The taxi from the airport dropped me off at home at 2pm yesterday and I immediately prepared the documents for renewing my visa to China and dashed off to Fedex to send overnight to New York City. Sure enough, the Fedex website reported it was delivered this morning, wow! – keep in mind most of New York City is buried under a foot or two of snow !
I picked up 4 weeks of mail (95% junk mail, grrr) at the post office and when I spotted the Chinese New Year stamps I couldn’t resist buying a sheet. Count the wily wabbits on the sheet .. see all 14? The little orange kumquats shown on the stamps are given as gifts around New Year and are delicious. We got some in the cafeteria at lunch time at work.
Also, my new iPhone 4 handset arrived. It is replacing my Blackberry Bold (aww .. after some should I or should I NOT? thinking on my part) since I could have chosen an upgraded Blackberry as well. I will miss the push button keyboard, but the old BB’s screen is just too small and the new one did not get great reviews. I’m just getting started on the iPhone, but I have already discovered the ‘compass’, here showing true north (it can switch to magnetic north*) as well as my location on a satellite image from Google Earth. So much technology shoehorned into such a small package!
*True north is the direction along the earth’s surface towards the geographic North pole, while magnetic north is the point on the surface of the Northern Hemisphere at which the earth’s magnetic field point vertically downwards
