Maya says goodbye to Nala this morning as she prepares to leave for a 3 week summer camp experience in Vermont by way of a weekend visit to her Aunt Susan in Burlington. Among the activities she will enjoy is mountain climbing and she has been walking around the house with her loaded back pack to prepare for the adventure.

This evening Jeanine an I took her on a walk in our back field which was occupied by a flock of geese. Neither of us could resist the temptation to let her chase them. Once liberated she made short work of dispersing them to the winds and took several high speed victory laps before disappearing into the thick underbrush which surrounds the adjacent pond. Just as we had surrendered all hope of seeing her again, she emerged, covered to the knees in mud looking quite content. After hosing her off she was returned to incarceration behind the electric containment fence and liberty privileges will not soon be granted again.

Maya models the new summer dress that her grandmother made for her. I probably should have spent a moment ironing it first but I am a man. I can claim ownership of an iron and the knowledge to use it (to affix wood veneers with thermally activated adhesives to MDF substrate or to steam wood for bending).

Kyle sold the Honda Odyssey today and will use the proceeds to fund the purchase of a truck for his business. Nicolai is in New Hampshire with a friend at their summer home.

To say that Nicolai is hard on crutches would be an understatement. This evening one of his six month old, state of the art crutches failed catastrophically. The aluminum tubing just above the grip support weld snapped off. Fortunately Nico was not injured but did miss his soccer game for lack of a back up. Nico was a field tester for SideStix, the manufacturer of the crutch, and they have been really great to work with. I have little doubt they will replace the failed crutch and study the one we return to improve the design and/or manufacturing process. Nico has a set of titanium crutches he will fall back on but he finds it very difficult to switch between dissimilar crutch designs and prefers the more comfortable SideStix.

I caught up with my father on his morning walk and despite a sleepless night am feeling much better this morning. Maya brought some fabric to Schenectady and this morning my mother turned it into a beautiful dress which will no doubt be featured in a future photo. She still uses the sewing machine given to her by her father as a wedding present more than fifty years ago.

Today I spent the bulk of the day layed up with an intestinal flu or food poisoning but did get outsdie for a brief tour of my mother’s Japanese style gardens. Over the years, my siblings and I have encouraged our parents to consider moving to a smaller more practical home. What do two eighty somethings need with an 8 bedroom, 3 story home after all?. To wander through the gardens, decades in the making, is to understand but one component of their reluctance to leave.

After dinner, Nicolai and I experimented with some candlelight photography.

This afternoon the family plus Hannah drove to Schenectady to visit my parents for the weekend. My father has recovered nicely from recent health issues and my mom just never seems to age. Hannah just returned from a family vacation in Turkey and that made two of us who were jet lagged.

My final morning in Hong Kong is spent making a brief visit to our office there. Pictured is the building in which we are located and the exquisite view it affords of the city.

At each factory we enjoy lunch in the on-site VIP dining hall with our hosts. A single factory can employ and provide dormitory housing and dining facilities for more than 50,000 workers. Contrast that to the population of Concord which is 15,000. iRobot products require more than 2000 workers to assemble and test. After completing our meetings and tours we hop on a ferry and make the 90 minute voyage back to Hong Kong.

We travelled to the Hung Pu area this morning for another series of all day meetings arriving at the Crowne Plaza Hotel early enough to take a quick walk before a business dinner. Adjacent to the hotel is the 98% completed Science City campus. It is overwhelming in both it’s architecture and scale but what I will remember most was how eerily vacant it was. I saw more dead butterflies than people during my one hour walk. The surrounding four lane roadways were almost completely empty during rush hour. Felt very post apocalyptic.

This morning my colleagues and I got an early start and traveled by car to China (Shenzhen area) where we had all-day meetings. I was so tired by the time we checked into our next hotel that I skipped dinner and went directly to sleep.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Nico enjoys a surprise World Cup Finals birthday party with his close friends. Photo courtesy of Jeanine. My Droid phone does not work in China, so I had little contact with family while I was on the road.

After arriving in Hong Kong and checking into my hotel I spend a few hours walking around in the 100 degree weather arriving at the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront by nightfall. I will spend the coming week visitng our three factories in China (where photography is not permitted) and our Hong Kong office. I sleep for 5 hours and then wake up to watch the World Cup finals at 2:30 in the morning.