cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, & Maxine Shirts
"I'm back from China and have 3 thoughtlets (.../thoughtlets) and 4 grandkidlets (.../grandkidlets) to catch up on. Isn't life like that? One figures out something important to you, you think you are caught up or maybe even a little bit ahead, and then you wake up one day to find you are three or four weeks behind. Most of us never take the time and never make the effort to get caught up. I guess all of this is part of what makes life so interesting, and, of course, so challenging.
I hope my example of keeping up with the Thoughtlets and with the Grandkidlets provides a basis for each of you to find successes in your own lives. For a key to success is persistence, tenacity, sticktoitiveness, or what ever you choose to call making the effort to get caught up on what is a priority in your life. You kids and your kids, now or in the future, are THE priority in my life. I hope you each choose to take advantage of me as a resource. And if you choose to not do so, I'm sorry for you and for me, for we both miss out on good experiences, the events that are ultimately what makes life worth living.
In Prime Words, a theme is God, family, and work, in that order of priority. I have consistently attempted to show by my actions that Heavenly Father and his work is my first priority, that family is my second priority, and that work is my third priority.
However, over the years, I have also tended to do what ever others ask me to do. I have always accepted callings at church. I have attended swimming meets, soccer games, band concerts, cheer leading events, gymnastic meets, theatrical presentations, choir concerts, scout campouts, etc. I did not have much of an opportunity to provide support to Heather nor Audrey, and so it is very understandable to me that there is not the same bond with the two of you there is with the other 8 children. In regards to doing what others asked me to do, one of the things I have done too much over the years is the things folks at work have asked me to do. And to be very specific, the one thing I have done too much of, to the detriment of family life, is travel.
In my sacrament meeting talk a few weeks ago on Home Teaching (0409.html), I referred to our Home Teacher pointing out to me that when I traveled over weekends my family did not attend church church meetings. So I stopped traveling. However, as I wrote, it was too little too late. And as I take a new job, with new family at home, I hope each of you can recognize the trepidation I feel as I'm asked to start traveling again. I remember getting shots to go someplace once, the nurse looking at my shot record, asking where I had been in the past year, and saying to me `You need to spend more time at home or you will find someone else has taken your place in the bed.'
This two week trip to China was much more than just my introductory project for GDC. They have two areas of international focus: China and Mexico. They want me to be very involved in both of these areas. Based on the last two weeks, I expect it is reasonable that I will be going to China every six weeks for the next two or three years. Plus they have said they want me to go to New York about the 10th of May, to the EAGE in Paris the 7th of June, of course I'm committed to be at the Hedberg Conference in Vienna the 11th-14th of July, there is a West Africa Conference in the fall, then there is the SEG in Denver from October 10th to the 15th, and then it starts over again in 2005.
The positive side of this type of travel is that Andrea loves to travel and would like to go with me on all of the business trips GDC wants to send me on. The negative side is she is teaching seminary (0402.html), and she can not leave her seminary kids to go gallivanting around the world with me. The other negative point is we have run up so much credit card debt, it doesn't make any sense to spend money on travel until this is under control.
So with all of this baggage rattling around in my mind, there was a moment of serious discussion with Mike Dunn and Dave Johnson of GDC. They asked me what I wanted to be happy with working with GDC. I said:
They responded, this seems reasonable, and we should be
able to find a way to make this happen. And thus it stands.
I do not have a written job offer yet. There is tentatively
a trip to New York on the 10th to the 12th of May, and also
Dave Johnson has said he wants me to be back in China to
follow-up on this visit when Paul is in Beijing with his
class on the 15th-16th of May. As of April 13th I have no
idea if this trip will happen in May. Visas and tickets
require a decision to be made in the next two weeks. Oh
well! I looked at the China travel list I put together a
couple of years ago (../china.txt), which only includes
those expressing interest, and after being updated it says:
Paul and Kate, Sarah, and Jared and Melanie are really
busy with work and babies. Chuck and Diane, Bridget and
Justin, Des and Sara, and Maxine are a cousin, niece,
sister, and Mother-in-Law, and I don't think wise to
request having you travel with me as one of my kids on
the first trip I take for GDC. So this puts Rachel and
Heather on the top of the list as traveling companions,
if I go back to China in the middle of May, if GDC does
agree to pay for your plane fare, if Andrea and I see
how we can cover the extra costs, and if you want to go
with us. I am so tired of disappointing people I love,
just because I am an optimist and life is often built
for pessimists, I feel like I have to put in all of these
conditional statements in case the trip doesn't happen.
And maybe Ben will take care of Ethan for a week, and
Kate's mom will take care of Grant, and my companions
will be Sarah and Kate. My point is to open the
conversation and to see what kind of response comes
back from all y'all.
I do hope I don't travel as much as I used to when we were getting Landmark off the ground. Some years I made a dozen trips to Europe and half a dozen trips to the Far East. This meant I was gone about two weeks out of the month. I actually put all of this travel log together as a Spotfire visualization a few years ago. I hope that someday, all of this will be on-line and indexed against the TimedexSM and the Infinite GridSM. One thing is I'm getting to be too old for this kind of strain on my body. Although I must admit I do exercise better when traveling than when home and wasting a couple of hours each day in a commute. Oh well! Tradeoffs.
This travel started on Saturday the 20th of March. Andrea and I went to the temple, then we went to the LDS bookstore, and then I drove home by way of I-45 and The Guitar Store. Andrea did not want to go into the Guitar Store. She had spent too many hours in this kind of store in the past. We went in, found a used Martin backpacking guitar on sale for $100, and bought it. We were out of the store in about 20 minutes. She said it was the fastest she had ever been in one of those stores. I was the only customer there with a suit on, and she was the only lady with a dress on. We were on our way home from the temple. I'll explain why I bought the guitar in Thoughtlet #2004.14 (0414.html).
Later in the evening we went out to Katy Mall and I bought a bag to carry the GDC computer in (I charged it to GDC on my expense report). When we got home I started to pack and to organize the things I wanted to take with me. I stayed up too late, and had a hard time staying awake in church. I was able to write about Taylor Robbyn Wright's Blessing (0412.html) after we got home from Church. Andrea drove me to Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport and dropped me off about 5:30 Sunday evening.
I had to go to the bathroom really bad and so I took my roller bag, the new computer bag, the tube with posters for the GDC booth, the Martin travel guitar, and my winter coat down the escalator, and then back up. Baggage. One of the not so joyous parts of traveling. As I got back upstairs I hear `Roicester,' Mike Dunn's nickname for me. Then I hear, `Oh no! I can't believe I forgot to bring the tube with the posters for the booth I was suppose to bring.' He debated with himself for five minutes and then took off, got a cab, went home, picked up the tube, and got back to the airport and was the last customer to board the plane.
I can not count how often I have had this type of trial when traveling. I remember forgetting my passport once, calling home, getting Sister Sue Feil to go by the house, pick up my passport, drive to the airport at 90 mph, and get the passport to me after the plane left. Then taking a flight to Boston, back to New York, and getting to London six hours later than was scheduled. Aaaaaaaaaaugh! Travel.
One thing nice about staying up late the night before a trip is that I have absolutely no problem going to sleep when I sit down in the seat. I did break the Sabbath and buy a Clancy type novel, Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. By the time we arrived in Beijing I had finished the 430 pages. I didn't do much work on the way over, which has been a pretty normal activity when traveling.
When we got to Los Angeles, we had about two hours to make our flight. We collected our bags (mine were very awkward), and made our way downstairs to the buses. Finally a bus came, Mike asked if it was the right one, jumped on, and as I went to put my bags on the door closed and the bus took off. About 15 minutes later another bus came, and I caught up with Mike. We were traveling on a two for one ticket, and so he needed me to be there for check-in. Isn't travel fun?
Mike and Dave are both X-Shell, and they still have the big company mentality. We traveled business class, and were upgraded to first class on the way over. It reminded me of my second trip to Nigeria. I was working for Mobil Oil, and was sent over with Bishop Gardner from DRL (Mobil's Duncanville Research Lab). When some of the guys I worked with heard that Mobil was sending two Mormons First Class to Nigeria they complained really loud about the waste of good alcoholic beverages. Oh well!
This was my first time to fly Asiana. It was the same flight. Andrea and Carole took to China the year before we got married. The difference was we were in the very front of the 747. We could look out the windows on both sides of the plane from our seat. And the seats actually laid back flat like a bed. It was definitely a comfortable way to travel across the water.
It was also my first time to travel through Seoul. What a first class airport. Much nicer than any airport I've been in in Europe or the U.S. We arrived very early on Tuesday morning, and none of the shops were opened. So we went straight to the first class lounge. No one else was there. They had very nice Korean candies. I brought some home for a Family Home Evening. Mike was on the computers checking e-mail and finding out what happened while we were in the air. Then he came and sat down, and I pulled out the guitar and sang `The Wooden Shoe' to him. Kind of surreal to be in Korea singing a campfire song in the first class lounge.
We got to Beijing, took a cab and got to the Hotel for a fee of 54 RMB for the two of us (about 8 RMB per US$). Dave Johnson had arrived before us, and he paid 125 RMB for a cab from the airport. No one likes to realize how much they have been taken advantage of when they travel. I think we went to the hotel next door, the Crowne Plaza, and ate at the buffet that night. Very good Chinese food. I do know it became a standing joke that we were not in a very classy hotel compared to the Crowne Plaza or the Celebrity Hotel (where Andrea Matt and I stayed, 0225.html), which was just down the street. We did have a good Internet connection, which was important.
As is normal in China, there was a breakfast coupon for each day we were in the hotel. It was a buffet the first morning. It was fried eggs and ham the next two weeks until the last morning when we left, and I was too full to eat any of the buffet that morning.
Wednesday, shortly after lunch, Jialin Yan picked us up and took us to RIPED (PetroChina and CNPC's Research Institute for Exploration and Development), which is where Beijing Hua You Geo Science & Technical Development, Ltd. has their office. They gave us a very nice presentation about their pre-stack depth migration seismic processing and also about their model building software, GeoTools. Dave gave them a presentation about GDC and the mother company, Geokinetics. Dave was particularly impressed with the quality of Geo's processing. We agreed that they would build a model for us of some of the data in the GDC well log database for the Gulf of Mexico. I agreed to come back and work with them on this data on Saturday.
Mike and Dave wanted to look around and go shopping, and so after Geo returned us to the Beijing Continental Grand Hotel, got in a cab and went to Tinnaman Square, in front of the Forbidden City. We watched the kites, brushed off all of the salespeople, and had some female students who were practicing their English walk along with us and talk to us for a while. We went to a Chinese restaurant near the southwest corner of the square, and struggled through a meal with no translation. It was fun, and Dave and Mike had a good time experimenting. This is an important part of traveling. Then we took a cab to the China World Trade Tower and walked around looking for the outdoor market. We never found it. Oh well! I had to go the bathroom and went to a McDonalds. When I came out Dave and Mike were being accosted by beggars. Dave walked off, bought three pears from a fruit seller, and gave one to each of the three beggars. It was touching. A while later we took a cab back to the Hotel.
Thursday morning we were picked up by GeoTech, Geo's competitor and GDC's current agent in China (yes this is messy). They took us to their office, where everything was set up to look like GDC was their only client. The offices were very nice, and the staff was very professional. They are good sales and marketing people. From this standpoint, my friends, Geo, can not compete with them. They have a 200 PC cluster, Geo has a 35 Sun cluster. They claimed they do not do services, and later admitted that they were looking at doing services because Core Labs is selling off their geophysical division and this leaves GeoTech without their major client.
Then we took two cabs and went back to the airport. We took a Chinese commercial plane 1002 kilometers on a 1 hour and 16 minute flight from Beijing to Xi'an. I sat next to Dave Johnson and learned about his 5 kids and a lot more about him. He seems like a very good man. He had a lot of negative thoughts about `Mormons,' and we ended up talking a lot about the church on that flight. He was particularly interested in the Plan of Salvation. I ended up drawing it for him on a paper cup. It was kind of interesting to see the 3-D effect, and the pre-existence right next to the celestial kingdom. Before we left Beijing I gave him a bookmark with scriptural references discussing this plan.
With all of the times I've been to China, this was my first visit to an Oil Field office. This was the Chung Qing Oil Field, which was the first customer to purchase GDC's AVO software. We arrived about dark. It was too late to do any sight seeing. GeoTech sent Sheng Li to help us, and they had a geophysicist named Dong come in later that night to translate for us. There was a nice dinner for us, and then we went to our rooms. There was no heat in the hotel, and it was cold. I had my big coat. I spent the evening working on translating `An Open Mind' from M/S Word to html. It was tedious to get the page layout, the index, and some of the other header information. However, it is set up so that each page prints as a page, and the color coded text is as it is in M/S Word. I think this will prove to be a nice means of distribution. Hopefully I will get the first 50 page chapter moved over to the web in the next few weeks. Dave and Mike were busy with Internet e-mail. As it points out over and over in the book Ben and Sarah gave me for Christmas, Bold New Worlds, for the modern traveler electronic networks collapse space and time.
Friday morning I ate too much breakfast at the buffet. Then we went over to the Oil Field Headquarters. This is the largest gas field in China. Their office is a 30 story building that could have been downtown Houston. First class facilities. The meeting was interesting. Dave gave a good summary of GDC. I showed them some of the Spotfire stuff I have been working on. Then they had questions about the software they had purchased. It got kind of heated. It is obvious there needs to be more and better support in China. Dave made arrangements for Richard Verm to come back to the Oil Field the Monday after the Convention. GDC is certainly demonstrating responsiveness.
We went back to the hotel, had another banquet lunch, and headed off for the airport. There was not time to go and see the Terra-cotta Soldiers. However, the flight was over an hour late, and so we got to spend a long time sitting in the airport waiting. I read. Dave and Mike shopped and looked around. We all wished travel did not have so much of this type of wasted time.
After we got back to Beijing, we changed, talked to the main desk, found a hot and spicy Chinese restaurant with English menus, and took a cab to it. It was a neat restaurant. I got the card so I can take folks back to it. It was a very nice meal, and I was starting to feel really stuffed. My swallow counts were going through the roof. I find it interesting that none of those I traveled with ever realized I was keeping track of swallows, even though we were together most of the time. People can always hide what they are embarrassed about, what they don't want others to know, or what they don't want to explain and have laughed about. Maybe this last thing is what my counting swallows has come down to.
Saturday I worked on translating `An Open Mind' to html in the morning. Then in the afternoon I went with Jialin and worked on building a model of the thickness of sand for the entire Gulf of Mexico. We did several tests, and outlined what was needed to put in our booth. We cut the model down to the interval from 5,100 feet to 8,100 feet. The model turned out really good, and became a centerpiece of our booth and also of Geo's booth. I was very pleased about how this turned out.
After working on the model Jialin took me to a Coffee House where we talked while he drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. This evening turned out to be one of those evenings you will always remember. During the course of our discussions, Jialin mentioned that he is engaged. Wonderful news. Then he mentioned that his fiancee is pregnant, and that they need to decide whether to have an abortion or not. He asked me what I thought. I told him. We ate dinner. I had salmon and a strawberry ice cream sunday. We talked. When he dropped me off I said, `Jialin, I'm glad your Mom and your Dad choose to bring you into this world.' That was the last that was said about the choice he faced. Life is hard, in China and in the U.S.
Sunday morning I got ready for church and took a cab to where church had been my previous two visits to China. It was not there. No one came. I sat outside waiting for about 45 minutes. Oh well! I went back to the room and continued to work on translating `An Open Mind' to html. Mike and Dave had gone on a tour of The Forbidden City on Saturday. They went shopping on Sunday. We got together for dinner at the Crowne Plaza buffet next door. I had been gone for a week, and I was once again, already tired of the opportunity to travel."