I rebuilt a wood stove I had in storage. The only textual items on the stove is "Made in West Germany". After puzzling about how to repair the broken leg (everything from welding with tungston rod to fabricating a splice), I found a similar replacement foot. It was similar, so I ended up buying two in order to make it look and set right. It was a fun "little" project. It cost me about $150 in materials and probably took me about 8 hours. I am looking forward to getting it fired up at some point. Since it is going back into storage I am wrapping it up with as much rust inhibitor as I can. I bought some VCI paper for the effort.
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I haven't blogged in awhile. I guess I am still decompressing from our most excellent, but crazy vacation in SE Asia. Things really went as planned. We first started considering the trip and these counties over a year ago and bought the transpacific flights 6 months prior. We were making reservations up to the day before we left.
We had 10 flight segments in 14 days. For clarification, we made no tight connections. We did have one long connection in Seoul (12 Hours). We didn't need a hotel since we landed at 5:00 AM and left at 6:00 PM. We had breakfast/brunch in the 4-seasons hotel downtown. I used their business center for some personal business. Never stayed in the hotel. Although the Royal Brunei ticket was to/from Brunei, it was not a layover, but still a a single ticket. Also, we had no morning flights. All flights were in the evening, so we could sleep, albeit in economy. Early morning flights were invented by the devil to totally "F" you up. The money you save is easily taken from your soul.
Airlines: Delta/Korean Air, Thai-AirAsia, Laos Airlines, Vietjet, Scoot!, Royal Brunei, and Philippines Airlines.
All the airlines were great for the most part. It was my second experience with AirAsia (first time was Kuala Lumpur to Chennai India a couple years back). We aren't going to use them again. Scoot! was a better than expected experience. They are a Singaporean LLC (Low-cost Carrier). They called us "Scooties!". Funny enough, but you start to see the utopian Scootie persona and motif in Singapore in public service messaging---I am ok with a sub-utopian life.
We are planning the next trip to Egypt (transoceanic). Then Malta and the Balkans (Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, etc.).
A pic we got after we got back from Singapore. Gotta love the "hokiness" of Singapore. Like in Korea, we did not stay in the Sands hotel. We had a great/better hotel a short walk away, actually with nice view of the Sands.
And for something totally different: (The Good Bad and Ugly Danish National Symphony) Ennio Morricone
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