Monday

Okay, okay--just for today I'm breaking The Silence of the Tomb^TM because I have several news items I really shouldn't put off mentioning. I'll do them in order. Sunshine's mom visited a few weeks ago. We took a relaxing cruise on a solid teak riverboat, going up and down various branches of the Mekong. On the day she left, my ballot for the 2008 elections was mailed; I'd cast my vote for the next president of the United States. So that's over with. Hope my candidate doesn't embarrass me over the next few weeks, huh? Last Monday, the twentieth, we received tentative word on our next foreign assignment. Since that still seems to be concrete one week later, I feel comfortable announcing it. But pardon me while I build suspense anyway. Tomorrow night we fly to Siem Reap in the Kingdom of Cambodia; Thursday, we'll celebrate my birthday at Angkor Wat. Then, after another month and a half, roughly, we'll both be heading to the US for the holiday visit home. We've finally got concrete word on that, too. Expect me to arrive in the Greensboro, NC airport shortly after one pm on Saturday, December 13th. I'll be around for all the traditional Christmas and New Year's Eve stuff, and then for a lot of January, too, doing what has also become traditional on visits home: going to the dentist. Even further into the future, then: because of the difficulty of Slavic languages, we'll possibly return from Vietnam as early as August 2009 to begin forty-four weeks of vigorous schoolwork. Then, sometime around June 2010, we'll be moving on to our next home in lovely, snowy Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post lasting either two or three years, depending how we play our cards at the time. [Cavin]