"Maybe this week's thoughtlet should be titled `Thanksgiving in Beijing. However, since I am so far behind, most of the notes I have are communications that happened this week. In looking over these communications, the concept which came to mind was friends, and since I've already written about Friends once (../9813.html), I decided on the title Friends Revisited. So before I write about the week, let me write about communications from some friends.
The context is that Andrea and I left early Monday morning for China. I could not get my e-mail to work until the last day I was in China, I also could not get my new cell phone to work in China, and so for two weeks I was out of communication with the world except with phone calls and faxes. It was like being back in the dark ages. Amazing how quickly we get used to cell phones and Internet and always being connected. Maybe this disconnectedness is the reason I have so many notes from friends for this week? Maybe we need to disconnect ourselves more often? Maybe a little more disconnectedness is the key to getting in sync with natural rhythms? Maybe it takes disconnection to realize how much we miss our friends? Maybe disconnection, like a fast, forces us take the time to revisit our good memories of times past and especially of our interaction with good friends?
There was a nice thank you note from Joyce Burnham. Joyce and Harold and Bob have moved to Utah. Harold is always traveling, and so it does not matter where home base is. There are kids and grandkids there, and it gives Joyce a chance to be with them. They are hoping Utah will provide a better environment for Bob to find a place in society. And the note was really to Andrea, because she spent a couple of days helping Joyce pack up the house for the move. The thank you note should have been from me to Joyce, because of her helping Andrea decorate the shelves in the music room. It has been quite a while since the room was finished, and I do enjoy sitting in the room, reading, playing the guitar, looking at the nice and interesting books, talking to new acquaintances, or letting memories flow to friends revisited.
We received a nice letter form Key and Judy Yano. They have moved to Kansas City, Missouri. It has been a long time since their daughter Katie was killed in a freak accident sitting on the hood of a car, being thrown off, and hitting her head (../9714.html). She was such a talented girl, all state orchestra, honor student at her high school, and all the rest. It has been a long time since we went to Sheri Elizabeth Yano's wedding reception, where we learned how distraught Mom was that it was not a temple wedding (../0146.html). Their note talked about Sheri and Scott's children Sydney and Spencer. It has been even longer since Ken and I were in the Elders Quorum Presidency together in the Dallas 1st Ward, when I home taught Julia, when I baptized Julia, and when I encouraged short Japanese Ken to follow his dream and to ask tall Caucasian Julia out on a date. There are events which happen between people which create an eternal and everlasting bond. And when these people get together, although it be on rare occasions, it is like they have never been apart. They are simply friends revisited.
Bob Mishler sent me the following note:
It is amazing to me, that after all these years (this is the sixth year) and all of the words (approximately 1,477,486 words and counting) tied up in these Thoughtlets so far, there are only three references to Bob Mishler (../9924.html, ../0210.html, and ../0303.html). I wonder how many corners of our lives are hidden in the folds of time and space? Back in 1980 Boeing set up a service company in Houston called Boeing Computer Services (BCS). They were selling time-share on large computer infrastructure to the oil and gas industry. Bob ran the Houston office of BCS. We interacted a couple of times when I was working at the Seismic Acoustics Lab (SAL), and I promptly forgot him.
Then I got a call in 1998 from Bob. Boeing was looking to bring appropriate technologies to the oil and gas industry. They wanted to discuss this with someone in the oil business, and because Bob knew me from SAL, I was chosen as the point of entry. There were two senior executives on this project, and they wanted to meet with me right away. We were just starting Continuum Resources, and I was very busy. They were in a hurry, and so we reached a compromise. We would meet in the evening, when I was going to be in Albuquerque working with Muse to develop the demonstrations for the SEG. So I called Roger Anderson, and he used some mileage credits to meet us in Albuquerque. I flew in from Houston, had meetings all day at Muse, making the Continuum movie we used at the SEG. Bob had his coworker, whose name slips my mind, flew in from Seattle. It was one of those magical evenings. They did a confidential download of Boeing technologies. Roger and I ranked the technologies against where we thought there were market opportunities. And from this meeting, there were lots of meetings and discussions with Boeing. Boeing is referenced in 39 Thoughtlets, compared to Bob being referenced 3 times. Interesting how little respect and memory is afforded to founders of an idea or a project.
I remember all of our detailed meetings in Seattle to talk about using transponder arrays on ships and satellites to bring seismic data from the ship directly into a seismic processing shop. Interesting idea, and someday it will be done. I remember the team we put together with Chevron and Boeing and all of the design meetings we had at Energy Innovations, at the same time we were starting Continuum Resources. This turned into a project with several hundred people employed down next to Ellington Airbase, where Boeing has a big office. I got cut out of my founder's shares early on. Roger got cut much later. Eventually the project was killed after a Boeing executive had an affair with his secretary, was fired, and the new President cut all projects not tied to Boeing's core focus. This had evolved to the point Boeing was going to build some deep water platforms using airplane technologies for BP and Chevron. Oh well! There were two really good things which came out of all of this work: (1) Boeing paid for my trip to Southern Utah to propose to Andrea. This was when I gave her the Sleepless in Seattle nightgown I'd picked up the night before in Seattle. And (2) Bob flew to China to meet me and catch up. This was when Ben and Brian were with me, and when we all went to the neat cave south of Beijing with Mr. Yan and his family.
Well, Bob Mishler contacted me again, the week Andrea and I were in China. As stated in his e-mail above, he has left Boeing, has started a new consulting company, has a major contract with some Far East money, and wants to bring me into the project to help do geological and geophysical evaluations of large oil and gas fields they plan to purchase. Interesting! Time will tell what will happen as a result of this friend revisited.
There was also a letter from my friend Rhonda Hartmann. She stopped by to see us after we got back from China. She is slowly recovering from the murder of her husband Mike (../0516.html). She is going on a two week `mission' with her church, 2nd Baptist, to Kenya. Her letter was a request for donations to help pay for her mission. We do not have the money, and this approach to paying for and type of work called a mission is so different from anything I am acquainted with, I probably would not donate even if I had money. It seems more like a service vacation. Anyway, it was wonderful to see Rhonda. She is such a special person, and was such a wonderful support to me as I transitioned through the dangerous waters of divorce.
Mary Lunt passed on an e-mail from Reynolds and Louanna Cahoon. I could go on and on about my friendship with Floyd and Mary Lunt, and I won't at this time. The same goes for my friendship with Louanna Cahoon. And again, I won't at this time. However, I will type out the e-mail we were given as a letter. It says:
Wow! Larry has died since then. A photo of his grave marker and headstone was forwarded by his new wife, Angie, early in January. I include the photo below as a reminder of Jim Jensen (../0349.html), Jane Moreless (../9844.html, ../9847.html, and ../9937.html), Norbert Schmidt (../0246.html), Todd and Michelle Staheli (../0349.html, (../0350.html, (../0351.html, and (../0352.html), my parents and grandparents, and of what it really means to have friends revisited.
There was a nice note from my sister, which I include because to me it shows we are friends revisited:
Sara's letter included an article from The Spectrum of Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2005 about Uncle Dick's son Glen. I am going to type it out with the hope that one or more of you look up Glen in New York, and become friends revisited:
I could go on about friends revisited, and I won't because this Thoughtlet is already getting too long (I was surprised to learn I have almost written 1.5 million words over the last six years. Guess this is a statement about how much I love my 10 kids, my family, and my friends who visit these pages!). So let me write about what little I remember of the week between November 21st (Mom's birthday) and November 27th (2 days after Roice's birthday).
Andrea got up early on Monday morning the 21st of November. I was already up and was working on catching up these Thoughtlets. I'm getting too old to do these all nighter's. Oh well! I was really tired as we drove to the airport. We made it, parked the car, and I gave the keys to Andrea for her to pick it up on her return trip, which was a week before I came back. There were no issues on the flight to Chicago, nor to China, unlike when Sara Ellyn and Sarah Elizabeth were with me. The highlight of the travel was our stop in Chicago. Shortly after we landed, I received a phone call from my friend Christian Singfield. He had an investor tell him they would fund FSI, and he was very excited. (Turns out he does not have an investor yet, and he is struggling to say the least.)
It turns out that we had an hour conversation. He kept asking questions about how to do this and that, once the investment money came in, and before I knew it we had talked longer than I ever remember talking on the phone. Christian has caught the vision of The Infinite GridSM, The Knowledge BackboneSM, and the new cities Walden 3-D will build someday. I don't remember the details of the conversation, I just the feelings and excitement about sharing my eclectic ideas with someone who really gets it, and who seriously wants to help make it all happen. It kept my mind going all the way to China, or at lest the time I was away on the way to China.
We arrived in China on Monday evening. We had a web page with the name of the hotel, The Celebrity International, and with this we were finally able to get a cab to take us to the hotel. I was going to take Andrea to a nice Western China restaurant Jialin had taken me to on my previous trip. So we walked several blocks, and it was not where I thought it was. Oh well! We went back along the main street, picked a place that looked nice, and had a nice meal before going to sleep.
I spent the days working with Geo, getting ready for the presentations to Ji Dong Oilfield. It was long days, cold, and not a lot of fun. Oh well! Andrea had a good time. The photos and movies she took are at http://www.walden3d.com/photos/China/051125_Andrea_China. She went to a lot of places I've never been to, and seemed to have a really good time. She loved the drum towers. She spent one day at Fragrant Gardens, where my first real experience with China occurred (../9727.html). Because we were late in deciding to come over Thanksgiving, Andrea's ticket cost about twice what mine did, and even though the total was still less than a Business Class ticket, this kind of put a pale over the trip. But Andrea is a trooper, and even though I was working 10 hours a day, she had a good time. I think the photos show this.
Scott Burns, the petrophysicist who lives in New York and who worked on the wells for Ji Dong, showed up on Monday. He had a room in the Haoyuan Hotel, which used to be a minister's house, very traditional bed and breakfast type of place right next to The Forbidden City. Scott did a lot of work, and the Chinese liked what they saw. He is very hard to work with. He always seems to do things in a counterintuitive way. For instance, he was tired, and so he was not going to work on the weekend. The guys from Geo were not happy campers. Oh well!
On Wednesday Jialin told me a Chinese secret, the four key happinesses:
On Thanksgiving evening, I took her to The Crowne Plaza, where they had a nice buffet, including turkey and ham. I ate way too many swallows, and ended up gaining 10 pounds on the trip, which I have not lost since returning to Houston. Oh well!
I struggled with two things most of this trip: no working cell phone; and no working e-mail. Turns out when the sim card on my cell phone died, and I got another cell phone a couple of weeks earlier (not recorded in a Thoughtlet), they turned something off. It took until the day before I left China to get it working right. And I got one call, from Blaine Taylor, and he thought he was talking to me in Houston. E-mail was also a big hassle. Turns out I forgot how to access e-mail at GDC remotely, and I think it was mostly operator error. Oh well!
Sort of like Andrea's last night, and my second attempt to find this nice restaurant that flies lamb in from Western China every day. We walked down another street to the end, and there was this building that with little windows up high. It seemed to be in the right place, and there were the typical set of young kids out front to greet visitors. So we walked in. All the walls were red velvet. There were French paintings of naked women on the walls. We were invited to go upstairs. We did. We were shown to a room with a big ash tray in the center, couches all around, a big TV screen, and there were a dozen pretty Chinese girls standing at the door. One of them was holding up her breasts, and then I realized that I had brought Andrea to a house of ill repute. It was my first visit to such a place, and we couldn't get out of there fast enough. Oh well! It is a great story, and Andrea has told it to all of her friends. Oh well!!! Operator error, not friends revisited. We walked back down by the hotel and ate a shrimp and pineapple pizza at Domino's.
Saturday morning Jialin and his wife Qing Yuan Hao came to the hotel to have breakfast with us and to introduce us to their son, Dao Yu. As we all sat down at the table with our food, Jialin announced that I was being tasked with giving their son an English name. We chose Douglas, or Doug for short. They were very excited about our choice. I know because after I took Andrea to the airport and dropped her off, I went to Geo's office to work, and Jia Feng Yan, Jialin's older brother, already knew the name Doug. It turns out that Doug sounds to the Chinese like dog, and to be named after an animal is very lucky, especially since next year is the Year of the Dog. I felt like I had been inspired, both by my growing up friendship with Doug Grimshaw, and by being able to come up with a name close to Dao Yu's Chinese name and a name which had multiple levels of meaning for his parents.
Andrea left, and that night John Gillooley, the new manager of seismic processing for GDC arrived from the states. We had dinner in the hotel that night.
Sunday morning John slept in to overcome jet lag. I went to church. I thoroughly enjoy the Beijing Branch. It reminds me of The Hyde Park Ward when I was on my mission. I think these feelings are shown by the fact I wrote six possible stanzas for Prime Words during the meetings:
And so another week went by, much more quickly than I was able to write about it. And it gives me reason to pause and reflect on friends revisited."