April Floos

I got back to Fayetteville tonight at 9:00, and went right to bed. An hour later I got up because I was freezing and achy. I took a bath, which I couldn’t get hot enough, and now I’m drinking hot tea. At first Dempster refused to join me. He was like, “No way man, I’m in bed already.” But then he decided to take the opportunity to eat copious amounts of dog food, and now he’s happily chewing on the leg of my pants because I’m too exhausted to care. Which just reminded me that I shouldn’t let my issues cause him to be badly behaved. So I redirected him to a toy, which in this case was the blanket but good enough.

I’ve never had severe allergies, but the last few years I’ve had a little. I think that’s what this is. I’ve been having sneezing attacks and watery eyes off and on, and then it kicked into high gear when I went on a long walk at my parents’ Friday. Stuff is blooming down there that probably isn’t up here yet, since we’re farther north and in the mountains. My mom’s had it too. But wow – I’ve never had allergies that feel this much like the flu! I have every flu symptom except possibly fever, which I don’t know about because I don’t have a thermometer. I’m on the fence about going to work tomorrow. My advisor is on maternity leave, and I gave one of my students approval to go to the autism symposium at the university, because her work offered to pay for it. Plus I plan to miss a day for my birthday trip. I guess we’ll see if anything develops in the morning.

I’m on the fence between watching an episode of The West Wing and trying to go to bed. My left ear is stopped up, so I probably couldn’t hear it anyway. Plus my laptop is still in my backpack from this weekend, and who has the energy for that? So I’ll probably just play a little 2048 (I know that game is totally 3 years ago, but I’m awesome at it and I find it relaxing without being too addicting).

We had a great weekend. Among other things, Dempster turned 7 months. I should probably go stop him from chewing whatever he’s eating right now. This phase can feel free to end any time now.

Australia and Asia!!

Funny story. Lord willing, I’m going to Australia for the month of June, for a wedding. I decided to book that flight tonight. I happened to see that one flight to Sydney had a short layover in Tokyo. Ooh, I thought, that sounds fun. I’ve done long layovers in London (where I dozed on a hop on-hop off bus and couldn’t remember what was real and what was hallucinations) and Dubai (where it was so hot I just walked outside my hotel and right back in). But it was too short to do anything. So I spent hours trying to figure out how to make that layover longer. There are sites that try to tell you how, but I couldn’t figure it out. (I had a brief encounter with Singapore Air, which supposedly offers free 24-hour stopovers, but then it turned out not to be an option at the last minute). Other options were Hawaii and Fiji, but I’ve been to Hawaii and the others appealed to me more than Fiji.

What I came up with is a 30-hour stay in Tokyo on the way, and a similar one in Beijing on the way back. At the last minute I realized I hadn’t checked to see if you need a visa for Beijing (I’d checked Tokyo), so before hitting the button, I checked. And you do. So I was going to rethink. Then I rethought rethinking, and googled “China visa stopover.” There are a few options for short stays. You can stay for 24 hours if you have a ticket to another destination (not a return to your original country). But my layover would be 30 hours. But there’s also a 72-hour option. Only you have to be from certain countries (check) and be going to certain cities (check) and potentially not go out of that city (I’ll check on that later). So, even though I’m not totally convinced I won’t be stuck in the airport for 30 hours, I went for it!

And the best news is it kept getting cheaper to add locations. Flying is weird. I have a school conference in San Diego the week before, so I plan to just leave from there. But adding the Little Rock to San Diego leg to the rest of it jumped the price up by $5,000. Lol. So I just got a one-way flight for $155. And if I’d done Little Rock to San Diego to Sydney to Little Rock, it would’ve been $500 more expensive than what I ended up doing – San Diego to Tokyo to Sydney to Beijing to Little Rock, and booking Little Rock to San Diego separately. And I may get a little reimbursed from the school for the San Diego leg.

I hadn’t anticipated adding Asian countries to this trip. I know nothing about Asia. I’m horrible at both geography and history. But I guess I better figure out some stuff to do there.

So I’ll have 8 days in San Diego (3 of them are for work; the rest with the Beelers), a day and a half in Tokyo, 24 days in Australia (and hopefully Tasmania), a day and a half in Beijing, and then back to Little Rock.

Good thing Dempster loves Grandmary’s house (and good thing Grandmary tolerates Dempster fairly well).