Daysleeping

  I'm on a beachy island in Indonesia for the week--we have a few days before work really starts and took the chance to have a vacation. It's raining now, and that doesn't spoil a thing--it's as peaceful and beautiful here in the rain as it is sunny. The above is my view, along with the kids playing in the pool, and I'm going to take a nap by the beach after lunch, maybe after reading a book or two.    Tanah Merah ferry terminal, as we pull away.  We left Singapore yesterday morning by ferry, and it took us about three hours total to get here. We took the ferry to Bintan, drove across the island, then took another boat to the island where we are now, which is small enough, we hear, to kayak around in less than an hour. The whole trip was ridiculously picturesque; crystal skies, emerald water, islands everywhere.  Super picturesque--it's got a boat in it.    We were all excited for our inaugural trip to Indonesia--if it's cool enough for Obama to be here at t

There was an awesome development this morning: my husband figured out how to turn off the air conditioner (or the "air-con" in the charming local vernacular.  I'm going to adopt it forever and be totally obnoxious to all of you.  Just like when I came back from a semester in England and drove my friends crazy using the word "trousers" in a terrible, affected, "I've been abroad, you know," kind of way.  Though in that case, using the word "pants" to refer to outer clothing in the UK is a mistake you really only want to make once, and it was genuinely a habit of self-preservation). We had previously tried to adjust the thermostat, but if you turned it up past a certain point the air would just start feeling un-conditioned--really warm and swampy and sticky.  But ho, we turned the system OFF and now the whole apartment is a reasonable temperature and not too damp.  I was getting really tired of freezing the entire time I was indoors and then

Yes, almost a week later than I told you we would, we picked a place to live!  We're going with Option 1 - Brand New and Modern.  Our Agent is negotiating our contract, and if all goes well we can move in sometime in early to mid-July.  Like the title says, when it came down to the final two, all four of us agree that this is our best choice.   We revisited each of our top four on Monday, and then Monday night went over to check out the neighborhood of Option 2, by the Botanic Gardens, on our own.  That location is still our overwhelming favorite.  We showed up just before dusk at the gate of the Gardens and went for a wander.  There is a scent to Singapore--green, and fresh, very lightly floral--that I might crazily suppose is the smell of plant-breath (as opposed to Houston Smell, which as much as I love H-town, is the scent of rotting swamp muck and chemical company carcinogens that occasionally permeates the city and makes you run right back inside on otherwise pretty-looking h

I'm sorry I've made you wait for the second episode of (not)House Hunters International.  When we finished looking yesterday, I was so tired that I was beyond making words.  Our really nice agent, seeing the empty stares on all of us, I think, treated us to an afternoon snack of roti prata, at the excellently named Mr Prata, and sent us home.  Prata, by the way, as I understand it, is a uniquely Singaporean but Indian-inspired fried flatbread that you dip into a veggie curry.  We all inhaled it along with hot sweet milky tea and tissue bread, which is a tower of thin, crispy, sugary dough. I felt human, but still aggressively nonverbal, after. Our nice agent ambitiously tried to use the prata-bump in energy to make plans to meet us this morning to revisit any places on our short list, but not even for fried dough was I willing to do three days in a row of house hunting. We'll take the weekend to think and do a little due diligence (house stalking), and we'll meet up aga

We've been in Singapore for about 30 hours now; I've slept for about 10 of these, eaten Singapore's national dish, Chicken Rice, taken two showers and a bath, grocery shopped, unpacked, signed my very official application for my residency pass, and only felt so tired that I wasn't sure I could feel my feet one time. I don't like that feeling, having my brain disconnect so thoroughly from everything except the desire to be asleep that I feel like I'm a head on wheels, and as I watch the sun set on my second full day I'm hoping my internal clock is resetting.  It's hard to tell if I feel alert because my body thinks it's 7 pm or because it thinks it's 7 am, though; it's mostly at the corners of the day, the 3's and 4's, that I'll know if my hypothalamus is on board with the move yet, or not. We're currently living in a serviced apartment.  Having spent our last few days in Houston in a hotel, my kids kept asking me to explain th

 Tomorrow at this time, I'll be on a plane. Knock wood. The past few weeks have been overwhelmed with lists and schedules and last things and must-not-forgets.  Y'all, logistics are not my strong suit.  I CAN be organized and often fake it for the sake of my family and friends, but chaos is my preferred medium.  It's been comforting to know that as long as I make it to the plane with both children and everyone's passports, we'll probably be ok, and it's kind of been a fun game to figure out what essential thing I'm going to forget and have to figure out how to buy in a new country while jet-lagged.  Just so you know what I'm up to: we will have one 14-hour flight from here to Doha, Qatar, and then a three-hour layover before an 8-hour flight to Singapore, where the sun will be just coming up as we arrive on Wednesday morning.  At which point I screw my courage to the sticking place and try to keep my kids awake and relatively sane for twelve hours to res