On the way out

Last day in the office for a while, and I had to contend with lots of things breaking, or not quite working as fast or as well as they should, until the death of a thousand cuts culminated in four dead hours in the afternoon waiting for various processes to stop chugging away and actually do something. A red hot laptop is not a blessing.

I felt grim, but luckily my wife had taken on all the packing duties so that was sorted; I just had to eat all the remaining cheese in the house, and pack my carry-on.United emailed me today to tell me that I should print out my boarding pass.

However, because I have luggage to check, all I could print out was a sheet of paper with THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS written on it. And people think that Americans don't get irony.We have a 7 am flight that gets us to Tokyo, and then a 13 hour flight to Chicago, and then another flight to Montreal, although by then I won't really notice what day it is, how long I've been travelling, or who I am.

I hope that the stop in Narita is short enough that I don't find the ice cream vending machine and end up biting my way through another cup of ice cream, but you never know. There's nothing else at Narita apart from one expensive bag shop and a smoking room, so at least I could entertain everyone else around us.

It's been over a year since we were last in Canada. Last time we were both on that side of the world, we parked a hire car into a utility pole (that's questionable utility at best) and I abandoned my wife for a intra-company competition. The two weren't necessarily related. This time round I'm hoping we have to oversee no more interactions between inanimate objects, and I stay within a hundred miles of my spouse at all times. We don't have the pressure of a wedding, or at least not our own; now we can jeer at somebody else's celebrant mucking up the pronounciation of their names, although we won't be trapped on a boat in a typhoon. Ah, you can't always get everything your way.

We'll be back in ten days - hardly enough time to buy bras, training shoes and granola bars. (And I'm not sure what my wife will want to pick up...)