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On my way home. After a lengthy stay in a few square miles in NJ. Its been quite eventful, weather wise.
I landed to ground frost with temperatures hovering around the 5 celsius mark. This was ‘fall’ or autumn as they say elsewhere in the northern hemisphere; ‘sharad’ in the hindu calendar.
It felt as if the temperature fell taking the cue from all the leaves.
And a week later it snowed.
I have rotten luck with weather. I visit a place & soon after I arrive, a few records weather-wise will be broken. eg, I was in London in March & it snowed for the first time in 50 years over Easter! And last week, it snowed in NJ during Halloween after 36 years! And to further make things interesting, in both instances I was at career turning points, in a manner of speaking. I’m reminded of ‘Signs’ – maybe everything is connected in some way; we are blind to the signs & what they mean.
I’m on the longest flight I’ve ever taken. It’s an 18 hour + ride from one end of the world where I live currently (Singapore) to the other (East Coast of the US). Some things I was surprised to learn (though in hindsight they all seem quite logical):
a) The aircraft isn’t the A380. Its an A 340-500. Now, even the well-informed Singapore cabbie who dropped me to the airport thought I must be flying the 380. Somehow it seems we equate the largest plane in the world with the longest flight capability as well. Not so.
b) It’s an all business class configuration. I guess the only people who will endure 18 hours inside an aircraft are those on a business trip. A family with small children will surely find it extremely difficult to cope on various fronts I am sure! So now we know why it’s not the 380 – an all business class configuration on it will require a substantial portion of the business community to travel on any given day!
c) Thinking about the flight path, I imagined a rotating globe & to me, it was a toss-up on which would be faster – the easterly or the westerly direction. Neither it seems; this flight flies north-easterly, past Japan, across the international date line, over Sarah Palin’s state, across Canada & finally to the east coast. That’s the way a crow would think about it I guess.
Folks had warned me about this flight. ‘You will see a couple of movies, a few glasses of wine, eat a couple of meals, read the preparatory presentations you need to, AND still there will be 7 hours to go!’ Well, I’m down a movie (Hancock, which wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be), an episode of Dexter, half a review of the Beijing games (some observations on that later) & a couple of glasses of Chardonnay. And oh yes, I did kind of doze / sleep for about 3 hours & I had lunch (the menu I’m struggling to remember – it was not memorable I can tell you). Regarding work – well, I had told myself that I would catch up on several things I wanted to write about, so I guess that’s also ticked off. I have over 10 hours to go!
A 3-Sided View of things 