Honestly, I am not slacking...

We are going crazy. We just got back from a five week trip to Australia, and boy were we tired. One would think that we would be relaxing at home, updating web pages and enjoying the winter evenings with friends.
Unfortunately we are not. We are putting out house on the market and hopefully selling it. We are planning to move to the coast, to get closer to some other relatives and the sound of the ocean. Slow the pace a bit, find a nice spot to bring up our brood. Well, our real estate agent has told us that we are best off getting the house up in the next week or so since there are very few new houses on the market right now and demand is high. If we wait till the end of the month, there will be a glut of new houses and we will get less for ours. So we are painting and repairing, tweaking and storing stuff, all to make this house ready to show. I have to get it done before wednesday at 6AM when I leave for a business trip...

Can we do it? I have faith, but I know it is costing me valuable sleep time.

Planes, trains and automobiles....

Hello there all.

We are back and not too much worse for wear. Jennifer and I had a great time down under and it was a shame that it had to end. For the next few weeks we will proudly sport our naturally acquired tans around the frozen north, for sure a conversation starter.

We had a bit of an adventure on the way back from Brisbane. Our flight arrived in North America on time, but it took two hours to get through the lines at immigration in LAX. Because of this, we missed our connecting flight and had to be re-booked. After some jockeying, we at least got a direct flight from Qantas to our home town instead of having to take a re-route through Chicago and change planes. We did have to spend an extra 4 hours in LAX terminal 2, fortunately we had each other to lean on as this is a barren, bleak terminal with no character, decent restaurants or inspiring retail facilities....

We arrived back home 4 hours later than planned, only to discover that our main luggage bag (the one that barely made the weight limit) was MIA. Now nobody can find the bag in LA or Toronto and I suspect that all our nice clothes, toiletries and contact lenses are forever gone... I cannot wait to try and file a claim with two different airlines, both of which will deny responsibility I am sure. Could be worse, a few years back we lost a TAG watch and 32 DVD's when some unknown person at LAX pilfered our luggage when it was in transit. We were told that since the whole bag was not gone, there was no recourse for refund and to claim it on our house insurance. That airport is the black hole of luggage violations... Excuse me, can we take 32 Kilos as carry on?

The moral of the story, we will never fly to Australia via LAX again...