February 18, 2006

Aye, yi yi! What a headache! Our R&R request was approved today so I spent parts of the day attempting to purchase our tickets for our May trip to Thailand. What a nightmare! www.Emirates.com seemed to have the best deal for the tickets, so I was attempting to purchase them from there. Turns out, they require you to either pick up the tickets in person, at the Emirates office or have the tickets mailed to you. The mailing address that you elect must be the same as your billing address AND must be within the country of your departure. I spent the morning waiting to see if our contact in Jordan could pick them up (he said yes) - then I found out you have to pay when you pick them up (no good), then I tried the other method and found out the latter. Yeesh! Travelocity was showing the same tickets at easily $700 more and Expedia wasn't finding the flights. I ended up coaxing Expedia to find them at very close to the same price, so all was well in the end...but not until I had a headache. Next step is buying our ticket from Bangkok to Chiangmai and back. For some reason, you can't find a ticket that goes all the way through to Chiangmai, even though the same airline runs those flights. I'm not going to ask. We are considering changing up our original plans. We want to go to Chiangmai of course..but I would also like to see Phuket. We're considering buying our flight from Bangkok as a multi-destination flight - go to Chiangmai first..spend most of our time there..then fly to Phuket. There's a resort that looks nice AND I would love to go scuba diving for a day.. Plus - you can't beat the 50% off pricing. We could go scuba diving one day - golfing the next...I looked up the rainy season and it appears that it really doesn't start till June. So, if we're lucky - we'll just have to deal with warm weather (no different than Iraq) and little rain. :) hehe. I'm excited can you tell! Can't wait to go ride those elephants!

Work the last few days has gone by really fast. Thursday was so busy I didn't have a chance to write a blog (thank you to those who noticed!)..yesterday, I only worked the morning since it's our weekend. We spent the afternoon relaxing as we should! :) I'm going to go to both kickboxing classes tonight and skip the gym tomorrow morning. I usually aim at burning ~3000 calories per week and this week I set my goal at 4000. My last day is tomorrow, and so far I've done 4425 with another 700 to be anticipated from the second kickboxing class alone. ;) I'm pretty proud of myself! (for those who wonder - I keep track of the calories using a heart rate monitor. It's really helped me motivate myself because it encourages you to stay within specific heart rates depending on your desired outcome and weekly goal...I highly recommend it if you're serious about getting in shape/losing weight) Well - best get back to work. Thanks for reading!