This Great Work

I begin with apologies about the formatting....half of this was written voice to text and when I transferred it over and joined it with what I had here, the formatting didn't match. I know I could fix it, but I'm behind on what I need to record so for now, I'm going to leave it as is. Because we were waiting for visas in December 2021 and trying not to accumulate 'stuff', we gave the girls a trip to Shanghai Disney for Christmas.  Thinking that our departure was just around the corner, it seemed like a perfect gift. But then of course, our visas did not arrive until March.  And then there was quarantine. And the Shanghai lock down. And then there was amped up testing, then difficulties traveling outside of the city. And then difficulties even traveling within the city.  So Shanghai Disney did not ever happen.  After things opened up we tried to hammer out some dates when we could go but there was always conflict. However, Tom and I finally made good our gift in Fe...

 Tom was all alone in the middle of China on a business trip when his sweet Mom passed away.  But for the Chinese it was business as usual with not much more than a word or two of condolence.  Tom had to go to the ribbon cutting of another company and be the eye candy for Waston to show off their foreign employee.  A death in the family did not trump that.  So he showed off for them with a very heavy heart.  He didn't return to us for more than 24 hours.  I was as sad for him to be alone as I was to have his Mom leave us.   We frantically bought tickets and made arrangements to be back for the funeral.  Thankfully conditions here were such that we could actually make it back into China if we left (that wasn't the case when we came).  It was such a crazy tight time frame and we threw things together haphazardly.  We knew we would have to quarantine upon return, but we didn't have much time to put much thought into that. We were ...