At Countdown

Here in LA, I'm ready to launch. We are here 2 days with family before catching the flight to Beijing on Saturday. The plan (now referred to as the "wise plan") was to break up the total flight time, reduce the jet lag (by only 3 hours, I know, but it all counts), and chill a little.

Hooray for the chilling part. Unusual for me, I had a lot of tension, preparing to go. Hell, it took me 30 minutes just to write out the cat-sitter instructions, and she already knows the cats, waters the garden, feeds the fish, fills the pond, tends the plants. But all of that was before the dreaded give-Moss-a-pill-every-day period. But I digress.

While we are here in LA, we are kicking back. I am writing a blog post. Tom? He is learning Mandarin. I am not making this up. Ni hao (hello). Ching (thank you). He's having a little trouble with "my wife is bugging me, and did you know she is a CIA agent sent here to foment dissent?"

I do hope we don't crash. Some of you know I am afraid of flying. Not a legitimate phobia, but an irrational panic, whenever there is turbulence, that we will crash  A wing will fall off. The plane will flip over and then nose-dive to earth. We will just rattle to death.

Take-offs and landings are also very difficult, and don't even start me on landing with turbulence. This China trip will reveal the stuff I'm made of. Or not. We have one connecting flight between LA and Beijing. Two connections on the way home. But INSIDE CHINA we will have three different flights, on those little, teeny tiny, foreign airlines that you can't trust to have anti-turbulence tactics or counter-turbulence equipment. (OK, on the bright side, not Malaysia Airlines.)

So, farewell, until I write you from the other side. No, no, not the other other side. I mean the other side of earth. Because we won't crash. We won't crash. We won't crash.