Wednesday

Sunshine didn't have to work over the Veterans Day holiday yesterday, so we started doing some Christmas shopping. It's still difficult to imagine that Christmas is happening. Half of that is because we are in southeast Asia, of course, where the decorations don't go up until around the time of US Thanksgiving and the weather is balmy and tropical. Some of it is because our scheduling has become increasingly flung to the future. We made all of our plans to travel home for Christmas so many months ago the whole holiday seems over already. Currently, we're planning things (dinner parties? Work conferences! Visitors!) up through mid-February. We are also distracted by issues pertaining to our months of repatriation, beginning as early as August '09 (and leading to our move to the Balkans in July, '10). It feels like we've moved past next Christmas, too. All the same, I'm really super juiced to be returning to North Carolina so soon: we leave almost thirty days, to the minute, after I post this. Anyway, yesterday we started the ball rolling on holiday shopping. What I thought would be an afternoon-long ordeal, complicated by the pestering realities of Bến Thành Market--which is located right on the cusp of Hồ Chí Minh City's highly toured "backpacker district"--only took us about thirty minutes. Some of that is because, nearly thirteen months after my first foray into the place, I've grown inured to those pestering realities. Another part is that after a half hour I was so loaded down it was already time to give up doing any more purchasing for the remainder of the afternoon. Since I can't, of course, write down all the things we bought, I'll leave you with this link, where you can go shave a Yeti instead. [Cavin]