Just another weekend in Vientiane

I finally decided to capture what has become a relatively common ritual in our happy little household. It plays out probably four times a week.

1. Katherine goes to bed before me (she's sleeping for two now, you know)

2. Jak heads up to bed sometime after Katherine, but before me.

3. I follow later. When I get into the room and start moving around and making some noise, Katherine grunts or sighs and rolls over, while Jak inevitably stirs, comes out from under the covers if he has burrowed himself in, stretches, and heads over for a long drink of water from Katherine's water glass.

It's gotten so that he rarely drinks out of his water bowl at all any time of the day, preferring the more civilized water glass. And if he takes an interest in your water but the water is too low or the glass is to narrow for his head to fit in, he sits and stares at you until you pick up your water and tilt it so he can get a drink.

And so I present to you, "Saturday Night in Vientiane". I assure you that Katherine is wearing a nightgown, even if she looks totally nekkid. I'm not about to post psuedo-porn of my wife. Not here, anyway.


This morning I went to Victory Park golf course near Nong Khai, Thailand with our friend Jon, he of 3-legged race fame. It is his 36th birthday, so he celebrated by playing a terrible round of golf. He's generally a good golfer (better than me anyway), and he even won the coveted Caddy Scholarship for the state of Wisconsin (yes, the same caddy scholarship that Danny was competing for in Caddyshack. 4 years of college tuition. Pretty nice), so when he suggested that we lower the stakes we usually play for, I readily agreed. $0.10 per hole, just to make it interesting.

Of course, today is the day I played well and he played like crap. If you click on the picture, you can see my ball about 4 feet from the pin. I still missed the birdie putt, but what are you going to do? I think by the end of the day he owed me about $1.20. Awesome.



Tuk tuks waiting for fares at the Nong Khai train station, where we stopped after the round so Jon could buy tickets for an upcoming trip to BKK.
Rain finally came to Vientiane tonight. It's been about 12 days or so with no rain, and the area farmers have been getting a bit nervous, as their newly planted rice struggles in cracked, dry soil. I was at work when the rain started, with some impressive thunder, and the requisite follow-on power outage. Thankfully, the Embassy is equipped with backup power that kicks in immediately, as I had been working on a presentation for tomorrow and hadn't saved my 2 hours of work. I remedied that quickly, then finished up. It's much easier to get work done on weekends without all those pesky visa applicants and Americans with problems.

Of course, my three main job requirements in order of importance are 1) Americans with problems, 2) pesky visa applicants, and 3) everything else that does not include 1 or 2, so 'getting work done' on weekends is relative (and, by the way, the visa applicants are not pesky, I just like the word).

The rain had slowed by the time I left the embassy at 11:00 pm, but it left some substantial puddles for me to drive through, which is always fun. Post-rain Vientiane on a Sunday night at 11:00 pm is eerily quiet and dark. Driving home I thought of the movie "28 Days Later." Well, not the movie itself, but rather the trailer, as that is all I've ever seen. It basically consisted of a guy walking around a deserted downtown London.

I think in the end it had something to do with a global plague that turned people into flesh eating zombies that the guy had to wail on or something, but Vientiane wasn't like that, just the walking around a deserted London part.