Well I made it back in one piece from Thailand.  The upgrade gods were very good to me (with a little donation of 30,000 frequent flyer miles) on the way home.  I got upgraded to business class for the one 6 hour and one 11 hour flight which, to those of you that have made this long, long trip, is a big deal.  Jet lag is a little less of an ominous thing if you are able to fully recline in your seat, and having a little better food with actual china and silverware seems a little more human.  It probably wasn’t in the holiday spirit to spend my waking moments on these flights walking through coach class with my glass of champagne asking each person "Hey, doesn't your seat recline all the way?  Ooh, that must make it hard to sleep.”   I didn’t really do that – it was a glass of nicely chilled Chardonay.

The trip was a great success. I was able to make great headway in getting things back on track with our major ceramics manufacturer.  They are a good company, and good systems in place, so I had faith, but it's nice to have one’s faith confirmed.  Then finding all of these great organic wood pieces, and curly vines that we are having put on stands, the big clean cut root pieces that are being made into buffets and the huge raw cut dining and coffee tables should add a great new part to our product line.  I have posted a number of photos of these things in our “stuff on the way” link so you can have a look.

Now it’s the mad rush for Christmas in our family.  Still have a number of gifts to buy and wrap, (which is why I am writing sentences beginning with “still” rather than “I still” saving time don’t you know . . .that is until I explained it all in this ellipses . . . crap).  Then its off to my wife’s family for their good traditional Swedish Christmas eve celebration (heathens to do it on Christmas eve, but what can you do), then a late night three hour drive up to my parent’s place on a lake in the woods, hopefully with snow for Christmas on Christmas day.  Should be a big group this year for us, with one of my mom’s sisters visiting from England, my sister Fiona and her husband Ravi and daughter Tara, and Ravi’s sister visiting from DC – Reema, Sergey (from Russia but in essence adopted into our family since the late 80’s), and his wife Amy and dog Bear, and David, one of our oldest family friends (that’s not to say he is the oldest person our family knows – just wanted to clear that up), and of course my wife Lisa, our 4 month old son Alex both of whom will be fresh off a plane from Stockholm tomorrow, and myself.  Again you must find yourself wondering why you are reading this stuff.  I know I would be.  So if you do Christmas, have a merry Christmas, if you don’t, then have a merry not doing Christmas, and of course, happy new year.