Scenes from a Morning Beach Stroll

Moored Naples Florida. Doing?

Working@ Ridgeway Bar & Grill

Moving to California in May. Why? Click Here
For a more complete history of me and sailing click here. 


One of the great things about my situation in Naples is the short distance to the beautiful beach. Sometimes I run the beach and other times I take a stroll with the ladies. I prefer the stroll. This day, we hooked a left and headed south along the Port Royal section of town as far as the Port Royal Club. You want to see some money spent, just click on the Port Royal Club link. Bam! It's nice. 


For all the northers thinking were soaking up the rays at the beach in south Florida, think again. Just check out our attire. But I can say the threat of flurries was not a concern.

                                                      

 Capt Chris....Happy in Naples

PS: You can double click on the images to expand them to see the full 10 mega-pixel capabilities of the Canon G11.

Wordpress Coming Soon to christianallaire.com

Moored Naples Florida. Doing?

Working@ Ridgeway Bar & Grill

Moving to California in May. Why? Click Here
For a more complete history of me and sailing click here. 

 

I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about blogs and blogging over the passed three plus years. The original idea for a blog was planted by Tom & Amy from Sandpiper.   They used Blogger for their journey from California, west-about to St John USVI where they now call home. I had to have one. And so I do. The blog has become an enjoyable labor of love. I always say, I love that folks take the time to read the blog, comment and send me emails. Please keep it up! But the main mission is for my own personal gratification. It's my log book of life. The blog has pushed me in different areas that I never imagined. It has forced me to think a little more deeply, to observer a little closer, because I may have to put what I'm thinking or feeling or observing into words. A daily event or situation forces me to assess, is it blog worthy? At one point I was getting tired of writing so much, so I thought well I'll just take more pictures and let them do the talking. Picture is worth a thousand words type of thing. This pivot hurtled me into an interest in photography, or a re-invigoration more accurately, because in 7th grade I loved the photography club. I dug the old school dark room development process. Of course now I needed to learn about management of a digital library and digital photography which lead me into the world of High Definition video and editing. All this sprung from my simple desire to let the folks back home know where I was and how I was doing on my sailing voyage. This is life.

My evolution continues. I originally started out on Sailblogs and still have my sailblogs site up and running. I found sailblogs limiting (has since gotten better) but became aggravated when I found out that Google Adsense revenue generated from my blog (granted, pennies) was going into the pocket of the owners of sailblogs. I decided to go the way of Sandpiper and start a blog on Blogger. Blogger has many more options and is easier to personalize and I could use my own domain name, christianallaire.com. I thought I was on it like Blue Bonnet, but since have learned that Blogger is still considered rookie ville. 

Enter Wordpress.org This is where the more serious go to to crank it up a few notches. Wordpress.org is a publishing platform that creates websites. It is all very complicated to new folks, me included. The learning curve is steep and I'm still on the first hill. Over the past month I have been working on this project. I have a Wordpress.org website now being hosted on a sever I pay for each month. Files are transferred via FTP and once a theme is downloaded, I can manipulate the layout and color and feel of the website to my own liking. The rub is, you must start to learn how to write CSS Code. I have no idea how long this will take me. But when you click on a professional website like Nikonfestival or Queens College you know you've logged onto a professional product. In terms of making the switch, from the reader point of view, you'll never do anything different. When the new christianallaire.com is ready for prime time, I simply assign christianallaire.com as the domain name for my new blog and you'll automatically see the new site. The new site will of course have all my archives and what not.

I love my Blogger blog and spent a good deal of time learning how to upgrade it. So why switch again? I would like to improve and with Wordpress.org, I can endlessly tweak the website as new technology is created or improved upon. But the biggest reason is that Blogger (owned by google) owns my content as the blog resides on their servers for free. So now I control and own my own content, but have to pay. So I have now gone from worries about squalls to worries about File Transfers Protocols. And of course I worry about bread trays to.

So keep a sharp eye. One issue that I'm not sure I will be able to over come is, when I make the shift I may loose my followers as the RSS Feed may be broken. If you are a follower via RSS Feed, I may ask for you to re-sign up for the feed. That's it from a chilly Naples Florida.

Capt Chris

Rigors of the Job

Moored Naples Florida. Doing?

Working@ Ridgeway Bar & Grill

Moving to California in May. Why? Click Here
For a more complete history of me and sailing click here.

As some may know I took a job as an Expeditor at a restaurant here in Naples. It has given me a whole new view into life in America after 20 years in the Coast Guard community. Once I'm done my tour of duty at Ridgeway Bar & Grill, I'll give a more thorough review of my experience. It is a low level job in the grand scheme, but one should never adopt the view that they are "above" a certain occupation. Having a job is a blessing. Having the opportunity to aspire higher is even more of a blessing.

An Expo is the coordinator of the galley. In my case, there are two of us and even then at times two Expo's become overwhelmed. On the busiest of nights the restaurant has 13 chef's working behind the line and 300 to 500 meals are pumped out between 5 and 9pm. Ensuring the meals come out timely and with a crisp quality is the Expo's bread and butter. Speaking of bread and butter. One thing I do many times per night is take a hot tray of bread and discharge it into the bread warmer. I've burned myself twice doing this. You can see above the latest scorch job. When the latest burn happened I didn't even know it, but when I looked at my arm a few minutes later, we had bubbleage! Medic! Medic! No one paid attention, so I went and got some ice and dove back into the  Expo mayhem. 


Capt Chris


PS: Happy Presidents Day! And I'm driving across the country in late May through early June time frame. You can read about that in a blog entry by clicking here.  I wanted to thank everyone who have extended an invitation for me to "camp" out on there couches. It really really is appreciated and I'm excited to meet blog readers! So thank you and see you soon!