Comin’ right back atcha

Okay, let’s go ahead and get this out of the way so that I can move on to other stuff:

The trip to Thailand, to visit with my 2½-year-old granddaughter (and my son and his wife, but they became vastly less important once the granddaughter was born) over Chinese New Year? That didn’t happen. Even after we’d bought the airline tickets, it was — because of my having to buy another car to replace the one that died on the road — still just barely possible. It took only a few small things going wrong to nudge that back over the line into ‘not quite possible’, and those few small things happened.

So, instead I spent the intended two weeks with my wife Susan in the San Francisco area. She took that time off, and we had a marvelous time pretty much every day. Whale-watching was the single biggest event, but that was only one day out of a dozen. I learned one extremely valuable lesson: never order calamari unless you can see the ocean from your table. (I say that and people go, “That bad, huh?” No, it was that good. I’d never had calamari before; I’d eaten rubbery junk called by the same name, but properly prepared calamari is just heavenly. Unfortunately, it seems to be available in only one place: Sam’s Chowder House in Half Moon Bay.)

At one point our son Kevin made a Skype call to us from Thailand, and we got to see our unnaturally beautiful — but also smart and lively and mischievous and enchanting — Amber on her holiday in Bangkok. Susan and I had to pull off the highway to take the call properly, pacing up and down part of the California coastline to get the best reception-and-lighting conditions, each of us using our own phone for a group call. (Wonderful.) Kevin told us later that, when they took Amber to one of the Buddhist temples on the tour, she looked at the stone elephants and said the Chinese word for ‘elephant’ … then she took another look and said, “Jia” (Chinese for ‘fake’), and after another moment, “Jia-lephant.” Her first Chinglish word, Kevin reported both proudly and tongue-in-cheek.

For some months, Susan was considering (maybe even actively planning) letting go of the California VA job and coming back home. She was homesick and frazzled and discouraged, and there just didn’t seem to be much point. Then, either because my visit bolstered her somewhat or because she finally got a retirement printout showing where she stood and she needed the extra time (possibly both working together), she started talking about finishing out the original three-year plan. She doesn’t intend to go on as she’s been doing, however; there’s a tentative intention to fly back to spend another vacation with me — and visiting family and friends here — in May. (For a while she had hoped to come here over Christmas 2018, and plan far in advance for our living-abroad children and their spouses to visit us during those holidays, but the California VA system stomped on that pretty quick.) So, we’re back to doing it as first envisioned … but she’s past the halfway point now, and every day makes the end closer and the process easier for her to tolerate.

(Me? I’ve just been working my unexciting job, sitting at home, reading from the internet and watching videos from the internet. Yeah, my life is a thrill a minute.)

So, that’s where I stand. Small stuff, but it’s mine.

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(Sad news regarding velvetwhip — Gabrielle — here.)