1st day of work . . . .

No fun pictures to accompany this post. Today has been all about work.

My travels went as planned and I managed to get 5 or 6 hours of sleep on the flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi and I felt reasonably refreshed when I landed at 7 AM. Cleared customs and found my luggage without any troubles and our driver (and my friend) Jasan was there to meet me and take me to my hotel.

I was told that I had about 2 hours until Jasan would come back to the hotel to take the 7 of us from the US to work. I had a light breakfast with a few of my colleagues and then went up to my room to unpack and take a shower. It felt good to get out those clothes I had been wearing for the last 40 hours.

Not much to tell you about work, except that there was plenty to go around. Here it is now, 6:30 PM and we're all still here, going strong. As usual, we're behind on getting the questions from our editorial staff, but as usual, we'll handle it with no problems.

Safe and sound here on the ground in Nairobi, I'll post more when I have more to say.

Layover in Amsterdam

Well, I've started my travels for Zain Africa Challenge 2010, Season 4. I left on Thursday at 4:15pm from Los Angeles International airport on a great big KLM 747 bound for Amsterdam. I got to sit upstairs in their business class only seating, but it was no big deal. Neither was their service. A short 9 1/2 hours later and we were landing in Amsterdam.

I had nearly 10 hours to kill before my flight to Nairobi, so I locked my carry-on bags into an airport locker and went through customs to spend a few hours touristing. It was easy to catch a train from the station at the airport that took my exactly into the city center of Amsterdam in about 15 minutes. That's a picture of the train station, above.

The first thing I noticed was, it's cold! About 48 degrees. I was glad to have packed my ski shell and a wool scarf in my carry-on because I was very comfortable dressed that way. The next thing I noticed was the traffic. There are more bicycles in Amsterdam than autos. You see them parked everywhere, cluttering the streets and they even have multi-level bike parking lots.

I dodged the bikes as I crossed the streets leaving the train station and saw a number of boating companies in the large canal there offering canal tours in long narrow glass covered boats. I bought a ticket on a tour that was just leaving and saw the sights of Amsterdam from the water for the next hour. Marion will be happy to know that there were no messy seagulls dive-bombing us, no rotten kids dumping buckets of water from bridges on passing boats, and that the glass roof would have protected us if they did.

After my boat ride I decided to walk around the city for a while. I had no plan of what to see or what to do. I knew what I wasn't looking to do. I had no interest in visiting one of Amsterdam's famous coffee houses, of which I saw (and smelled) several. That would be a stupid reason to miss my connecting flight.

I was more interested in the wonderful bakeries and cheese shops I saw. These Dutch love thier cheese; Gouda, Edam, Jarlsberg, big yellow wheels of cheese everywhere you look. I passed on sampling the cheese though and set my sights on a treat that I remember from previous trips to Germany; Dutch Patats. What the Germans call Pommes Frittes and we call French Fries, the Dutch call them Patats and they cut these Belgian potatoes into small wedge-shaped fries and fry them in I don't know what. Then they serve them hot in a paper cone and covered with a mess of your choice of sauces. I chose curry sauce, something between a red curry and a bar-b-que sauce. You eat it with a little wooden fork the size of a toothpick. Yum!

After that I headed back to the airport on the train and still had 4 hours to kill. I got some work done and posted this blog, but now it's just about time to board my flight to Nairobi on Kenya Air.

Halloween 2009

We had a very fun Halloween season this year. It all started with a trip to the Pumpkin patch at Faulkner Farms. They had a pumpkin-lobbing trebuchet that would launch a gourd 100 feet away to it's gut-splashing death.

On Halloween day we started off with Nik's AYSO soccer game, and then it was time to rush home to prepare for the evening.

This is the first year that both Brodie and Nik could really take part in preparing their own pumpkins for carving. Neither of them were too happy with putting their hands in the squishy guts.

They both created their own design for their Jack O' Lanterns and I helped them carve.

Meanwhile, Marion was getting the house ready for a Halloween party we were hosting for Brodie and Nik's friends. We were having about 9 kids and their parents over for games like Skeleton scavenger hunt (find the bones hidden in our yard,) Which Witch? (where each kid demonstrated their psychic skills by reading the minds of the others,) and mummy wrap contest.

She also prepared some spooky treats. The punch bowl had two scary hands floating in it, and the apple slices were dressed up as vampire's mouths with slivered almond fangs. She also served freshly sliced flesh for the grownups (prosciutto on toasted baguette with cream cheese.)

Brodie wanted to be the Terminator for Halloween, so I bought a small makeup kit to cyborg him up. It seemed a shame to let the rest of the makeup go to waste, so we dressed-up Nik's pizza guy costume to make him a Zombie Pizza Guy; "Want a slice?!" I don't usually dress up for Halloween, but since I was hosting the party I thought I should make some effort so I did myself up as The Joker from Batman.

Everyone from the party trick-or-treated as a group in the neighborhood of new homes behind our house. The houses were built very close together with the front doors very close to the side walk, so we were able to visit a lot of homes in a short time. Unfortunately we didn't stop after a short time. The boys returned home at 9 o'clock after more than 2 hours of trick-or-treating, and only stopped because their arms hurt from carrying their heavy bags of loot.