In the past two weeks, this happened:

• My last day at work.
• Andy defended his thesis and became a doctor of philosophy in micro-nano manipulation and extreme nose-to-grindstoned-edness.
• We moved.

Andy flew back to Denver to work this week, but flies into Chicago tonight, and tomorrow we begin this:

• Singapore
• Bali
• Xi’an
• Guilin
• Beijing

I will take it. I may or may not document these adventures here, depending on how motivated I’m feeling and how much downtime we have. We did get a fancy new camera, however, that may need to debut its work. Pay no heed to the quality of the photo compositions. The idiot behind the camera doesn’t know what she’s doing.

One of the perks of crazy amounts of the nonstop travel I did a couple years back for a previous IT consulting job was a growing stockpile of mileage and hotel points. Observe the before and after.

Before:

After:

My favorite part is the advert pointing out that we could have saved miles by simply paying $20,126.00 out of pocket.

Our goal was to drain my hotel and mileage points and spend little out-of-pocket, and we’ve successfully met that goal THANKYOUITCONSULTING. There are some overnights and flights not covered by the points that we booked separately on cheapo Chinese domestic airlines and other such sites. And we couldn’t resist the upgrade to first class from Beijing to Chicago (with a stopover in Japan), as it was only a few hundred dollars total. Completely worth it, if you ask me.

More later, but for now, it’s back to packing and prepping my sister for extreme catladyness as she takes on our two cats in addition to her own for the next several weeks. So far I’ve purchased for her a crochet hook, ten bottles of nailpolish, and Instagram. Okay, I didn’t purchase anything because I already had all that myself. Cat ladies think alike.

More later from the other side of the world, where they drink coffee made from cat poo. Mmmmmm!!!