gemini://jsreed5.org/log/2023/202305/20230529-2023-week-19-20-21-status-and-updates.gmi

On the heels of visiting Boston for the first time, we traveled to England this month to attend my sister-in-law's wedding. She moved to the UK last year and was legally wed to an Englishman she'd been dating for over a decade, but this year the couple were able to arrange a proper ceremony. My wife served as one of the bridesmaids in a small, intimate ceremony near the southern coast of Britain.

We later visited a few sites in the south of England, mostly in London. After taking a cruise on the river Thames, we rode the famous London Eye, then perused a few small and large bookshops. On the last day we saw a production of "Wicked: The Musical".

Our flight home did not proceed as smoothly as the rest of the trip. We were delayed from leaving London Heathrow International Airport by two hours, due to a technical glitch that did not allocate ground crews to our aircraft in a timely fashion. Our layover in Chicago was just over four hours, but it required that we change airports from O'Hare to Midway, and we didn't have time to make the trip. We thus had to spend an extra night in Chicago, thankfully paid for by British Airways.

Friday, the day we actually returned to our home, was also the first day of a local anime convention , at which many of our friends work as staff and even play as resident DJs. We'd previously received word that one of the DJs planned to propose to another on-stage at the convention, but the day of that proposal was changed at the last minute from Saturday to Friday. My wife developed a sinus infection on the way home and thus could not attend. I, jet-lagged and phenomenally tired after sleeping fitfully in Chicago, dragged myself to the convention in order to film the proposal live at 12:45 in the morning. I finally made it back to our house and collapse into bed after being awake for almost 24 hours straight two days in a row.

We now live quite far south of the city center, and the lack of tall buildings means that we can see things far off on the horizon. This severe thunderstorm was several miles away from us, but as I drove home on Monday night, the wall of cumulonimbus clouds above them dominated the eastern horizon. This was one of the last photos taken on my Nokia G21.

Last year, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the future of the Airbus A380 was unclear. I decided that I would not pass up the opportunity to fly aboard one, so I purchased upper-deck seats on the two-storey airliner on our flights both to and from England. This extracted video frame shows A380-841 GX-LEE arriving at the gate at Chicago O'Hare International Airport before we boarded. Funnily enough, I had seen and photographed her at Dulles just eight months before.

I had about two dozen candidates for photo of the week from our trip to England. I consulted my wife on her favorite, and she singled out a photo of Stonehenge, a pre-Roman stone monument in Wiltshire and one of the most famous landmarks in the UK. I was quite pleased with how this particular photograph came out.

2023 Week 19/20/21: Status and Photos

2023-05-29