Cloud Nine

This week I am supposed to be giving three lectures in a conference held in Singapore. But it's been a pretty difficult time to travel. I realized the question wasn't so much how inconvenient our city's hotel quarantine period can be, but how on earth we can guarantine coming back on time.

I decided offering recorded lectures. Instead of travel outside Hong Kong, I had a family vacation in a theme park with my daughter's classmate. Oh yes, I'm fairly certain I am not a theme park fan, but not in a stubbornly anti-theme-park manner. Life is a rich tapestry of what we do and don't know. More likely than not, I can find delight in our family event.

With that in mind, I packed my swimming suit, a novel and iPad (for the live Q&A after the lectures) for the theme park lodge stay. Before going, we watched the weather forecast (not too reliable, if I'm honest) and looked at the clouds (pretty helpful for the plan next day, I believe). There were cumuloninbus clouds. My goodness, that means rain, thunder and lighting ahead. If I need a reason to feel hopeful about the cumulonimbus, I can think of the classification of clouds by number. Cumulonimbus is number nine on the list of the US Weather Bureau. Remarkably little is known about this. So little, in fact, that it took me a while to reckon that we're on cloud nine.

Very well, there was indeed heavy rainfall. We grabbed umbrellas but couldn't stay dry. There is a silver lining behind all those clouds, if of the somewhat unexpected one. It's practically the shortest queue for the otherwise-busiest-and-crowded roller coaster ride.