The Great and the Good

Hey Y'all,

Well, May has gone very nicely, thanks for asking, and has resulted in my becoming a full year older, but sadly no wiser. Such is life.

I was invited (plus one) to a British Airways reception the other week here in Houston to "celebrate the move of the Houston flights from Gatwick to Heathrow". The great and the good of Houston were there, along with Willie Walsh, CEO of BA who talked much about how excited they were to have this move happen, how he was sorry he kept losing all our bags, and how the Houston flights will only move into T5 later this year when all the glitches have been ironed out of the systems. Right.

They had put in a lot of effort with this event; for about 150 attendees (I'd estimate) there were a couple of BA chefs from the London lounges cooking up some awesome food, plenty of drinks to be had, a mockup of the new Club World (business class) cabin and seats which I was lucky enough to encounter on my trip to South Africa last year.

In the corner was a flight simulator hooked up to proper controls of the new Boeing Dreamliner (787), so of course I had to have a go on that. Sadly, I have to report that the first time I brought the plane down on houses just outside the airport boundary (no power to the engines), and the second time I surfed along the runway at 170 knots thanks to the throttles refusing to reduce power at all. I assume Boeing will work out these kinks before they send people up in the real Dreamliner... Those airport protesters might have something genuine to complain about if the real plane keeps landing on their property...

The next shindig we were invited to was in honour of BHP Billiton's sponsorhip of the Beijing Olympic Games later this year. All the metal for the medals come from BHP Billiton mines, and probably most of the materials used to build the stadiums (and the rest of China come to that) too. The final of the Mens Gymnastics Championships was being held here in Houston, and BHPB made a big thing of it by having over 300 people down at Reliant Park. Multi-olympic medal winners Mary Lou Retton and Peter Vidmar were guests, and took part in a great Q&A session in the BHP Billiton room before the event, as well as taking time to explain to us how the scoring works, and what were were looking at. The event was very enjoyable, and was basically being used to select the USA Gymnastics team for this year's olympics.

BHPB impressed me with food and drinks flowing freely all evening.

Work continues well - currently a lot of activity at our operated Shenzi Development with wells drilling and new information coming in all the time which makes for a very interesting and exciting time.

I've booked tickets home for the end of June, early July (yes, with BA!), and will be heading up to Scotland as well as London and North Wales most likely on the schedule.

Posted some more pictures on www.flickr.com/samclayton.

Labels: Houston

posted by Sam @ 2:21 PM