I have a couple friends who have traveled to Cambodia in recent years and visited the Landmine Museum. The founder of the museum — Aki Ra, a former child soldier of the Khmer Rouge — is working to make his country safer and raise awareness about the millions of landmines and unexploded ordinance scattered around. These friends decided to help his cause, and in turn, I chose to help theirs.

In the past few weeks, we’ve organized a community event in Seattle: Demine Valentine:

Among other things, it includes drinks, a buffet dinner, silent auction, and speaker Jill Morse from the Landmine Relief Fund. Also, we’re making landmine-shaped chocolates as giveaways (more on that process later). Our goal is to raise $5,000, enough to de-mine a village in Cambodia.

Although it’s taken up a decent amount of my time recently, it’s been thoroughly rewarding, knowing that our efforts very directly contribute to making another community safer. If you live in Seattle, you should consider joining us on Tuesday night at Demine Valentine.

[ If you’re not going to be in Seattle on Tuesday but would like to make a donation, the Landmine Relief Fund is the place to do it. ]

Happy 2009! If the internet is to be believed (and in this case, I think it is), it’s been just under a month since I last posted to my blog. I just haven’t felt motivated, and while I know that’s “okay,” I do at least wonder why.

One thing I realized is that for me, writing here is truly a leisure activity. It’s not that high on some imaginary list of priorities, and so when I’m really busy, I don’t blog that much. It’s kind of a shame, since I’m doing interesting stuff that (presumably) you’d be interested in. For example, shopping for Transformers belt buckles in Asia.

This fine January morning finds me in Hong Kong, waiting for a friend to call so we can meet for dim sum. It’s amazing to me that I have to travel 5,000 miles to have enough free time to write, but so it goes.

Prior to this Asia trip, I spent two weeks on the East Coast. In contrast to many of my previous trips there, this one wasn’t so great. Though I did get to see friends and family, travel was difficult (snow in Seattle and Boston), not everyone was healthy (first my grandfather took ill, then later in the trip I was laid up for 3 days with a stomach bug), and I was gone long enough that I started to just want to be home. This really was the first time in over three years that a trip to Boston/NYC/DC was overall net bad – not a bad record considering I’m back a few times a year, I suppose.

Of course, I turned around 36 hours after arriving in Seattle to get back on a plane, this time to Hong Kong. Hooray for frequent flier miles! This is my third trip to Asia in a year, and I’m starting to get better at it. The jet lag didn’t bother me at all coming here this time, and Hong Kong seems much less intimidating than last time. I’ve enjoyed some great food, explored a few more places, and have even taken an interest in learning some Chinese. More on that later, I suspect.

Note for those eagerly awaiting poultry reports: I’m making progress in documenting our turkey adventures (way back in November!), though I’m having trouble conveying the magic of the experience. Conveying the blood & guts comes easier, especially in photos.

So that’s it for now. The rest (China pictures, turkey stories, frisbee adventures, robot arm updates, etc.) will have to wait ’til I’m back in Seattle.

It was an exciting weekend not just because of the whole Thanksgiving/turkey thing; I witnessed some of the first signs of life in the robot arm:

More details on both the turkeys and robot arm to follow!