I began this site as a way for me to share my experiences in Jamaica with my friends and family back in the US while I was serving in the Peace Corps. Now that I am back in the US myself I think it is a good time to transition to my own personal domain of http://www.oliverhansen.com and start fresh. On this current site, I've been using Joomla which is a great CMS but I was never able to get the comments components working correctly. Not that I spent a great deal of time trying but that's not necessarily what a CMS is for. The new site is running WordPress which is a great blogging software. I will also be starting a gallery on the new site which I will talk about once I get it going. These are all Open Source programs and do their respective jobs quite well!

My new site will just focus on myself in a more general way whereas this one was more focused on Jamaica. I'm not sure what I'll do with this site in the long term. It will certainly be here for a little while but I don't really want to keep doing security updates and checking it while not using it. Until then, you can check out my Oliver Hansen blog at http://blog.oliverhansen.com and eventually the rest of my site from http://www.oliverhansen.com.

Last week saw some pretty heavy rain up around these parts. No flooding where I live on the island but some places near rivers got it bad. I found a Youtube video on the flooding so you can get an idea. So all that rain and then the wind starts this week. With the ground so wet, the wind just blows the trees down. Yesterday there was no power when I woke and so I went right into the coffee shop to get some warmth and internet. About 30 minutes after I arrived the power went there too. I chilled and watched a video on my laptop hoping the power would come back but after a while I left. I guess the entire island was without power plus many surrounding areas. I stayed up with my gramma, cooked some hot chocolate, soup, and toast over the fire. Then we found some batteries and got out some old radio shows on cassette tapes. Made for some entertainment. Filled up my hot water bottle and went to bed a bit early. Power finally came back on around 4:30am so it was gone for more than 24 hours at my house.

This morning I cleaned up some of the branches off the tennis court up near my aunt's cabin. I also got to take a warm shower and shave :). It's way too cold here. I'm looking for an apartment with a friend since I finally got a job so I should be moving away soon. Not gonna get any warmer any time soon but my new job will have travel so hopefully some warm areas sometimes. Well, until next time....

So I finally found that there is a Seattle Reggae scene. Found a flyer down at this Pan-African restaurant I went to with my Peace Corps recruiter in Seattle. They have a website which is cultureyard.com so I checked it out and saw that Antony B was coming to town! He's a pretty big artist in Jamaica so I bought a ticket not even knowing who I was going to go with. I was pretty excited because believe it or not throughout my whole two years in Jamaica, I never made it to a concert or stage show. I went to one for New Years Eve my first year but the show was rained out. So, I found another returned volunteer in Seattle who I knew somewhat in Jamaica and she agreed to go. I also invited a friend and his girlfriend who I bought tickets for online.

Well, about two hours before the show I got the email that the show had been canceled. Seems Anthony B had made it up to Portland, Oregon the night before but decided there wasn't enough attendance to come to Seattle. What a let down. I had been playing the reggae music cable channel all day on the tv and had all my Cooyah clothes on. I was ready to go! So anyways, quite a bummer. I don't see any other events anytime soon with names that I am really interested in so we'll see what happens. Over at cultureyard.com, they don't seem too happy with the cancellation either.