Since the big announcement (er, last post, over six weeks ago), things have truly been hectic at Engel-Cox central. J was on a plane for every one of those weeks until this most recent one. I spent all of April trying to clear up items at my UMBC job including getting the rough draft done of the bigger annual report that I had to do every year. The Wednesday that was my last day on the job there, I got on a plane so that I could be in Columbus to start having meetings and get oriented to my new job. And we finally got to actually go to Kuala Lumpur to see what the country's like two weeks ago. We stayed downtown at the Trader's Hotel, which is the other anchor to the KLCC Convention Center, the other end of which is the Mandarin Oriental hotel and the PETRONAS Towers, which are just as amazing in person as they are in photos.

Both J and I actually had meetings in the Towers while we were there--at one point I was up to the 70th Floor, although I didn't get to spend much time there. Did get some good views from the 59th, as well as from the skybridge, though.

We had some wonderful meals, including a couple of buffets with all the Malay food that you could want, a Chinese dinner where our beer cost us almost as much as the rest of the meal, and an outing to the "Seafood Paradise" restaurant where you identified the creature you wanted to eat from among the selection of aquariums along the wall.

We didn't have as much time as we would have liked to house hunt, although we may have gotten lucky and found a place (we're currently in negotiations, with our fingers crossed). And we're still not sure what's to become of our 18-year-old cat, Ashes, as we've identified no home for him to go to here in the States and we're not sure he's up for the trip and the 7-day quarantine required in Malaysia.