Photo: Sunset here, sunrise there

It's off to the plane I go.

View at Flickr. (Picture taken on 9/25/08.)

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

Well, the time has finally come. Everything is all set State-side. My apartment keys are now gone; Salvation Army has picked up the last remnants of my furniture. Somehow in all this I feel like I should be more hesitant, but I'm not. Even today's financial turmoil seems so far removed....

The driving force for all this is simply that life is about living. I know I hear people say carpe diem all the time, but rarely do you hear people who actually do anything about it. (Well, B did beat me to this...)

Besides, there's only one way to figure out what my future holds out and it can't be done 14 hours away. Thanks for following along on this journey. I don't know where it's going to lead, but I hope it won't bore you dear readers too much.

Even the cookies know...

My fortune for today from the cookie at lunch...

"You will soon be crossing the great waters."

How apropos! Now to buy a lottery ticket with the numbers it came with.

Blogging

I'm sure people are wondering why the heck I'm up at this late hour. As you probably haven't noticed (since I doubt too many people are visiting yet), I've been tinkering with this blog on layout and such. I've now thrown in some analytical data from Google. For those looking at putting together a blog, the information is here.

Excitement

I have to say I'm quite excited for today. Call it the end of a chapter, but today will be the last day of work before my trip. I can't even begin to imagine what the future holds, but I'm looking forward to it. Much more so than when I look back at where I've been. Must be a very good sign, right?

Name Origins

One of the things that's always fascinated me is to find out why certain things are named the way they are. For example, the gasoline company "Esso" was named that way after the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly (hint: what are the initials of Standard Oil?).

Well, the reason for the name Upsead comes from a play on words from Chinese. Originally, I had intended to head to Asia by transferring within my firm to one of the offices in China, most likely Shanghai. If you take each of the words of Shanghai (上海) and translate each one individually you would get "up" (上) and "sea" (海). Put the words together and you get "upsea" as the combo. (Note: originally I mistakenly thought the second character was "ocean" and set out to brand everything "upoceaned", but after much amusement from M, I was quickly set straight on the correct translation.)

Okay, now that you know about "upsea", where'd the "d" come from? Well, I figured it'd make more sense to make this a past tense verb to avoid any confusion with the city. Hence "upsead".

Start

Only one week to go. I'm heading over to Hong Kong for four weeks and I figure this is as good a time as any to start a blog. As some of you know, I'm looking at looking at traveling for awhile and exploring. I'll try to document as much as I can here, but given my proclivity for anonymity, I'll try to avoid naming names and such. At least I'll use my camera and put up pictures so it's not all words you'll see here!