As I type this, Laura and I are traveling at over 500 mph, at 37,000 feet, approaching the North Pole, on Cathay Pacific’s flight 841, from JFK to HKG. The moving map shows us with Greenland off the right, and northern Canada off the left with just over 11 hours to go until touchdown in Hong Kong.

Cathay put me in business class, so I have a power port for my computer, and a real comfy chair that reclines into a bed, inside my own little cubby hole. Since we purchased a ticket for Laura, she is in coach. Coach, on international flights, isn’t like coach on domestic flights. A personal T.V., more leg room, and better reclining ability. Still, it isn’t business class. I have offered several times for her to trade me, at least for a little while. She seems to be happy curled up next to the window with the pillow I gave her from my seat. I may still get her up here, at least for a little bit, to see how the other half lives. There is a lady near me with two, yes two, kids with her here in business. They are probably six and eight, are quiet, and well behaved, but I just can’t imagine what it costs to buy tickets in business class for the whole family! I’m here because it’s free, and that’s the only time I’ll see it!

Our trip actually began late Friday night, packing up stuff, frantically trying not to forget anything, but also not pack too much. We finally got to bed about 1:00 am on Saturday morning, saying that if we forgot anything, we’d just buy it once we got to Hong Kong. With two hours of great sleep, we woke up at three, because Laura’s parents were going to take us to the airport at 4:15 am. Wow, that’s early, even if you don’t go to bed at one in the morning!

I got up twenty minutes late on accident (I must have hit my snooze while sleeping) and then proceeded to rush around like a mad man. Her parents arrived early, in case of a flat or closed road, and they patiently waited for us to finish our final packing of toiletries and shutting down the house: the hot water heater, the air conditioning, and so forth.

We headed to the airport and had plenty of time for our early flight to JFK. I grabbed a Starbucks and got on the plane. Cathay paid for my ticket to JFK and we purchased one for Laura. Why did we go so early, especially since we weren’t leaving for Hong Kong until Sunday morning? We originally were going to send Laura on stand-by to NYC, and save the cost of a ticket, but at the last minute, we decided to go ahead and buy one for her. Traveling stand-by is much easier in the morning, before all the delays, cancellations, and problems. I bought my ticket for early so that we’d reach NYC about the same time, but once we bought her ticket too, it was just too early! Oh well, we could nap once in New York.

Looking up from typing, it is strange to see London off the right and Anchorage off the left! Polar flight routes play mind games with me. Special navigational computers are needed to cross over the pole, because regular compass flying and headings don’t work anymore this high up “on top of the world.” When you think about it, it makes sense: At the north pole, every direction is South — so how does one navigate like that? Magically, we will stay on course and arrive in Hong Kong with no troubles.

Once we arrived in New York, we were going to go up town and see Central Park, or at least the Empire State Building, but fatigue got the best of us. Our several hour nap turned into five hours! That worked out best, though, because later in the afternoon, it started to pour down rain, and we wouldn’t have wanted to be caught in that. There was nothing around the hotel because it was in an industrial complex, so we ordered delivery from a local pizza joint. Boy, that was some seriously good food! We got way too much because the portions were so huge. Laura ordered a sandwich on a roll. We thought, for four bucks, it’d be on a bun-like roll. Nope! It was a twelve inch sub! I got spaghetti alfredo that was out of this world, and we got garlic bread and pepperoni pizza. Way too much, but of what we could eat, it was great.

We watched some TV, headed to bed, and got up at six a.m. the next morning, Sunday, to head to JFK. When checking in is when I found out I’d be able to sit in business class and that afforded me a chance to check out the First/Business lounge there in terminal 7. It was very nice, with coffee, juices, liquor, fruit , newspapers, highspeed, large lounge chairs, and so forth. I went in to use the restroom, but headed back out because Laura wasn’t let in. I wanted to just sneak her in, but they scan your ticket — they are serious!

The plane we are flying on is a Boeing 777-300ER. It is painted up with the “Asia’s World City” color scheme and is a gorgeous airplane to behold. The cabin is huge, with seats in coach in a 3-3-3 configuration, and four across in business, with just six seats in first! It seats over 300 in total. There are four versions of the 777 currently in use. The 777-200, the 777-300, the 777-200LR, and the 777-300ER. The older two are the 200 and 300. The 300 is bigger than the 200. The new 200LR has the same fuselage size as the older 200 and the 300ER has the same fuselage size as the older 300. The only big difference is that the 300ER and the 200LR have the same sized wing, which is even bigger than the original 200 and 300. That large wing, that can hold a lot more fuel, plus very efficient engines, makes these airplanes a hot commodity in the airline industry and gives them very long ranges. The 200LR, since it has the same sized wing as the larger 300ER, but is smaller and thus weighs less, is the longest range airplane in the world, and competes directly with Airbus’s A340-500. We are on the larger, 777-300ER, which has no trouble traveling 15 and a half hours from JFK to Hong Kong, non-stop.

We took off on time out of JFK and arrived fifteen minutes late on arrival into Terminal One in Hong Kong. Laura, in her coach seat, was able to sleep some, but I, unfortunately, didn’t sleep a wink. It was a great landing and touchdown in Hong Kong, and clearing customs didn’t take too long. Finding the bus to take us to Cathay City, was a different story. Two people that I talked to and thirty minutes later, we found the bus that would drive us the five minutes it took to head over to the Headland hotel.

The plan was to take a nap and then get up and walk around. We landed at 2:00 p.m. and got to the hotel room about a quarter to four. But, like NYC, we laid down and that was it — we were out! Hopefully, tomorrow will go smoothly, and the time change won’t kill us too much, but we’ll see. All in all, it was a great day, with lots of excitement, adventure, possibilities, and new beginnings ahead of us. We traveled half way around the world and didn’t have a hitch or scratch — that says something about modern air travel. As we were headed toward Hong Kong over Northern China, after having been aloft for 13 hours, I was struck with the idea of just how large this world is. The 8066 miles doesn’t even come close to covering this planet, and yet how many people, villages, cities, and country side did we pass over? It is a great big world, and it is all in His hands. I’m glad that we get to see at least a small part of His world, a half a world away from home, here in Hong Kong.

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In my last post, I talked about how we added enough dirt to the west side of the house, that with heavy downpours, water backed its way into our basement. I’m just glad that this happened before we left for Hong Kong, so I could try and fix it.

Instead of plastic basement window wells, the west side of the house has concrete “walls” around the window to hold both dirt and water back from the windows. Unfortunately, we added enough dirt and mulch that rain ran back down into the well, around the old wooden window frame, and onto the basement floor. (A later project will be to change those old, rotting, peeling windows!) Since we lined the house with Castle Rock landscape stones, dirt had to be added behind them, but that proved to make the elevation of the ground higher than those concrete walls.

Of course, with my luck, we noticed this on Thursday afternoon, the day we got our new driveway gravel. We were to leave for NYC on Saturday morning and I still had 1,000 things to do. So, early Friday, I got up and started out at my favorite store, The Home Depot. I picked up some pavers and mortar, and got to work. I added 4 inches of height to the concrete wells by setting the pavers in on their sides and this, by now being higher than the surrounding dirt, will hopefully keep the water out. On the plus side, I think it makes the wells look better too and am happy how they turned out.
The next rain will make me a liar or a hero . . . we’ll see.

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Two days before leaving town, we were able to get a delivery of gravel as a new driveway covering and it sure looks a lot better than it did! We’ll have to keep up with it once we get back with Round Up, but there is nothing that looks better than a fresh layer of driveway gravel, especially the first day it’s down.

In time, the weeds will have their way with it, but I love the way it looks now. Thinking back to how it looked before, this is quite an improvement. The guys who dropped off the gravel did a great job of tailgating it, where they could lift the bed of the dump truck and drop it pretty close to where it needed to be. My trusty shovel and I finished the job in just a few minutes.

Having this finished feels really great, however, as we seem to finish one project, more of them pop up just as quickly. It poured down rain last night, and when it did, the water made its way onto our basement floor! Not from around the windows we filled in by projects past, but around the windows on the west side of the house. We accidentally filled back-fill dirt too high around the wells around the basement windows, causing water to flow back into the basement window well, and thus, past the window to the floor. Yuck! My last day before being gone for four months, and I have to deal with this. 



The tidal wave of projects never ceases. Some, I just plain can’t figure out. For example: The light above our front porch. We have it on a timer so that it comes on at dusk and off in the morning. Because we are going to be in Hong Kong, I want the light on for security reasons. Because it will be on for long periods of time, I wanted to use the new, efficient, florescent, curly-cue bulbs. Not because I’m a tree-hugger, but because I want to save money. The bulb I bought was the wrong color temperature, made for the “daylight” spectrum, instead of the soft white color. After spending more money on a soft white bulb, I plugged it in, but it won’t stay off when the timer switch is off! It flickers on and off, a few times a second. I had a florescent bulb do this to me before, and it burned out a few days later . . . I plugged the daylight bulb back in, and of course, it works fine. Unfortunately, the daylight bulb at night has an ominous green, 1920’s insane asylum hallway light, type of color. The soft white looks great, but they flicker . . . Exasperating.

I’m beginning to think that the best part of leaving for Hong Kong will be the vacation from all these projects!

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Two years ago today, Laura and I tied the knot. It has been a great two years and we commented how in some ways, it feels like we just got married a few months ago, and other times, because of the memories made and how well we know each other, that we’ve been together for a long time.

Last year, our first anniversary, we weren’t able to do too much, like leave town, because I had to study so hard for my Cathay interviews. We did go to Hocking Hills on a hike with photos here. This year, I again am the stumbling block, as we leave in a few days for Hong Kong, to start my new job with Cathay (See, the studies paid off!).

So, we dined on great steak at J. Gilbert’s and plan on celebrating in Hong Kong for the week we are there prior to starting my training.

Dinner was late tonight, because I was with Laura’s uncle Mike, who was helping us by changing the brakes on the VW Passat. That project was slow and tedious, thanks to the engineering of the placement of some necessary bolts behind the wheels. Oh well, thanks Mike for all the help! Now our car runs and brakes smoothly.

Dinner was nice, out with my Sweet Pea, and we look forward to many more memories and years together.

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With our departure for Hong Kong just a few days away, we are racing to get all our (not so) little projects around the house accomplished. We’ve already landscaped with mulch and stone, closed off basement windows, backfilled dirt up against the foundation, cut down trees, ripped out junk, dug up hundreds of rocks and landscape stones from a previous owner, and more, and more, and on and on!

This weekend, like most weekends, we thought we’d tackle a three or four hour project, that if we started by noon, we’d be finished by 5:30, in time to make our family going-away party at Laura’s parent’s house. The project? Remove, paint, and reattach our window shutters. No biggie, right? Well, like I said, our estimation of time needed for a project would be a lot closer to being correct if we doubled the time we felt would be needed. It seems like every time I start something, the process goes much slower in reality than it takes in my mind. Oh well.

We spent this weekend taking down all our white, plastic shutters and painting them with spray paint. These shutters are thin and cheap. Because of this, they have some cracks in them where they have been impacted by a ladder (me) or dropped (by my wall insulation guys). Also, and the main reason we are painting them, is because they are cheap enough that they don’t have an ultraviolet inhibitor in them, so the UV rays from the sun have turned them all yellow. On a side note, the UV inhibitor in Vinyl and other products is made from a white pigment, so most often, plastic products that don’t turn yellow with age because they have the inhibitor in them will most often be white in color. Unfortunately for us, the previous owners bought these on the cheap, and the shutters have all turned a nasty, dingy yellowish-brown color.

Because of some of the shutters being cracked, and their poor quality, I was just going to replace them, until I found out it would be about $500 dollars to do so. Hmmm. We spent fifty dollars on spray paint instead. When this project has finally gone bad years from now, we’ll replace them at that point.

We bought six cans of spray paint and had to go back and get eight more! Isn’t that how it always is? Taking the shutters down wasn’t too hard. I did that on the ladder while Sweet Pea painted. We got her a nifty little tool that connects to a can of paint and acts like a trigger for your fingers. Instead of wearing out your finger pressing down on the nozzle of the spray can, you can “pull the trigger” and spray, and it is much easier on your hand, especially for a job with lots of spraying.

Once washed, painted, and dried, I hung them back up. It worked out well because she stayed just a little ahead of me, so there was always a new set of shutters to go up when I needed them. Putting them up was a bit more challenging because it is always easier to remove a screw than it is to put one in. However, the job is finished and we are proud of the work. Unfortunately, no one will really notice our handy work. Why? Because people expect things to look nice and only notice when something needs to be done! We wanted to leave one shutter up in the only dingy yellow color, so people could see what we did, but thought better of it.

Anyway, this two day deal is done and we are glad this project is now in the past!

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