in Germany" or "Sheila-usually-in-Germany" (for when I was, um, writing while not in Germany...) until we moved to Cyprus in January 2009, so for awhile I was then "Sheila-in-Cyprus-but-was-in-Germany" and finally got comfortable with "Sheila in Cyprus." But at some confusing point--I think it was while we were in South Africa, but going back to Germany after a few months and I knew we'd be moving to Cyprus eventually--I joined a homeschool forum and had to give a name, so settled on "Sheila Somewhere." That name, at least, will always be accurate. Since this blog has no stated purpose except for me to have fun rambling without feeling that I'm imposing on anyone, I couldn't come up with any more accurate name than that.

Here's a photo of my second-youngest daughter, Helen, who will be two years old on Sunday. This photo isn't one of her cutest, but I'm posting it because although it's from a couple of weeks ago this is about what she looks like at the moment ("Mommy-get off the computer!"). And besides, it's so easy posting photos and I don't know what else to put here!

The photo in the first post is, fairly obviously, our whole family, taken about two and a half hours after my youngest daughter, Elisabeth, was born. :-)

And now, having rambled about nothing in particular, I have to come up with a title for this post.

Here I go again

I like the idea of blogging. It took me awhile to like it, though, and I'm still not sure why I do.

My first blog, Trying to Homeschool in Germany, was started because more and more people were asking me to keep them updated on our struggle to gain permission to...guess what...homeschool in Germany. I copied and pasted all of my updates dating back to, I think, July 2004, and was fairly good about updating when there was any news on either our family or in general in Germany with regards to homeschooling. My blog was found by googlers and we even helped two other families get permission, but our family never did. We also spent a significant amount of time outside of Germany, and were in such a precarious legal situation while in Germany that I no longer was able to post much about our own struggles anyway, which rather defeated the original purpose of the blog.

When we moved to Cyprus in January 2009, several people asked me to please continue updating my blog so that they could keep up with us. I ended up starting a new blog that was for that specific purpose, with the grand and glorious title of The New Blog. I've sometimes tried to keep up with it, but haven't done a great job. It hasn't helped that I started getting (a bit too much) into Facebook, and the specific people who asked me to keep my blog updated are all on Facebook now. In fact, one of them is on FB ONLY so that she can see our photos, as that's considerably faster than e-mail and I haven't managed to post photos to the blog, for no reason I can understand.

Then not long ago the host made some changes that I found confusing, not to mention did away with the wonderful template consisting of just books. I don't mind new things--in fact, I very much enjoy new things. What I don't like is changes to things I like! Friends kept recommending blogger.com, so being up with my very-nearly-two-year-old too early this morning, I decided to have a go.

So, here I go again. If I can now manage to post a photo, I just may post here again someday, from somewhere...