Secret revealed

Ok... so I've had some people bugging me about the secrets I've been keeping. One has now been revealed. And most people already know this, but if you don't, it's that Tiffeni and Brett are now engaged.

So congratulations to them both!

Thanksgiving

This year was a very special thanksgiving for the Bauman family for several reasons. Most importantly, Kevin and Darice flew in from Indiana, and Brian got to spend much needed time with his brother. Everyone came to our house for a fabulous thanksgiving feast complete with my Rosemary Guinness turkey with sage and apple stuffing, yorkshire puddings, garlic and blue cheese mashed potatoes, among many other wonderful side dishes. Jen and Ethan joined us, as is the tradition. And an intersting announcement called for much celebration in the Bauman household ;-)

I'm on an old lady schedule.

I mean it. I pass out in front of the tv by 9:30, and I'm wide awake at 5:30. On the way to Asia, I didn't have this kind of problem adjusting to the many time zones we crossed. We even lost an entire day because of the date line, but I functioned just fine when we were there. Coming back, though, we arrived in LA BEFORE we had left Hong Kong. And I just can't get my internal clock to understand that I don't want to be awake at 5:30am.
The cats don't seem to mind. In fact, since we've been back they've been within 2 feet or less of me at all times. I guess they missed their mummy. Awh!
This morning, I woke up at the crack of dawn, did some work, then went to the gym with Barbie. Imagine Barbie getting up and working out at 7:30?? Who is she, and what has she done with my best friend? I supsect alien abduction. If she stops smoking, I'll know for sure ;-)

I swear I'll put pictures from our honeymoon up soon. I'm just too damn lazy at the moment, and as always, work is consuming all of my time. Things ran very smoothly while I was gone, though. Thankfully. And all because of my awesome team. I am very lucky to have them. I spent most of my day today recording speaker notes for a bunch of slide presentations that will go on the web. It's a good thing that the recording software lets you alter the pitch of your voice. I had no idea how much like a 12 year old I sounded. Ack!

Keeper of Secrets

I'm keeping 2 secrets right now. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! You may think you know what they are, but you don't.

Hello from Hong Kong

Well, we're on the last leg of our trip now. We've seen some amazing things, eaten lots of weird food, which we've really enjoyed, and have soaked up some Asian culture. We're now in Hong Kong. Today we took a tour of the city, which took us up Victoria Peak for an amazing view of Hong Kong from above, then to stanly market for some shopping, and to the aberdeen floating community where we took a water taxi around to get a look at all the people living on boats and working the floating market.

Bali was beautiful and a real eye opener as far as the culture goes. We took two days worth of tours, including a trek through the rice terraces, which was wonderful. Our guide showed us all the different types of rice, and picked fruit from the trees for us to try. There's a fruit here that I really like, the Dragon Fruit, which I've never seen before and I love it. In Bali, I also tried the Durain fruit, which we saw on one of the discovery channel shows and is the smelliest fruit in the world. It smells like hell but tastes like heaven, apparently, and they were not kidding. It did smell really bad, but I liked the taste. The only problem is that you burp it for hours afterwards and we all stunk up the car ;-)
The houses in Bali are really weird, too. I'll explain more later, but bascially, they are pretty much out in the open and only the beds are covered, and the kitchen. No privacy, whatsoever. It makes you realize how spoiled you really are when you see cultures like this.

So only one full day to go now, and then we'll be on our way home. We leave at 1:30pm on thursday, and arrive at 9:30am the same day in LA, so we're going back in time ;-). Maybe this is the secret to staying young?

Anyway, we're happy that we got to take this amazing trip, and we have lots of stories to tell and pictures to show, which we may bore you with whenever you come for a visit, but we are both very excited to come home and resume our normal lives. We miss our cats and friends, and we miss hanging out on the couch in the evenings. So we hope to see all our Austin friends this coming weekend so that we can feel back to normal.

I haven't missed work one bit ;-)(sorry guys)

(Hi Wassim - We're thinking about you slaving away while we're out here NOT thinking about PDE).