Thursday

For the last fourteen days I've been getting up between nine and nine thirty every the morning. This is quite a feat, and to achieve it I had to stay up all night once, two weeks ago. Then, just to keep myself tired at night, I've been forcing myself out of bed after six hours almost every day. The drawback is that I now go to bed well before four in the morning. Thus, at some point while I was asleep, Sunshine rose, dressed, and then escorted her mother to the international departures wing of Tân Sơn Nhất Airport, where she waited until Bet was through security and merrily embarked upon her long route home. Apparently, the jetlag is lessened heading west, when the time zones are subtracted from the itinerary. Bet will actually arrive home on the same date she left, even though she will be in the air for a whole day. Also, because of the (pre) spring time change, Bet is only jetlagging eleven hours over the next twenty-four, rather than the twelve she changed arriving. Conversely, she’d been very comfortable coming from the snows of Kentucky mountain winter two weeks ago, and I wonder what it will be like retuning from the dry and acute southern Vietnamese heat we’ve all been enjoying here. After leaving the airport, Sunshine could think of nothing better to do than head to work, where she arrived some three hours early. For my own part, I got out of bed around nine thirty without dressing or being prepared to entertain. I busied myself doing utter nothing for much of the morning before then getting down to my one chore today: searching through my freezer for all of the things that have been hidden there over the last two weeks. [Cavin]