Male Bonding

Wife and I are back in Falls Church, Virginia (suburb of Washington, D.C.) visiting the magical moving land of Pulandia and the family of Venerable Pu, daughter #2. Pulandia seems unusually calm by Pulandic standards however with another time/space shift in the not too distant future that probably will change.

On these rare visits, we try to spend as much time as we can with our grandchildren as we can since they are getting older and older. Grandson 2.3 is 10 and will be 11 in June so it really was time for some serious male bonding.

And what says male bonding more than...

...Pedicures!

Truth be told

This is my FIRST PEDICURE EVER

As well as 2.3's

He and Wife had a serious conversation on what color he was going to choose

And the discussion on which person was going to do his feet

2.3 sinking into the Pedicure experience

I think next time we are going to try facials

A Fish In An Ocean Of Beauty

Over a long number of years Wife and I have gradually worked on our home and yard. When we bought our home 17 years ago, we did so because of its location close to the mountains. The house was nice but not spectacular.

But Wife had a vision. No that's not right. She had a feeling. It was a feeling that there was a state of beauty that could bring joy and contentment to us. There was no plan to speak of. Just this feeling, and this commitment.

Gradually the change to the environment started. At first small changes at first like skylights and a new fireplace. Then the big, more robust ones. Adding another floor, redoing our kitchen and adding a room that connected our inside and outside. Then redoing our backyard. Each of these changes was done with Wife's eye for beauty, for enhancing our environment. Then there were little enhancements, decorating, getting pictures, certain furniture. Tweaks.

The result beauty. Beauty that surrounds us each day. Beauty that we can see of our world around us seeing the mountains and city that are our home. There is a tendency for things to become commonplace. What was once spectacular now just becomes part of the background. But being part of the background does not mean unappreciated. For us it means that all through the day you are drawn to the beauty. You go by a window and see the spectacular sunset. You eat breakfast and admire the hardscape and landscape. You open the blinds and see the mountains. You walk between rooms and catch the arrangement of the furniture the pictures, the view the sweeps from one room into another.

It's as if beauty has become the entire environment, an environment the enriches and nourishes.

Like A Well Oiled Machine

That's the de-I Travel and Work life these days.  I'd related a few posts ago that the whole new travel planning process was working like a charm. We've just about finished all the final details related to day tours we want to do in various places. Have all our photo and food experiences lined up. This trip is going to take us to Israel, Jordan, Greece and Turkey.

I have to say that one thing that has surprised me in our planning has been the almost universal lack of customer service in Israel at least during this the planning phase. Whether it is Airbnb listings that are woefully incomplete and inaccurate, tour operators that don't have accurate information, people who respond to requests with completely different information than what was requested, the general impression is way different than let's say Greece where the level of information and response is superb. Maybe Israel is just more oriented toward large tour groups. Everyone I know who has gone there has gone as part of some kind of organized group. Anyway I will try to keep my mind open.

Work equally is cruising along. I have this one job with a major national trade group that required a lot of writing (not my usual just talk and pontificate gig). But I have a colleague who is a professional writer and she has made the project go lightning fast. In fact I think the hours we work on this will be way below what I budgeted (and we are on a fixed price Yay!) All the rest of my projects are going so well, that I've decided I'd better start marketing again. At least get the pipeline going so I have something in the hopper for when I return.

For the first year in three years because of our change in travel timing, we are in Albuquerque for March and most of April. It is kind of nice to see Spring bursting forth here.

AND the camera divorce is final! Wife is getting another Olympus. Bye bye Nikkon. This will reduce our weight substantially and reduce duplication of lenses. We were pissed off to find however that the new Olympus uses a different battery than the one I am using. So we still need to bring two battery chargers.

Travel Planning Fiend!

Ah to be in one's own element. To be able to use all the skills and wiles to best advantage.

Decided this last weekend, I was going to finish up the vast majority of our reservations for our next travel extravaganza. Too early to unveil exactly where we are going but I will tell you that we will be in five countries and will have ten cities as bases. We will have our usual mix of city stays, car/driver guided touring, self-driving periods, food tours and cooking classes and photo workshops.

Absolutely the new planning process has reduced the amount of work required. We reached a consensus on what we wanted to do much quicker. We used the new resource, TourHQ, for the first time and have ended up booking three different aspects of our trip. We'll see how they all turn out and if this is a good resource for us going forward.

Our trip is going to be dominated by Airbnb stays. In two of the countries we are exclusively using Airbnb. In the other two we are doing private tours with accommodation done in conjunction with our TourHQ acquired guide. Booking all the Airbnb stays took the most amount of time. This left us with five air reservations to make, finishing negotiations on one country where we're using TourHQ, figuring out a tricky transfer where there is no easy way to get from point A to Point B, and getting various visas and pre purchased country wide passes.

I am proud to say it was all done this weekend. A few minor things to still book and we'll be ready to go. D-Day is April 24. Having all this done now means I can focus on work. In my lust to make up the funds for this trip, I've gotten a little too enthusiastic and now have a bunch of new clients. I wish I could just do the selling and get the clients and have someone else do the work 😁

All I can say is that I am ready to be out in the world and traveling again!

de-I Corrupt! Fake News I Say!

We all have our bhav. In the yogic path I follow, the describe one's bhav as all the intangible aspects of your life that kind of make you, you. This would be the way you walk and talk, your mannerisms, the various things that happen over and over that are just part of who you are (think of tendencies for various things to happen that don't really make sense but just seem to happen again and again).

Part of my bhav is the on-going saga of my various electronic devices - both hardware and software - having mysterious problems. I used to get all upset about it and call tech people. But now I find when I go to Internet search any particular problem and come back with nothing, that it's just to be expected.

So when my iPhone 6s which is not that old started to have battery problems and not holding a charge, I didn't even fight it for a moment. I just went and got a new one. "Ah" I thought, "I have been a good trusty Apple user and I just backed up my phone yesterday so with the vaunted Apple fast restore program, I will have my new phone up and running in no time."

Get home. Connect the phone to the computer. Hit the button to restore...and get the error message...
    
                                          Your back-up is corrupted restore cannot be completed

What the bleep are you talking about? Didn't my chief of staff do a security clearance on that stupid back-up? That back-up wasn't even a part of my main team. It sure the hell shouldn't be implicating me and preventing my restore.

Unfortunately my computer was having none of this. So I have had to input again all my app passwords and account numbers. I've had to reenter my calendar (which wasn't so bad since there wasn't much on it going forward. But the biggest bitch is the loss of my contacts. I won't go into the whole bhav related problem of being on a MAC desktop Outlook system and trying to synch with an iPhone but there is no easy way to do it.

It seems like the world has bigger issues to deal with than going after some two-bit corrupt back-up.