A full year of Seattle! Who’d have thought of that?
I wondered if I actually like to travel. If not, why do I travel so much? This year I left home probably once a month and sometime twice. Oversea trips were mostly to Asia, but once to Greece. Pretty much all of them were business trips. We are, however, getting better at combining business with pleasure: rendezvous and steal a day or two for tourist activities in the city that I went to for business.
Kid engaged and set the wedding date for next May. We knew this wa coming and gave them all our blessings. At the same time, the sadness of the inability to hold onto them slipped in. They are all growing up and we are both growing old. Soon, there will be this old couple on their recliners staring at the TV all by themselves. I thought of my parents more and more as I tried to see myself from kids’ eyes. I remembered how I felt when I was their ages. This is very strange: to remember through kids’ eyes as parents.
The other Kid graduated and entered grad school. Life is now building the launch pad. Decision time is sooner. But there is still precious time to goof off once in a while: it is hard to wean away from the nice college care-free lives.
Nephew got married. We all have been holding our breath for this moment and so glad that they finally overcame all barriers. Another niece is now a Mom! Man, I am now a grand-uncle. Another, slightly more distant, niece moved to the US and recently got pregnant with her second kid. This trend of grand-uncling is not slowing down, I can see. Soon, I will acquire the title of å°æ˜Žå”å…¬ (long story, inside joke, another blog).
The job is its usual high-stress, high-demand, high-tech drill. No job is perfect. This one is on the better side, on the scale of my long list of employments. I really enjoyed the direct, non-bullshit small company culture. We operate at a much faster pace. Yes, the competition is fierce and we will die easier and quicker if we screw up. Guess what, so it is for the biggest companies in the world too. This is the era where size does not really have real advantages, at least not for the industry that I am part of.
I still feel like a visitor to this city of Seattle. I am not sure if the feeling of “temporarily” will ever be gone. We moved into our own condo in the summer and let the city grow on us. After all, this is where Kid will get married, I am sure that we will remember that day for a very long time.
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