(Haha I dunno why people hate airports. Airports are like my havens. It's like the only place where nobody is (almost) guaranteed to bother me since I'm "in transit" and I get to sit in peace for 45 mins before boarding.)

Amidst all the crazy of the last week, there was also this thing called GISHWHES (Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen) that ended up being THE EXACT SAME WEEK. I kind of gave up all hope on it as soon as I realized how it overlapped everything else, but I've always hated giving up on something before I even got out of the gate, especially when I had signed up ages ago and was already assigned to a 15 person team.

So, 12:30 am on Tuesday night, I skimmed through the 150 or so scavenger hunt item list that had been posted, and ticked off the (very tiny) handful that I could conceivably either do myself or arrange with someone else in like the 3 hours I had free for the remaining week. And then I started making a minute-by-minute schedule. (Omg I made all the schedules D:)

Buckle your seat belts ladies and gents, it's gonna be a bumpy ride ...

THURSDAY
MST 1:30 am - figure out how long it takes to get to airport with traffic, add in time to pick up breakfast, figure out to the minute when I have to set my alarm clock for, go to bed
MST 8:45 am - wake up, shower, pack up, check out
MST 9:30 am - leave hotel for airport
MST 10:00 am - driver misses the airport exit
MST 10:10 am - driver ends up making two detours D:
MST 10:30 am - finally arrive at airport, fling checked bags at the ticket counters, run through three terminals with 40 pounds of photo and electronic equipment, to arrive sweaty and out of breath after running a mile at a mile-high city and sad-so-sad about missing out on using my coveted A 01 Southwest boarding pass but grateful I still made it in time to snag the one bulkhead seat left
MST 11:00 am - I'm tearing through two bags of fruit snacks when a flight attendant taps my shoulder and asks, "Would you mind moving to another seat? There's a lady whose dog is way too big to fit into the other seat rows." Oooookay.
MST 11:05 am - After three tries they find me another seat, squeezed into a row with a young couple and their adorable little baby girl. (And in front of another baby who, I will find out later, has a VERY healthy set of lungs. Q_Q )
MST 11:10 am - flight departs Denver
MST 11:40 am - flight attendant asks if I would like a complimentary drink. I splurge on a cranberry club soda and ask for five bags of peanuts. Dig my earplugs out.
PST 12:30 pm - land in Orange County
PST 1:00 pm - get picked up and FINALLY A PROPER MEAL <33333
PST 1:45 pm - make it home, throw everything down on the spot, run upstairs and fling my clothes off (and put some new ones on - kinda >.>)

All right, Bert, you asked for it ... selfies(-ish) galore! \o/ (As a stand-in until I get the real stuff sorted - in typical fashion, Kali and I squeezed pretty much every last drop out of a trip. Four water activities, an as last-minute-as-you-can-get horseback ride, and even arts <3 in a matter of 48 hours. We probably spent just as much time in the water as out of it this weekend. Everything is beautifully exfoliated and my hair is soft and fluffy like you wouldn't believe.)

Also, diving down with flippers is like my new favorite thing in water now after learning what I'm calling the mermaid flap (cuz I learned it secondhand from Kali and I totally missed what she said our guides called it). Large bodies of water was never an easy medium for me for all that I like to think I'm an excellent swimmer, what with all the motion sickness (I've gotten seasick snorkeling, much less boating) and ear pressure issues (even today my right ear is still not quite back to normal) and general dislike of wet and sand and salt (o god why even this trip you might be thinking - cuz I apparently like to bang my head against a wall in the same place several times to see if I can break through to the other side? >.>)

BUT!! The key here is apparently to distract myself with shiny new things to try out cuz I was literally the last one to crawl out of the water yesterday and even then it was only cuz poor Kali had a date with some dolphins. I'm pretty much fully onboard with this whole ocean thing now and who knew but if you do some things enough times you might actually get a different result after all! ^_^

Want to know what REALLY went down this day of [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]? Read the director's commentary edition - to be posted soon!

​
April had been an awful, awful month, and the beginning of May hadn't been much better. Sure, a lot more (deserved) downtime, but it wasn't like we were actually enjoying it, being borderline comatose recovering. This weekend had been looking up, though - there had been intriguing rumors of a get-together, and maybe even a whisper of "cake" through the ranks - but I should have known anything that promising would not only be a lie, but was just the lead-in to something of equally opposite appeal:

@#*^)$(^&#

Can the universe not find anything to occupy these supervillains for longer than a week at a time? Seriously, my 4-year old nephew has a longer attention span. (And I really don't get how the human race has not already irradiated themselves into extinction when all these "objects of extreme power" have just been literally raining out of the sky. Surely this can't have been the only time in human history this has been happening, especially if the Asgardians visited enough times in the past to have sparked an entire religion on Earth.)

I've heard MC joke about Hydra recruiting its minions out of high school, but you'd think a decades-old world-wide secret organization that had nearly toppled entire continents would be able to afford spellcheck.

And ugh, if I've told JL once, I've told him a million times, he's got to set the record straight​ for that poor -

Great. Yes, thank you, CL, for supporting the team spirit. Rah-rah.

Still, it wasn't as if this situation wasn't exactly what we had all signed up for. In spite of the scant 8 hours' notice to prep and catch whatever sleep we could, we were geared up and ready to launch by the designated mission time.

Man, do I miss Stark tech. I'd offer to give Director Fury a pedicure for a month if it might bring the quinjets back. But considering that the relationship between SHIELD and Stark is more volatile than the stock market, I guess we should feel lucky we even got a nice view and an insertion point within a mile of the area of interest. (An extra 600 feet of elevation that we didn't have to scramble up on hands and knees with extra gear would've been nice too. Just saying, if Santa - or Stark - wanted to be early this year.)

For all the forbidding approach, though, we weren't alone ... several times, we were taunted by not-so-distant echoes of, "Hail, Hydra!" ringing through the gorge. We tried to put off climbing - and becoming (easier) targets to pick off - as long as possible, but when we were forced to unpack our harnesses for the final ascent, Mission Control came through just in time with additional intel.

We took turns heading up - it was slower than all of us tackling the ascent at once, but this way at least we could give each other some minimal cover during our most vulnerable moments.

A (classified) number of analysts sitting at their desks in some (undisclosed) location, and they leave it to a handful of field agents clinging to some rocks (by their literal fingertips) to decrypt the message. Did we really need to start include pencil and paper (or an Emacs app) as part of the standard field kit?

I'll give JL this much, though. He may be easy to distract at times, but he's no slacker - he jumped on the code before I had even managed to turn around to rappel down again:

JL: Partial decryption:

Eytreme readings in vicinity of South fyrtuna summit.

MC: Those crafty HYDRA agents with their typos are trying to deceive you again.

​(If I had a quarter for every time MC threw in a dig on HYDRA's minion education ... well, I'd be on some private beach somewhere. Lounging, mind you, rather than storming the sands on some moon-less night, thank-you-very-much).

JL: Full decryption:

Eytreme readings in vicinity of South fyrtuna summit. Use caution, shield has been sighted in mission trails, if encountered terminate with prejudice."

Well, that certainly made me feel all warm, fuzzy, and welcomed. Thankfully, it was soon followed ​by a much more decisive victory:

Me? Engage in adolescent silliness?

(You bet your sweet tush I would, particularly after the news of an added 7 miles and few thousand feet of elevation to scramble through while ducking HYDRA agents in a non-major-denominational god's equivalent of a scavenger hunt.)

JT: Copy. Have reached extraction point. Dumping and resupplying at visitors center.

JT: At checkpoint. Gearing up.

​MC: Double-time it agents, HYDRA is on the move!

Yeah, yeah, it wasn't as if we were loitering in some air-conditioned sedan chowing down on chicken sandwiches and chocolate bars. Still, the faster we wrapped this up, the faster we got to go home to hot showers and hot food.

After a while, there came another ping from Mission Control, but since I was on point, I let the others field the communication. Not 5 seconds later, though, JL was exclaiming: "There's no way for me to solve this one!"

That brought me hustling back. The guy liked to decrypt things in his downtime for fun. What on Earth or Asgard could have made him give up so quickly after just a single - 

MC: New HYDRA intercept:

統系換、侵入客駭牌盾被統系星衛頭蛇九

Ah, JL's one achilles. ​EL gave him a sympathetic pat and took over. "HYDRA's detected SHIELD's electronic incursions," she translated. "They're switching communications networks." Then a funny look came over her face and she added, "They messed up their name."

Well. Nice to know that HYDRA was so consistent, even across language boundaries. 

All jokes aside, though, we were now dependent solely upon what our Eye-in-the-Sky could see on its own - not to mention that the land itself had its own hazards besides what HYDRA agents may be scurrying about.

​Swampy crevices where run-off had gathered and stagnated, hidden by lush patches of greenery until your next step was sucked into slime and mud. Vegetation that was an inconvenience at best, perhaps even lethal at worst - both JL and CL fell victim to one, though thankfully with only minor wounds. Rattlers and other poisonous fauna that could be more dangerous than any HYDRA - at least the latter were much easier to spot in this arid landscape. Navigation was challenging with only a few distant peaks to act as landmarks, and making course corrections for straying even just a few hundred feet was becoming taxing as we ran low on adrenaline and water.

Both energy and alertness were beginning to flag, though. It was a slow, grueling march, even if it had its own little perks. With a literal bird's eye view, it wasn't difficult to have the gaze roaming for more reasons than just spotting potential enemy agents.

Still, our conviction that this was the "right thing to do" was little comfort when we rested eyes on the next distant peak, where we would have to race HYDRA after what was already a long and difficult day.

This was the last sprint. We were all becoming a little sloppy, allowing ourselves to be strung out along the ridge in our haste and exhaustion. We caught ourselves every so often, tried to reestablish proper procedure when we remembered, and were lucky we never encountered an ambush during the times when our attention lapsed.

There was nothing more to be done. Looking out over all that we had traveled - and had to travel again, if we wanted an extraction - with the knowledge of an incomplete retrieval hovering like a pall over us, I could feel my shoulders slumping. But then JL looked at us and said, "Come on, there's one more thing we can do while we're up here."

Reminded that we still had two out of the three pieces in our possession and that HQ was busy trying to burrow its way back into the Hydra network, we were reminded that the mission wasn't quite over yet - enough that we remembered to start doing our jobs again.

​JT: Jon intercepted a suspicious character, but he knows nothing about the scepter.

The less said about our journey back, the better. It had been a long, trudging, ignominious affair - of just wetting the tongue from our dwindling water supplies, but never enough to swallow a whole mouthful; of blazing wandering trails down dangerous washouts when we lost our way, legs numb and stumbling; of dodging Hydra patrols when they zipped by once we entered more familiar territories.

​Looking behind me, the two peaks that we had chased for over half the day seemed so small and insignificant - I turned back around, swallowing against the dryness in my throat.

It was a rough match, after the grueling marches we'd already been on. With little cover nearby and advanced warning of our arrival, the HYDRA agents had been prepared with a veritable stockpile of munitions, simply waiting for us. Forced into a full frontal assault, even freshly equipped, we were nearly mowed down in the very first wave - except that JL lured away the one minion left to guard the stockpile in a risky maneuver that would have left Agent S****** swooning ... leaving me an opening.

I could hear the pounding footsteps of another Hydra agent at my five - far too close - but didn't let myself turn, just shot blindly over my shoulder to slow him down. I had my sights set on a veritable hand cannon that had been left oh-so-conveniently behind with their entire cache of ammo, and I swore by whatever gods were out there, they weren't going to steal something right out from under my nose again.

I dropped my near-empty sidearm as I swept the new piece up in a clumsy scrape of plastic on stone. Didn't even shorten my stride as I dove right into the stockpile for a recharge. Swung around, muzzle-first, as I felt the sting of a near-hit zip past my ribs - and blasted my tail at near point-blank range as he ran straight into the shot.

Hydra belated realized their mistake when I started to take them out with their own weapons.

In short order, the rest of my fellow agents rallied around me, and now the tide had turned as we stood our ground at the top of the proverbial hill, dropping Hydra agents left and right. I whooped, smelling imminent victory ... but it wasn't until EL yelled over the din, "He's getting away with the third piece!" that I even realized there might be an even more important objective than clearing out some random Hydra outpost.

Honestly, I still have no idea how I was able to cover the ground I did to catch up with her and the figure - hunched protectively over something in his hands - fleeing from the melee. The stand I had made over the stockpile had been one of half-stubbornness, half-practicality - I hadn't moved because I hadn't thought I would be able to move once my feet were planted and my knees locked. But it turned out that if you waved the cape in front of the bull enough, it didn't matter what shape the bull was in ... it was still going to lumber after you and do its bloody best to stomp you into the ground.

It didn't take long. The rest of the SHIELD agents were beginning to stream out with us, sensing our urgency, leaving a skeleton crew to handle mop-up. The few Hydra still standing were also making a weak attempt to help their comrade escape - all of us spilling out into the open, thinning into individual skirmishes. I saw the target go down, but had barely enough time to hope that one of our own was close enough to scoop up the third piece before I had to focus on keeping my own skin intact.

So, mission accomplished. Our little field team got to keep our (thus far) perfect record.

(And then there was CAKE! There really are happy endings.)

<3 West Coast Flying Trapeze

When in Canada, do as the Canadians do ...

With my love of Cirque, how could I not attempt to take a flying trapeze class whilst in Canada? Had an AMAZING time at their Onesies Friday class, where I shuffled between time on the rig, molesting their adorable little puppy, and snatching catnaps in a vain attempt to fend off a cold.

It was a near miss on the class, as the entire week I had planned to be in Vancouver with a friend was abruptly commandeered by a work emergency and I had to fly to SF for the week on 48 hours' notice. Then I managed to get out of SF a day early - but only partly due to what felt like the beginnings of a cold caught from the conference, which I argued I should nurse while away from key personnel and in a stable location, traveling BEFORE it got too bad.

Prophetic words, because the "cold" eventually became bronchitis later in the week, but before we knew it would be anything worse, we managed to sneak in a flying trapeze class in the one night we had left in Vancouver. And boy, I have never been so glad to have been forced out of a nap and into the freezing cold. HEE-YAH!

I was absolutely incredulous when they verbally laid out this trick to me, and then claimed that it was catchable. I continued to be incredulous when they said that the catcher would hold ANOTHER bar which I was supposed to latch onto. Those crazy trapeze artists ... what will they think of next.

Richmond, BC Canada

This is a beautiful but familiar sight by now, yet every so often, it strikes me anew just how extraordinary it is. 100 years ago, a view like this would have been literally unimaginable to the common man. Even after the first commercial flights started running, none would have flown at an altitude that could have provided a tableau like this.

Later this week, if all goes well, we'll be launching equipment that are the first steps for taking humans to Mars. I wonder what extraordinary photos future generations will capture that would be, in their eyes, just as mundane as this picture is to us now.


USA Southwest

So, I feel compelled to say a few things about my visit to Macau.

I had done no previous planning for Macau except to ask the concierge how to get there (I was told to just hie myself to the ferry port and they leave every half hour) for various reasons (some of them being that I had stayed up all night Thursday ostensibly to catch the sunrise but really was just cuz I wanted to, had made an impromptu visit to Disney on Friday, and simply given myself no time to do anything more than to just jump on the first random ferry that said it was going to Macau on Saturday).

It turns out that I hopped onto the one ferry that goes to Taipa instead of the Macau peninsula port. But that's okay cuz I saw that there were dozens of free buses from the major casinos ready to shuttle money-loaded tourists, and so I took the closest one to the Venetian. The Venetian concierge then kindly informed me I should have taken the Wynn Resort one instead, as that one actually goes to the peninsula, and then directed me to the City of Dreams, where I could take another shuttle to the Sintra Hotel. (At this point, my journey was beginning to sound like the modern equivalent of the Arabian Nights.)

I finally make it to the peninsula, and just a convenient one or two blocks from Senado Square which I had been aiming for. I literally take no more than ten steps before I end up loaded down with 2 giant shopping bags' worth of all the presents I had wanted to get but couldn't find in Hong Kong.

So then it was an about turn to look for the Wynn hotel (which took two inquiries because, forgetting this wasn't Vegas, it was a slow realization that the Wynn wasn't large enough to be seen past all the other gigantic casinos) since I figured I could drop off the shopping with their bag check and I could confirm the shuttles back to Taipa at the same time. After three inquiries (one in Mandarin, one in English, and one in who-the-heck-knows-what-but-it-sure-wasn't-Cantonese) for their concierge desk (which I never did find), I stumble across an atrium with a really cool eastern/western zodiac installment around which a whole crowd of people were loitering. Since it seemed like they were all waiting for something to happen, I waited around to see if something would happen too.

AND SUDDENLY THIS GREAT SMOKING GOLDEN ANIMATRONIC DRAGON ROSE OUT OF THE HOTEL DEPTHS.

I am discovering that though I have no problems communicating in Mandarin, I apparently don't think enough like the Chinese. Everything from finding that restaurant yesterday to finding the ferry terminal is taking me three times as long as I predict, and they're never where I'm expecting. There's apparently just a different logic to things I've not figured out yet.

There's a certain comfort to their laid back procedures though. "Oh they sold you an 11:30 ticket even though the boat finished boarding and left before you could even reach the dock? Here just stand in this line for the 12:00. Next!"

Here, also have a pet rainbow that followed us to Macau: