It's been a few months since I noticed that the lewislau.com guestbook is broken (no one can leave messages!). I finally spend a few days and got the guestbook back up and running again... Sign in if you want to leave a message for me...
Sitting in a wine bar on a Sunday afternoon in Albuquerque, New Mexico right now - I have been on the road for the past 10 days and have only a few more days to go before Julia comes to L.A. to spend a few weeks in the United States :)
WISH ME LUCK.
I shall know by noon Pacific Time.
I spent my birthday weekend hanging out with some old friends back in Minneapolis (and semi-dressing-up for a costume party, using existing "props" and some add-ons). Got back on Sunday night and realized that I will be working my *** off for the next few weeks to drum up some business to wrap up this strange election year.
Speaking of elections... this will be the last one where I do not get a say on who gets elected. More details to follow this weekend, where I party Las-Vegas-Style with my friends Bernd and Jana who are visiting from Germany!
While on my vacation a few weeks ago visiting Julia and her family, I was fortunate enough to also be invited by my friend Bernd Rueckert to join him to Oktoberfest 2008.
I took a train to Munich, stood in line from 7:15am to get into the Augustiner tent (side note: "tent" is not a true description for this structure - it seats THOUSANDS), and had a blast! More pictures will be uploaded once I can find some free time from work/late-night-phone-calls/studying:^P.
We found a bench at around 7:25 a.m. and started drinking... and drinking... until 3:30ish (my idea of time/space was a bit blurry by that point). I have also uploaded a video of the event on youtube. Enjoy...
I live right across from a hotel, but I really don't know if you can normally book it on line - at the same time it is being used as a movie set all the time. Over the past weekend they shot a scene right at the corner of 4th and Main, and they turned on the neon sign - in the past two years since I have lived in my apartment I have never seen it turned on. Pretty cool ;-)
Traveled to Las Vegas last week for work, and got upgraded to a suite facing the Las Vegas Boulevard... right across from the ginormous construction site for City Center (Large Photo Here)... while I understand that once you start a development, it is impossible to stop - but is such a monstrous development economically feasible at such a horrible time for the country? Although I haven't head of people jumping off buildings just yet, but I also know no one is going out and spending $500,000+ on a condo... especially in a place like Las Vegas.
But of course, Las Vegas isn't like any other place in the United States - there is so much money flowing in and out on The Strip every day there that it just may defy all logical reasoning in these strange financial times...
I have been playing with my blog template, and decided that (soon) I need to revamp the lewislau.com web site again. One thing is to catch up on updating my travelogues, and another reason is the look-and-feel of the site (sort of got sick of the way this main page looks).
I have decided to make my index page photo posts LARGER - realized that in the old (smaller) size some of the details are not to my liking. Hopefully this looks better :)
The pictures above of Julia and myself are from our trips to Koenigswinter and Koeln. More posts to follow in the next few days.
Returned from a 2-week vacation in Germany (more pictures to follow), but I am currently traveling in Las Vegas and Alberquerque this week and had forgotten to bring the pictures with me to post on lewislau.com.
But I promise I will post at least a few in the next day or so...
While flying out of Burbank yesterday morning the overnight wildfire that was suppose to subside ended up becoming larger, and was just starting to move towards the homes. Here are some pictures taken from the plane...
Something that was interesting - the fire was straight North of the Burbank airport, and our plane flew directly over the "smoke clouds". For those who know me is familar with my fear of flying, so when our plane suddenly dropped about 5 feet without warning I almost **** my pants. If the drop was caused by the strange oxygen/smoke mixture of the fire, you'd figure that the pilots would fly further out, away from the smoke!
Just don't like to be scared :{
... and start my work preparation for this upcoming week.
The picture is of me with my old friends Marie and Johnny, whom I have known since 1984 (but lost touch for almost 22 years since 1986 when I left Taiwan) - glad to find them after all these years!
On another note, with the summer coming to an end, I am hoping that this fall would be like any other year, and have business pick up to end the otherwise sluggish past two months...
but of course so far it has not been a normal year for business... let's see what happens!
Back in 2004 I posted an entry on "how I prepare for Mondays", and how my closet looks like after I get all my dress shirts ironed - this is an update, with more dress shirts...
Yup - it's labor day, and I can proudly say I spent an entire day ironing all my shirts and pants over the long weekend - not exactly work work but a bit better than sitting on my butt all weekend doing nothing.
