Airbus A380 looks pretty fly

Waiting to board the flight to Singapore, at Terminal 3, Heathrow

The wonderful world of the M25

Ho hum, it is the crawl to Heathrow. Fortunately the slowness was offset by a beautiful sunrise earlier. I love the sunrises over West Sussex, but I do miss the horizon! In such a built up area as most of Mud Island is, you need to actualy go out of your way to get a view which has a horizon.

Skype is wonderful

Here I am (last week) catching up with life, with Rose, via Skype.

Sometimes the long distances seem so small when the conversations just go on from where we last left off. This was our delightful venue in the dining room at Paul & Carol's home in Watertown, CT. Freezing and snowing outside, but plenty warm inside - it was a very comfortable meeting place.

View from top of the Empire State building

Another one of Tim Miller's pictures, but enhanced a little in Picassa! It's a view from the 86th story public observatory. I only discovered later that there is a much smaller observatory at the 102nd floor! I did not see it advertised. Apparantly it was meant to be the mooring place for airships coming into New York from Europe, but was later determined to be far to dangerous.

Try this next time you pack a bag!

I was shown this method of folding a tee-shirt recently, and klutz that I am, I have about a 50% success rate of having anything turn out as advertised. It looks nifty, and is, when it works.

What time is it?

Real Palm Trees inside Dubai International

A reasonably comfortable flight from Gatwick to Dubai overnight, and I am catching up on my caffeine at a Starbucks in Dubai International Airport. The shops are always amazing here, but I did not think so many bargains as I recalled from before. Of course, you can get just about anything associated with lifestyles of the rich and famous, probably reason enough for me to simply park myself quietly, sip a Grande Cappucino, and watch others buy their real gold bars, Cuban cigars, and Russian caviar. WiFi is free around the Starbucks area, which is close to Gates 1,2 and 3 at the end of the terminal building. I see that Skype Zones also has a good and strong signal here in the building for both their pay-as-you go service ($2.95 for 2 hours) and their other account service.