It's not onions

Our Indian consultant is leaving today.  He's contract is up and he's moving on to another project.  I'll miss him.

We have a female Indian consultant with us until next week.  She'll be our offshore resource for SAP BW.  Her responsibilities will include load monitoring, development, and as a general technical resource.  She'll be assigned to us for 4 hours per day.

Unfortunately, she smells.  There is no polite way to put it.  She reeks and my eyes are burning.  She's currently using another coworkers desk, so the proximity isn't too bad.  That coworker is getting married this weekend, so I'm hoping she won't be back for another week.  The smelly girl should be back in India by then.

There should be a class given to outshore consultants on hygiene requirements in the West.  First order of business, wash off your stench.

-Mizike-

The future's so bright, I got to wear shades

Infinite, clean energy.  Sounds like a pipe dream, doesn't it?  Seems like it might be just around the corner.  China is about to test the first fusion powered reactor.  Why is this significate?  Unlike nuclear power plants, it produces no nuclear wastes.  It doesn't produce polution like coal burning plants.  It doesn't destroy vast amounts of land that building dams do.  And it doesn't require acres and acres of land for wind farms.

I hope this works.  If it does, I hope US energy companies will copy the design.  For some reason, I doubt it will happen.

-Mizike-

Deal of a lifetime

No names or many details.  But Skyprincess just told me this, which just blows my mind.

One of the pilots had a breakdown not long ago and they took him off flight duties.  Afterall, you don't want a mentally unstable and suicidal pilot flying your plane.  That's a no brainer.

The company had an intervention recently with him and gave him the opportunity of a lifetime.  He would be placed on permanent leave with full salary and benefits.  For the next two years, he would be required to see a company councelor to ensure he stays on his medicine and keep control of his alcoholism.  After two years, he would be fully vested in his pension and could retire with full benefits.

Sounds great, doesn't it?  For the next two years, you only show up for one appointment a month.  What did he do?  Told them they could go to hell and quit.

His job was the only thing keeping him stable.  It was the only thing keeping the demons from destroying him.  Now it's gone and we fully expect him to be dead within five years.  He'll drink himself to death and no one can stop it.

It's sad when you realize how self destructive people can be.

-Mizike-

Beijing part 1

Our wedding day was Sunday and we left for our honeymoon the next day. All the wedding crap had been delivered to Curt’s place after the reception and we just had our 4 bags to carry to the airport. 2 large bags and 2 carry-on’s. The 2 large bags were empty.

We got to the airport around 8am and caught our flight to Tokyo. We used Skyprincess’s passes and paid only for the upgrade cost to 1st class. Now I know why Skyprincess says it’s the only way to travel internationally. The flight was very comfortable for a 12-hour flight. We were pampered the entire flight. Unlimited drinks and nice meals. Too bad I can’t really drink without getting sick or I would have abused the drink option.

We were given a movie list and I picked a couple I would have never rented or went to the theater to see. I only remember two of the ones I watched then, Poseidon and Nacho Libra. Poseidon was extremely bad. I’m not sure anyone remembers the original. It was made during the 70s when all the studios were putting out disaster movies. Earthquake, Airport, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm. Although there has been a reemergence of disaster films the past decade, they lack the building of tension the old movies did. That was the problem with Poseidon, there was no tension build-up in the movie.

After the long flight and a bit of a nap, we arrived in Tokyo. We had a couple hours layover before we caught our flight to Beijing and spent some time looking around in the shops. Not much to see in the airport shops, to be quite honest. We did find a Hello Kitty waving cat (Maneki Neko) that we bought. It was adorable and the arm waving was powered by solar panels.

We boarded the JAL flight to Beijing and flew in coach. It wasn’t a bad flight, to be honest. They code-shared with China Eastern and the service was very nice for economy. The economy cabin was in far better shape than any domestic economy class I’ve flown the past 5 years. Skyprincess was very surprised also. I guess we were expecting to board a DC-3 with goats and chickens.

My first impression of Beijing is that it’s a city of bicycles. It was a sea of people and bicycles. There was little attempt to enforce any type of traffic laws, if there was a space, you changed lanes. If there wasn’t a space, you made one. Honking your horn is the norm, unlike in the US where you can live your entire life and never know where the horn in on your car. The car horn is there way of letting people know you are there. People walk out in to traffic constantly, and the cars just drive through waves of people as they cross the street. I expected to see traffic accidents everywhere, but we just didn’t see it happening. For some unknown reason, it works. In the states, it would never work. For one thing, US drivers are selfish a-holes who would never let you in. Chinese drivers always yielded when someone cut them off.

Next thing I noticed about China is that it is a place that abhors a vacuum. If you leave an empty space somewhere, someone is going to fill it. For example, people in the states have a fairly large area of personal space. When we wait in a queue, we leave plenty of space between the next person and us. Not so in China. If you stand too far back, someone is going to cut in front of you. Stand back too far from the counter in a store, and someone is going to step in front of you. Queues are the norm, but lots of people didn’t get the education we got in preschool that cutting in line is a social no-no.

The most disgusting thing we noticed is public spitting. What is up with this? Why do so many Chinese spit in public? And it’s not just spit, but they do the whole loud gather of spittle before you spit thing. The most disgusting thing is to walk down the street and have to dodge all the wet spots from Chinese people spitting on the sidewalk.

The government is trying its best to change this habit for the upcoming Olympics. They have implemented fines for public spitting. If spitting has been curbed, I would hate to have been visiting when it was worse.

I guess I should speak on pollution in Beijing. The air quality is bad, very bad. The particulate pollution in the air is thick. If I spent any long-term time in Beijing, I’d end up wearing masks all the time. Your eyes are constantly burning and you skin just turns ashy from all the gunk in the air. You’d wipe your face and the washcloth comes away black. It’s bad. But the city isn’t really dirty. The government has hired thousands of workers to clean and beautify the city. Everywhere you find lovely landscaping. It really is nice what they are trying to do. I was impressed.

With all the people in Beijing, you’d expect it to be a bit claustrophobic, but it wasn’t. Most of the streets were very wide and the buildings not especially tall. It gave a sense of being wide open. And pedestrian traffic moved at a brisk pace. I didn’t feel unsafe once.

Well… that’s all for now. I’ll talk more about the sites we saw in Beijing tomorrow. Time to get back to work.

-Mizike-

Evil Cat Lady

I got home last night and Skyprincess had some bad news to share with me.  We had hired a pet sitter to come every other day to check on our two cats.  This would be far cheaper and less stressful than boarding them.  Its not like it was cheap, but was cheaper.

Skyprincess chatted with our neighbors (the landlord) and they brought up some disturbing information about the cat lady.  She came to the house regularly, which we are glad of.  But she brought her boyfriend on a number of occasions.  Okay, I can get past that.  If they are just doing a run in and check on the cats, that's fine.  I was extremely unhappy to hear they caught him smoking in our house.  First, I do not allow anyone to smoke in my house.  PERIOD!  Second, it's against our lease.  The landlord caught him with it in his hand and told him that smoking wasn't allowed.  So he put it out and apologized. 

Later, they said they saw their car at our house at 6pm and thought they were there to check on the cats.  They thought it was odd that the car was still there around midnight.  Then they got up the next day and it was still there.  Since we were gone, the landlord was taking this time to do some spot painting and some minor repairs.  One time he said he found the bed downstairs unmade and thought that was odd since we always make our bed.  Well, Skyprincess does.  He said he found the bed made the last time he came in, which was a couple of days before we got back.

I feel so violated.  If you only knew me, its a very hard thing for me to even have people in my house.  I've gotten much better the past 5 years about having people over.  6 or 7 years ago, and that would have never happened.  I just couldn't stand people in my house.  Its my cocoon from the world and I couldn't let anyone in.  Now I can, but I still find it hard at times.

I'm trying very hard to overcome the ick factor of having strangers screwing on our beds.  I'm very grateful it wasn't our bed and only the guest bed, but still!  Ewwww!!!!  We bought it specifically for any guests we might have over and it creeps me out what happened.  I mean, we don't even sleep on it.  And we especially haven't screwed on it.  It just feels so unclean right now.  Plus, now we have to change all our locks since she had a key and we just are skeeved about the whole thing.

-Mizike-

The return

Hello everyone! I’m back! I hope you didn’t miss me too much.

First, I promise I will get pictures to you all. When I get to the Hong Kong part of the trip, you’ll understand why that’s not exactly possible right now. But I’m not going to get ahead of myself.

The days before the trip to L.A. were very busy for me. Skyprincess had left a bunch of little last minute things for me to do, and I was just running out of time. I can honestly say I wasn’t procrastinating, I just couldn’t get to them all in time or didn’t know about them until the last minute.

The last week I spent a long time getting the house ready for us to not be there. That meant unpacking all the boxes from our move and culling what I could. We had a half of the garage stacked high with broken cardboard boxes. That’s right! Broken boxes and they still stacked almost to the ceiling! I can’t believe how much packing materials we had! I think I’m responsible for half the deforestation of the rain forest just by this one move. It was insane.

I only had the night before my flight to get the reception music made. We had asked our guests to supply 3 songs that we added to the wedding mix and loaded it to my iPod mini. We really didn’t have a huge response, so I tried my best to think of a wide range of music that was decent. It was so hard not to have an all 80s mix. I did very well, I think!

All told, I had just shy of 7 hours of music on the iPod. I know, you think that’s not much. But I started from scratch and I didn’t just select the music from the iStore. I bought a membership in a very nice streaming music jukebox and then bought a piece of software that recorded streaming music as MP3s. The problem is that I had to start and stop each recording, then name and save them as MP3s. I started at 5:30pm and didn’t finish until 6am. It was a very long night. Then I had to run to catch an 8am flight to L.A.

When I got to L.A., we were in a non-stop run. Skyprincess had arrived the day before and had hit the ground running. We bought cases of wine and put our wedding labels on them to add to our gift baskets for everyone’s rooms. 2 bottles of wine, some cheese and crackers, bottles of water, candy bars, pringles, candles, and mints. We put all this in the basket and wrapped it up with plastic tied with a ribbon. It was very nice.

I will have to admit, I never got the hang of putting labels on wine bottles without wrinkling the labels.

For the most part, everything came together. We had a couple of minor near misses. First, the cleaner didn’t get the wedding dress cleaned when they promised and we had to get a friend to pick it up the Saturday morning. We expected it to be done Friday morning. At least they didn’t lose it.

They also didn’t have the right shoes for the men in the right size. I personally don’t like square-toed shoes, but they round toed shoes weren’t the right size for some of the men. So we switched to square toed. It’s not what I wanted, but who is going to look at our feet? It’s not like we were wearing Crocs.

The biggest potential problem that worked out fine was that they didn’t have our suites we booked. They hotel had changed names and when they did, they switched computer systems. They lost our suite reservations from the prior name and were only going to give us regular rooms. We had intended on using the rooms as staging areas and this was going to cause major problems. They solved it by giving us 2 attached rooms. This worked better, I think. We could have hair being done in one room and makeup in the other.

Here is where tradition got in the way.

We didn’t get the reception building until the morning of the wedding. That meant all the decorations had to be put up that morning. Since Skyprincess didn’t want me to see her until she walked down the hall, I was not able to help with the preparations. That also meant I was roomless. Yes, she kicked me out the door and told me to find some corner to sleep in! The heartless woman!!! (just kidding). Luckily, my groomsman David rented a room at another hotel, and I bunked with him. He ended up with a suite, and I just used the pull out sofa bed that night.

The Long Beach crowd took us all for the famous Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles joint for lunch on Saturday. We were told it tastes much better than it sounds. That for some reason, it just works. I wasn’t impressed. But most everyone else loved it. I guess it’s a taste thing.

David didn’t like it too much and he started getting sick afterwards. Poor thing.

After lunch, we got back to work running errands. Then the Coterie group (that’s a whole ‘nother post) got together to see the Pirates Dinner Adventure. If you’ve heard of the restaurant “Camelot” where it’s basically dinner theatre, it’s the same thing but with a Pirate theme. It was hooky, cheesy, and the kids loved it. David was really getting into it and we just had a big laugh that he was enjoying it so much. It was a lot of fun, I have to admit. Some of the kids came dressed as pirates! They had such fun! All the kids were invited down to play British red coats to fight the pirates at the end. We all decided this would have been such a great place to go if we were 25 years younger.

We returned back to the hotel so I could grab some clothes for the night and then went to bunk with David. He wasn’t feeling very well by now and we decided to just get some sleep. It had been a long day.

We didn’t need to be anywhere until 12:30 the next morning. We got up and decided to find some breakfast. David wasn’t feeling any better and tried to hide it well. We found a Mexican restaurant open and went for some orange juice, eggs, and sausage. David was eating when he suddenly cupped his hand and up came everything. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Poor thing, I felt so bad for him. He felt so embarrassed, which he shouldn’t have. Stupid chicken and waffles!

Luckily, he felt so much better after that. Amazing how hurling 2 days worth of food can make you feel so much better. Just the body purging the toxins from the system. What amazes me is how quiet he was. Me, I’m a noisy person when I get sick. If my windows are open, you can hear it 2 blocks away. And no way can I cup my hands and discreetly get it only on my plate (can you believe not a drop off the plate??!) Mine is projectile. Watch out!

We went back to the room, and David took a shower and we left for the hotel. I was shown into her Uncle’s room to dress, since they were still working on make-up. They ran 15 minutes late, and I was worrying we’d get to the chapel too late. We only had it 2 hours and had pictures to take before and after. Luckily, we hired a tremendously talented woman and it went smooth as silk. The only problem is that it turned out hotter than we expected. Most of our guests had arrived and we pretty much just let them find their seats and not be ushered down.

Finally, the girls finished their pictures and I was given the coast is clear to get back into the backroom for my entry. The bride’s party had left to circle around the back.

Oh! Before I forget.

Skyprincess had invited her friend Carl to attend the wedding and he agreed to also do the hair. Carl is this guy who runs a very trendy and successful hair salon in the Dallas area. Its one of those places where you either get on a 4 to 5 month waiting list or you have to know ‘someone’ to get in. This guy is extremely talented and makes a killing.

Anyway… I had to run up to the girl’s room to retrieve the ‘blue book’. It had all the wedding plans, etc in it. Skyprincess had forgotten it when she made the dash to the limo. No problem! I just ran up real quick to grab it.

As I was leaving the room Carl shouted from the other room, “Someone looks gorgeous today!” Not thinking, I shout back “thanks!” I hit the door about 5 seconds later and realized that he wasn’t talking about me, but Skyprincess. So I paused, thought to myself… ‘self, how do you pull your foot out of your mouth now?’ and shouted back ‘oh! You mean Skyprincess! I knew that already!’ and gave a disarming chuckle. Luckily I had way too much on my mind to dwell on the idiot that I must have seemed like. Haha!

Back to the wedding.

The bride’s party has left and we are now in the back room. The vicar keeps looking at me and asking if I’m nervous. I’m not in the least and I think that surprises him. It surprises everyone, it seemed. Neither Skyprincess nor I had any reservations about that day or nervous in any way. So he went through what to expect and tried to give some pointers. Like don’t lock your knees, to keep at least one of them bent. David reaffirmed this by saying that’s what they taught you in the military. If you lock your knees, you are more likely to pass out. I put this bit of trivia in the back of my mind and kept waiting for the bells to start ringing.

Finally, all was ready and we started our walk out. I went to my mark and planted my right foot where they told me to and waited for the processional. Skyprincess was already at the end of the path grinning like a chesser cat and waving. I smiled back, but since everyone was looking forward I couldn’t very well start waving back. The music started playing and her party started coming down. As she walked, she was being a bit silly and started doing the princess wave to everyone. When she got down to me, she grabbed me and kissed me before we took out places. To my right, I could hear my wedding party say “you aren’t suppose to do that”, “no, you aren’t”. It wasn’t planned. Oh well….

The ceremony was nice. We did the recitation of our vows, the lighting of the unity candles (we forgot to blow out the candles), and handed roses to our mothers. The only hitch was the rings.

Okay, I think this happens in a lot of weddings.

Skyprincess had left both her rings to be put on. The engagement and the wedding band. I only wanted to deal with the wedding band. One ring is enough to worry about. Anyway, I fumbled with them for a bit because I wasn’t sure which one went on first. And also when you put one on, it makes it harder to put the next one on. So I finally gave up on the last one and just pushed it up and made Skyprincess twist it onto her hand. I wasn't going to stand there and jam this ring up her finger and scrap all the skin off her knuckles. Nuh uh, not me!

My ring went on much easier. It’s now how much I don’t notice it there. I never wore any form of jewelry before this, not even a watch.

The ceremony was over and we went out to one of my all time favorite songs, Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a wonderful world’.

Then 30 minutes of pictures and away we went to get ready for the reception.

We really had a nice reception. We didn’t want one like most people, where you just rented a hall and had everyone sit at a table and pray someone got out and danced. We wanted to get both families involved and talking. We rented building with a nice lawn. Plenty of room inside to eat and then set up lawn games to play outside. Badminton (though no one played this). Croquet, botchy ball, and horseshoes. I was afraid we wouldn’t get anyone outside to play, but we got a huge response. The one thing we didn’t expect is that people drank far less than Skyprincess expected. We had enough booze for 200-300 people. We only had 40-50 at the reception. So much went to waste. We had 5 unused cases of wine we gave away. Plus all the fifths of alcohol. Our bartender made out like a bandit in the end. We just told everyone after it was over, to grab what you want. We couldn’t take it with us, and since I have an alcohol allergy, it wouldn’t do me any good even if we could.

After the reception finally wound down, we spent the next 2 to 3 hours cleaning up and packing Curt’s and Stephen’s cars. They were full and we still had stuff to carry. So I ran and grabbed the rental and we loaded it up. Curt offered to store the wedding stuff and ship it back to us when we got home. Also, he would return all the tuxes on Monday.

I followed Curt in the rental and he took a route I’ve never taken. Obviously, he wasn’t use to it himself, since he had to turn around once. I thought that was it, but then we got into a turning lane before you cross the bridge and he decides he needs to go over the bridge. So I follow him and nearly broadside this car beside me. I clearly cut him off and almost caused an ugly accident since it was very late at night and the streets were very crowded with traffic.

The car I cut off started honking his horn and tail gating me with his brights. Then he rushed along side of me and tried to run me into the side of the bridge. I braked and he then started jamming on his brakes to get me to rear end him. The odd thing is that I was completely placid and calm. Not once did I have any tingling of panic over what was happening. I just gave the guy his 30 seconds to vent his road rage and he finally went away. I continued to follow Curt and we unloaded the car and I returned back to the hotel. That ended the adventure for the evening. More to come! Next stop, Beijing!


Mizike