Monday

Well hello there. Counting on my fingers, I see it's been precisely ninety-one days since my last post here on this Update column. That's exactly a quarter of a year, based on certain values of the words month and exact. In any event, this constitutes the average point-two-five year. I can't believe all that time has passed already. In fact, I spend many of these latter days marveling at how close we've come to when we'll be leaving Vietnam again. That'll happen even earlier than I thought back in November when I last posted, probably sometime at the end of July. Of course things have changed, why not? November was a quarter of a year ago. I did not indulge this lapse of communication on purpose. First we traveled to Singapore for our anniversary, and then we traveled home to the states for the December holidays. Happy belated Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year! I ended up staying in the US for several additional weeks to go to the dentist a couple times. Happy belated Boxing, Martin Luther King Jr., and Inauguration Days! Obamanation! I returned to Vietnam just in time for everything to close down during the week of Tết. Happy belated Year of the Ox! Overlapping that we had visitors for a week (happy belated Groundhog Day, Bill and Kate), and then it was time to travel somewhere special for the three-day Valentine's Day weekend. Happy belated Valentine's and Presidents' Days! And then, ever since Tuesday the seventeenth of this month, I've just been too lazy to post. This particular quarter of a year sure is filled with holidays. For the next week or so, I'll try to fill in some of the three months' worth of blank space between this entry and the previous one. [Cavin]