Welcome to the Blog, Shelly!

She hardly made a big deal about it in her debut on the big blog, but I wanted to welcome Shelly aboard. I think she is worried that I will never blog again. I might have said something like that to her, but it was mostly because I was in the middle of an extremely busy week at work. (In fact, I still have two stories to write this week, and then my schedule will ease up considerably for a couple of weeks.)

I've spent the past week-plus editing thousands of words written by lawyers in India, China, Singapore and Korea. I know more about foreign investment in India than I thought I ever would. I've also managed to get out of the office a few times this past week for interviews for my own stories, as well as conducting a dozen or so interviews by phone with people from around Asia. I am looking forward to a slow down.

But it will only be a brief slow down, as I'm heading to Vietnam in about three weeks. I'll be there for a week and a half, though a long weekend of that will be holiday with Shelly in Danang. She's in Singapore now, and is heading to Manila later in the week, and we're also planning on a holiday in Indonesia in August, so we're looking at a busy summer.

That busy summer will probably involve quite a bit of volunteering at church, because the congregation today had shrunk from our normal 200 to about 40. The Church of All Nations is connected to the Hong Kong International School, so a lot of the members are connected to HKIS. As I learned this morning, HKIS teachers, students and expat wives desert Hong Kong in droves during the summer. Given that it hit 34 degrees (93F) in the city today, I can't say I blame them. Pastor Dale and his wife are in Oregon for their summer holiday, where they apparently get cold at night. Can you say jealous??