Feeling Like I Should Write Something of Import

I don't really have anything of import to write, though. Therein lies the problem. Want to hear some discombobulated ramblings? Read on...

School started in Chennai today and I'm just about finished filling out enrollment forms. The last things are the physicals. Kind of a pain to get done, but when is hanging around the doctor's office not a pain?
My parents return home from Poland tomorrow. From what I've heard, they had a wonderful time meeting with the relatives and seeing the sights. I'm so glad my grandmother had the oppotunity to go with them. This was her first opportunity to return to Poland since she was a little girl.
We've been told about our housing assignment in Chennai. It sounds just about perfect, so we're all quite excited. It's an older home, has 2 floors (stairs again!) and is on the Consul General's compound along with a couple other family homes, the tennis courts and the pool. The other homes (aside from the CG residence) all have families in them, a couple with kids the same ages as ours. That alone is making our monsters giddy. Even better, the compound is close to both school and Consulate.
Tomorrow is the 6 month anniversary of my BCC surgery. I'll try to remember to take a picture. I'll always have a scar, I scar easily, so I'm glad I wear glasses! But I've been good about wearing a hat whenever I'm outside, long sleeves when it's not too miserably hot, and SPF moisturizer when I know I'll actually be in the sun. Here's to many years of healthy skin.
The stress of moving, or the anticipation of moving, is expressing itself in different ways around here. I'm happy to report that I no longer have insomnia, but as usual I have 3 different To Do lists floating in my head. They keep me up for a while until I pull out one of my many notebooks to jot everything down. The suitcases are taking over our bedroom floor and I feel better tossing things in there as I pass them. Katherine is behaving much more upbeat. She has her moments of being difficult or "depressed" but she's much better than she was 2 months ago and has taken a keen interest in playing with her sister. Rebecca is, of course, thrilled at all the hours of attention. Though something is bothering Becca, something she can't figure out. The past couple nights she's had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. Tonight she cried but when I asked what she was talking about or thinking about at the time, she couldn't come up with anything that would trigger this emotional response. I thought it must have to do with the move, starting over, leaving the dog, worries along that line... but she said no. And it's not from anything she's watched on TV or read in a book. She's just emotional. It will work itself out in time. The boys, well, the boys are as rambunctious as ever, but I have a feeling that's just them being boys.
Can you believe Jonathon, my baby, will be 5 next week? I can't either.
Still watching the housing market back home. Does anyone think there will be something, anything, affordable in Northern Virginia 2 1/2 years from now? We have our fingers crossed and once our car is paid off we'll be building up our savings for a house. Until then though, checking out realtor.com is plain disheartening!
OK, enough tidbits. Off to bed. Another week almost done, and only 20 days left in Togo.

It's Time...

Our address for September onward:

6260 Chennai Place
Dulles, VA 20189-6260
It's a U.S. address, so mailing stuff to us only requires whatever postage is to send to Virginia. Letters do not need 2 or 3 stamps, 1 will do. Really. And mail to and from Chennai will take approximately 2-3 weeks, though longer during the winter holidays.
Another important note... please please address anything to us either to my name or to Ian as Ian, -not- to David. We happen to be going to a post where Ian's boss will be David Hopper. The same David Hopper who received our consumables order last fall. Help us all out by using Ian's name. Unless of course you know the other David Hopper and want to send things to him... then please disregard this note.
We realized that our three years in Chennai (provided no wars break out or a pandemic or riots or whatnot requiring evacuation) will be the longest we as a family will have lived in one place. I know that's no record, but still, our oldest child is only 10 and we've moved houses 9 times between 4 states and 3 countries. Chennai will be country #4 and move #10.
It should get better from here on out, with typical assignments lasting 3 years each. Unless of course, we encounter one of those evacuation scenarios I mentioned.

Only in a Developing Nation

The kids were swimming while Ian and I watched. Nicholas ran inside to use the bathroom. I heard Maaa maaa and asked Ian:

"Is that Nicholas or.. a goat?"

Turns out, it was a goat.

Sable is healing well

36 hours since her surgery, Sable is doing so much better. She's eating, drinking, walking around. Ian, Rebecca and the boys gave her a sponge bath and brushed her so I imagine she's feeling loads better just from that. The vet came this morning and evening and said she's progressing fine. She's not at all thrilled being closed off in the front foyer, but tomorrow I think we'll leash her and let her get some fresh air and leg stretching outside. Her stitches come out in 10 days.

And I thought vet care was questionable in Manila.

We had Sable spayed today. She was picked up and put int he back of a taxi at 8 this morning. She was returned at 12:30, carried from the back of a taxi again, with her abdomen shaved and stitched and her entire side of fur all bloody. OH MY GOODNESS. Thank goodness I'd prepared a dark, quiet corner, soft with brand new dog pillow for her. She wags her tail some, but doesn't lift her head or anything. I don't know if it's lingering anaesthesia or pain that's keeping her down, but she's definitely still totally out of it. I'm concerned having her directly in our care rather than recovering in a vet hospital but who am I kidding, there aren't any vet hospitals here and she's probably much better off here than where ever the surgery was done. Ack. It's going to be a long few days. The vet will come back tonight and then twice a day for the next few days. I hope she'll be OK.

Keeping Busy.

Ian has been busy at work the past couple weeks, a welcome change of pace. Today was a continuation with a second American death case from the weekend, he didn't even break for lunch which is an odd thing indeed.

At home, nothing spectacular happened but it was a good day anyhow. Katherine enjoys practicing the piano and is doing well learning new songs from her "Kids' Favorites" book. She also won a round of Settlers of Catan, but Nicholas was right on her tail. The kids all played nice in the pool this morning. Someone from GSO came and changed about 8 light bulbs in the house. Yes, I can change a lightbulb, what I can't seem to figure out is taking off the covers. I've seen it done and yet I have this huge fear of fumbling it while tottering on the top of a rickety ladder. Our ceilings vary somewhere between 10-12' high and I could see myself dropping or slipping. It wouldn't be pretty. But now all our lights work and the boys especially are pleased.
We made a white cake with lemon pudding in it topped by lemon frosting. I love lemon stuff. And we finally opened up our single special bottle of kiwi wine, the one we carted for two years from Rotorua, NZ, through Sydney, Singapore, Manila, on to Arlington, VA and then here. Our fear of it being rancid were unfounded. It was amazing and wonderful. I wish we had a case! Unfortunately, Riverhead Estates no longer makes kiwi wine. Perhaps we need to go back to New Zealand and find a replacement.
While the rest of the family watched a couple episodes of Sliders (we're working our way through the first 3 seasons, and it has kept surprisingly well for an early 90s series and opens up a lot of discussion on different moral and political issues), I nearly finished Bad Twin by Gary Troup. It's a fictional fictional tale (yes, two fictionals), created especially for fans of the "Lost" TV series. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, especially as written in such a way that if I place a Sam Spade voice in my head, the book reads like a "dark and stormy night" novel. I'm curious to see how it ends.
Did I get anything productive done today? Not a thing. But that's OK sometimes too.

Being forewarned

As I've mentioned before, we recently had a death case that involved a victim of a Nigerian 419 scam. The scammers made him believe that they needed his help bring gold from Ghana to Dubai. It went on for about 18 months, and he gave almost a million dollars to the perpetrators, in addition to traveling to Dubai and Accra. A colleague in Ouagadougou, who had a similar case (though it didn't involve the death) sent me a link to a New Yorker story about a well-educated older man who was taken for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He even went to jail for depositing fraudulent checks and committing wire fraud.

It's easy to call the victims stupid or naive. Perhaps they are naive, but I think more than anything else, they don't want an opportunity to pass by. It doesn't matter how ridiculous it gets to an objective observer. Many people say that e-mail is an aid to the scammers because they can use anonymous Web-based e-mail addresses. That's true, but there's a psychological factor as well. E-mails can look official, or they can look personal. When you get an pleading e-mail for help from someone in distress, you can inject as much emotion into it as you're prone to give.
There's also the "good money after bad" issue. I've noticed in dealing with these cases that at some point -- perhaps after $500, maybe after $50000 -- the victim has decided internally that they can't admit to themselves that they've been scammed. So they keep going, hoping that it'll all pan out in the end. It's better than admitting failure. Sometimes that means getting friends and family to give loans, sometimes it means stealing money from your company, and sometimes you've gone so far you think you have nothing else to live for. Think about it -- if you lose $300,000, $500,000, or a million dollars, you (if you're like most Americans) are never going to recover from that. You've not only ruined your own life, but probably your childrens' as well. It's not surprising to see someone consider suicide.
Anyway, here's the story. And believe me, whether it's from Nigeria or not -- I've heard from colleagues in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Benin, Ethiopia, the Netherlands -- the money isn't coming. But there are Internet cafe's full of Nigerians, Ghanaians and anyone with passable written English who will tell you it is.