From Russia with post

At semi-long last, From Russia With Love came off "short wait" on Netflix. So we now have the second edition of My Year of Bonds. You can go right to the From Russia With Love article here.

Lagged out

A quick check of the archives suggests that I was messed up for most of the week after returning from Australia as well, so perhaps I should have seen this coming, but man, do I ever feel like shit right now. It's been pretty messy since I got back - we landed in Chicago at 8:20 am, but that was 10:20 pm later that day Manila time (this after I had been up since 5 am Manila time and slept very little on the plane, as I never can sleep on planes for more than an hour or two). As a result, I ended up falling asleep at noon and waking up around 7 pm, then staying up till about 5 in the morning and sleeping until around 2 pm on Friday. It hasn't been much better since then; while the schedule itself has been slightly more regular, I've had trouble sleeping for more than six hours or so in a row. If it weren't for clocks, I'm not sure I could even tell you what time it was within four hours.

To add insult to injury, I hadn't yet been back to my apartment - where I left most of the contents of my wallet while I was away - when I headed to work from Alma's this morning. It dawned on me just as I was stepping onto the bus that my CTA card was not with me (thank God I was carrying enough cash). Then I had to have the front desk call up to work when I got there to let me in, because my building is smart enough to have security cards with your photo on them but too stupid to have a system where if you forget your card they can call up your ID photo by your name and just let you in. It's just as well that I got into work early enough to disrupt the prank my office mates had planned, because if they'd gone through with it and I had even remotely believed them, I don't think it would have been good for anyone.

All this is my way of telling you that the recap and pics won't be up until later this week - I was planning to start tonight but it's just not gonna happen aside from maybe copying the raw files into the computer. I'm sure you'll live. There are 30 pictures up on Facebook, if you didn't notice (if you're not friends with me and want to see them - well, too bad, or friend me), but the whole shebang will probably be more along the lines of 200-300, plus journal/commentary. I do hope to have it done by the end of the week.

Airport additions

Over a year ago, I made a list post (based on Tyler's previous list post) of all of the airports I'd been to. The count then was 36, 27 within the US and 9 out of the country. The list, by my reckoning, has since expanded to 40 - one more in the US and three more international. I also think I made a mistake in my earlier list, so I'm amending that. New list below, with comments only on the additions/corrections:

Domestic
ALB - Albany, NY
ATL - Atlanta, GA
AUS - Austin, TX
BOS - Boston, MA
CLE - Cleveland, OH
CLT - Charlotte, NC
CMH - Columbus, OH
DCA - Washington National, DC
DEN - Denver, CO
DFW - Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
EWR - Newark, NJ
IAD - Washington Dulles, DC
IAH - Houston, TX
JFK - New York JFK, NY
LAX - Los Angeles, CA
MDW - Chicago Midway, IL
MOB - Mobile, AL
MSP - Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
MSY - New Orleans, LA
OAK - Oakland, CA
ORD - Chicago O'Hare, IL
PHL - Philadelphia, PA
PHX - Phoenix, AZ
SAN - San Diego, CA. Traveled here in June 2008 for vacation.
SAT - San Antonio, TX
SFO - San Francisco, CA
SJC - San Jose, CA
SLC - Salt Lake City, UT

International
AKL - Auckland, New Zealand
BNE - Brisbane, Australia
CCS - Caracas, Venezuela
CPT - Cape Town, South Africa
JNB - Johannesburg, South Africa
LGW - London Gatwick, UK
LHR - London Heathrow, UK
MNL - Manila, Philippines. This was the arrival point for my trip, as you would expect - it's basically the only international airport in the country. The airport also has a domestic terminal which serves as the base for short flights around the country, which I also made use of.
NRT - Tokyo Narita, Japan. Our trip to Manila connected through Narita. On the way back we actually had to stay overnight at a nearby hotel, which means I got to add Japan to my list of countries visited without any sense of incompleteness (it's in my passport now and everything!).
SID - Sal Island, Cape Verde. I originally listed RAI, the Praia airport, as the stopover point coming back from South Africa in 1997. But I was pretty much just guessing there, and the information I found today suggests that the Amilcar Cabral International Airport on Sal was the one that would have served as the stopover point.
SYD - Sydney, Australia
TBH - Tablas, Romblon, Philippines. We flew here from Manila on our trip to Romblon province. It's certainly the tiniest airport I've ever been to - there's a single building which doesn't even have real doors on the outside, a single airstrip with livestock milling within feet of it, and not even so much as a metal detector.

Full Philippines post coming in a while, although like San Diego it's going to be on BigFlax and just linked here, for space and organization reasons.

I have returned

Back from the Philippines. Pretty good trip, and one from which I have lots of multimedia content which I will try to post by the end of the weekend (i.e. before I have to go back to work). I'm pretty severely jet-lagged at the moment, which is no surprise. Heading west across the Pacific, we arrived in Manila late at night after about 21 hours of transit, meaning that we could go right to sleep and wake up the next day ready to go. Coming back, however, we had an overnight stay in Tokyo, followed by a weird 11-hour flight during which we flew into darkness and then landed in Chicago at 8:20 in the morning on Thursday after leaving Japan at noon on Thursday. Worse still, by noon in Chicago I was crashing hard, since it was 3 am Friday in Japan by that point and I had been up since 6 am Thursday with minimal sleep on the plane. The upshot is that an hour ago I woke up from a seven-hour "nap." I'm not even sure what to do now. I have to hope I can fall asleep again in the next six hours or so (not later than 2 am Chicago time) and then sleep more or less through the night. All I can say is at this point I'm liking my decision to take Friday off work as well.