a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here are a few pictures of my apartment in Dameisha (it’s a three bedroom) that I share with my colleagues. One can walk down to the beach from here, but is a good 15 or 20 minutes, though.
It’s still chilly outside and in, and we don’t have central heating, hence the space heater. (Yes, we need to keep an eye on it, and be sure to turn it off when we leave).
Yes, home it is not but it will do, right? Only three of us got picked up tonight by the driver at Hong Kong airport. The rest of the gang will come out tomorrow due to the snowstorm that closed the airports out east.
The flight went very well; the sore throat I started with even cleared up somewhat. My friendly little teddy bear piggy bank was waiting on my desk in my room for me, so that cheered me up a little bit (aww LOL) ! I have ‘reconfigured’ my wallet (out with the greenbacks, in with the red 100 yuan notes), and my computer bag, so I should be ready in the morning for the shuttle bus to the Daya Bay offices at 6.30 am.
I got put on the earlier 6am flight to San Francisco again, which is good – gives me a little more time to make the connection to Hong Kong. Dry and clear here, no sign of rain and snow. One could almost think winter is passing us over this season, but I don’t believe that !
Oh, and the two canisters of powdered Parmesan cheese pasta have been tested for explosives by security at the airport ! My roommates and I had better enjoy them. I’m not packing powdered parmesan cheese into my bags again.
I’m packing my bags and shipping out on Saturday morning (flying out, that is). Most of my other team members will have to stay put for a day or two longer. They are on the East Coast and there is a massive blizzard moving in. It looks like they will have to wait until Sunday or Monday.
I took the bus to downtown to go pick up my passport with the new visa in, at the office. I stayed there for a bit to catch up on my e-mails as well.
It was rainy this morning, and cleared up later. I don’t mind the rain at all. One of Seattle’s monikers is Rain City, after all. (For a while there was Jet City, while Boeing was still headquartered here, and we have Emerald City for tourists, a better one than Rain City, I’m sure).
It was a busy day, but not too hectic. I bought a Mandarin phrasebook (the inevitable panda on the little guy’s shirt), a Hong Kong book, and a Chinese character study book. Sounds like I’m serious about learning some Chines, but all I hope for is to make a start with, say 200 or so characters !
My passport and multiple-entry visa will arrive tomorrow (the first visa only allowed two entries, and I have used both). I also went ahead today and applied for an ‘enhanced’ drivers license that can be used to cross the border into Canada and Mexico by car, ferry or rail (or foot, I suppose) – just in case I had to send in my passport, and then want to go up to Vancouver for the weekend. I was allowed to smile, see? : ) which surprised me because I thought smiling distorts the biometric data gleaned from one’s face (lines between the eyes, nose and mouth) on the picture.
Tonight my friends & I went to a nice neighborhood bar for cocktails, beers and pub food. It was wonderful – it always is.
My body clock is still somewhat shifted, so I got up really early to come into the office here in downtown Seattle. I use the bus two blocks from my house with my Orca card (in Hong Kong it’s an Octopus card, which I already have and plan to use lots as well).
All the printers in the office were replaced just last week (of course) with different models, so it took 30 mins for me to install new printer drivers, and then when people started arriving at 8.00 am I still had to go ask for help to scan and send in my expense reports since the instructions by the printer had not been replaced. Aargh.
Looks like a beautiful day here from where I’m sitting. I wonder if February will be as mild as January. Last month was the warmest January on record here in Seattle.
It’s Monday and I already have to catch up with some work! (from home, giving myself one more day then I’ll go into the office tomorrow). It also allows me to take care of very necessary little tasks, such as throwing my computer backpack into the washing machine to get rid of the smell from a chunk of banana that went unnoticed and bad inside of it! Blech. My house is in decent shape, and the deck and yard at the back is finally free of leaves and twigs now that the neighbor’s maple tree has shed all it had for the season.
The 2007 versions of Microsoft Word and Excel that we upgraded to recently, seems buggy and glitchy and I’ll go and ask the tech support guy tomorrow if he had similar complaints from other users. (Always a bad situation when you’re the only one with a problem that no one has ever seen before).
I have to get a light jacket and maybe a few more dress shirts so that I have some extra ones, out in China. Isabella, the dry cleaner shop in the apartment complex, is on the pricey side at $2 a shirt and even more for pants, but the clothes come out of the cleaners looking like new.