Thursday

Tonight, at eleven-something on September 18th, 2008, we'll have been here in Hồ Chí Minh City for exactly eleven months. Raise a glass. I mention this because it's probably as close to the halfway point of our stay as I'll likely remember to note. Juggling probabilities, this halfway mark is still about two weeks away: I assume we'll be about to return home eleven-and-a-half months after the eleven-and-a-half month mark. But there's some wiggle room: it's pretty certain we'll return from Vietnam sometime between the first of September and mid-October, 2009. Let's time travel twelve months from today: if we're not at home already, we will certainly be leaving shortly. Our stuff is already in crates working its way around the world. Our plants are earmarked for friends. Are we making desperate last minute travel plans to see places we've accidentally forgotten during our time in Asia? The recent goodbye parties have all been in our honor. Our next job position is a certainty. We know our training schedule in Washington DC and the parameters of our finite repatriation. Whatsisface is president. Probably, one year into the future, our schedule will be set, with wiggling room, clear through the year 2013. Of course, for some of these things we can rein-in the time travel a bit. We'll have a good head start on all of this knowledge of by the time we visit home for Christmas this year. We're working on getting the next job right now (Pristina? Banja Luka? Ljubljiana?), and expect to know something before December. We'll have a new president-elect by December, too. We're working on this, too (overseas voting forms were requested last week). Sheesh. Halfway or not, our whole near-future seems to rest on the decisions we make in the next two months. [Cavin]