Departing

Tonight’s our last night in Thailand. Tomorrow, the festivities begin! I kid, of course. Tomorrow the trip home begins. Which may seem like a festive occasion, but is really just a hurdle to be crossed before we get home. Long flights are always a chore. A chore that may seem a little bit more comfortable this time, I realized, because I’m more than 30 pounds lighter than I was the last time I got on a plane.

We’ve packed everything, disassembled my desktop computer and returned its components to their original boxes, and cleaned up our room. Tomorrow we’ll get up around 8:30 and have a light breakfast, then some family members are coming to pick us up and take us to the print shop. Apple’s getting her hair washed and prepped for the trip, we’ll have lunch and then head for the airport around 1:00.

From here in southern Thailand, we fly to Bangkok’s Don Muang airport, the nation’s major domestic hub. Then we have a good number of hours to journey by taxi to Suvarnabhumi, Bangkok’s “other airport” through which all international flights travel. We have a connection in Seoul, then another in Atlanta, before we finally get home to Florida on Sunday. As David Hasselhoff said after every turbo boost, “Whew.”

Apparently though, the word didn’t think we had enough disasters to contend with, so it gave us swine flu. I wouldn’t be at all concerned, except we’ll be traveling on planes in very close proximity to other people, but there’s no choice. So we’re taking face masks and hand sanitizer. Ironically, I think Apple managed to get a minor cold from her nephew, so it’s probably us who people will be looking at with abject horror. So the face mask might work both ways, in her case. It figures!

I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off from work, so I’ll have time to ease back into the groove of U.S. time. I’ve pretty solidly acclimated myself to GMT+7, so that might take more effort than usual. I also might be dealing with a technology crisis straight away: I fired up my Slingbox today for one last channel-surf, and found my TiVo HD stuck at the “Welcome – Powering Up…” screen. At some point it rebooted for some reason or other, and during the reboot it locked up. The only way to fix it is to physically pull its plug, and there obviously won’t be any of that until I get home. (I’m at least glad it didn’t crap out the week we got here!)

The bad news is that a TiVo getting stuck at the “Welcome” screen, if not a fluke, usually indicates a failing or failed hard drive. Which would be ridiculous and maddening, because the 1-terabyte drive I put in there myself is less than a year old — and because we’ll then have lost six months worth of recordings that we’d planned to catch up on. Hopefully the damn thing is just stuck and a reboot will cure it. But if worse comes to worst, I’m bringing home a 500GB hard drive that I’ll throw in there to get up and running fast. And I guess not having hours and hours of shows to catch up on would be freeing, in a way. 😉

It’s hard to believe that we’ll be back in our own house in just a couple more days. Our nice clean house, I might add, thanks to my parents, who brought in a housekeeper to freshen the place up. We’ll be ready to jump right into our new life…or is that our old life?

During our travels, you can keep up-to-date on what’s happening over at my Twitter. Or, y’know just look at the sidebar.

Seeya back in GMT-4!