New Horizons...

It's been some kinda crazy couple of weeks here at the FFA.  Daddy's been travelling quite a bit, although two weeks ago, it was being at the Boeing Leadership Center here in St. Louis.  Last week, it was in Seattle, Washington to support my new job inside the Big B.  This new role, officially known as a Supplier Program Manager in the International Strategic Partnerships Group, will have me be responsible for most of our supplier interactions for foreign military offset for the entire Pacific Northwest and solely for the P-8I Maritime Aircraft for India.  Lot to take in there, first:  Offset.  When a country spends billions of dollars on our aircraft, they often need to please their citizens when that much of their citizens' tax money is coming to the USA.  To do that, they write "offset" clauses into the sale, such that the US (i.e. Me) needs to work with suppliers of the P-8I to encourage that they build some of the airplane parts, or transfer some technical knowledge or somehow give them (the Indians) something intangible that they can use to benefit the general industry in their country.  Sounds fair?  Well, not really.  But this is how the world works in a global economy.  For us to win any competition on the global scale, we need to offer "offset" otherwise, some other country with a competing airplane will...and they will get the sale.  Now, most certainly, we're not giving away our most secret stuff....but ultimately both parties win; we sell airplanes and they get an airplane and some technical knowledge skills.   Now, onto the airplane...you can read all about it here.

So...Mommy had the boys this week and everyone did awesome as expected.  I missed the darn Super Bowl because I was flying and more importantly I missed these fun times below....

After Daddy headed out, it was cookie time and Aidan had to really get into it...hope you like smelly feet with your cookies!  Just kidding!

Mommy sent me this picture and I couldn't believe that both my boys were riding cycles using the pedals!!  Such big guys!

The weather must have been pretty nice, since they were outside with no coats...in February!

Ethan the pedal man!

Mommy had a Super Bowl Cookie Decorating party!  Look how those little decorators go!

Looks like they were little samplers too!

Much of Daddy's week was full of meetings, but I did bring the camera to get a few shots around town.  Here's a few:

Best shot of the week, morning sunrise of Mount Rainier in front of Lake Washington....nice.

Seattle is Airliner-City!  Here's a bunch of 787s (our newest model) and 737s hanging out at Boeing Field in Tukwila, Washington. 

More 787s including serial number 0001 on the left, that's the 1st Boeing 787 produced!

So here's a P-8A (the US Navy's version) can't see much other than it is a 737 with a bunch of antennas and no windows. 

The Museum of Flight is in Seattle and this poor Concorde sits outside in the elements...pretty booty considering there's only like 6 of them in the world left. Oh well. 

Downtown Seattle, Space Needle to the left behind the baseball and football stadiums.

So also during this week, the boys got some fun Valentine's Stuff from their Grammies...thank you Grammy T and P!

That's all for tonight! Have a great night everyone!

Thanks for reading,

Ty, Emmy, Aidan and Ethan