Okay, this has got to be a record–another day of amazing productivity!  I accomplished so much, I’m almost afraid the enumeration of completed tasks could, in itself, exhaust me.  But I’ll risk the mention of a few, namely the cleaning of the kitchen and downstairs bathroom, the vacuuming of the entire first floor (six large rooms), the completion of a detailed floor plan for the Student Center Grand Ballroom the evening of the Mountain Keepers event, the payment of my vehicle registration, the running of errands, the cancellation of my Lexington Herald Leader subscription beginning April 18th, and last, but far from least, the replacement of windshield wipers on my truck. Clearly the remedy for my mid semester slump  has been the energy-inducing nature of Spring Break.  I never dreamt I could accomplish so much with only one week away from school.

Also significant–that S. moves into our new Saigon apartment Monday afternoon, that our dog Ralph is under-going surgery in morning to repair his ruptured ACL, and that two stray cats have taken up residence in our basement, a squatting of sorts, both in terms of leaseless living and in terms of pottying in the cellar’s dirt floor–a soiling, if you will.  Do you suppose Air-wick would work in that setting or Glade plug-ins, perhaps?

Another record–that this may be my shortest post to date–wouldn’t want to spoil Spring Break with excessively shitty blogs–or would that be a “soiling” instead?

Recently my productivity has amazed even me, especially during the past week.  Not only have I managed to grade more student essays than I care to count and calculated and posted midterm grades, but also I’ve finished my official summary of student evaluations, registered for frequent flier programs with four  US airlines, and (drum roll, please) filed my federal and state income taxes!  Admittedly, there’s more to be done, but, goodness gracious, I’m feeling a great sense of accomplishment and enjoying the satisfaction that goes along with it.  The realization that Spring Break would be my last chunk of free time to finish  the tasks that have to be done before I leave for Asia has motivated me to maximize this opportunity–carpe diem in a work your ass off kind of way.

However, the week has not been all work and no play–much work and little play, perhaps, but last night, for example, I ate dinner with Lynn and the boys at Ricon’s in Chevy Chase.  Needless to say, for those of you who know my family’s tendencies toward hilarity, we had an awfully good time.  The evening culminated in an episode of serious spillage, when I tipped a tall plastic glass of diet Coke (a good 32 ouncer) into my lap.  Fortunately a friendly bus boy attempted to save me from my baptism by carbonated beverage.  He seemed to be standing by with mop and rag in hand waiting to intercept any unintended tippage.  However, as he lept to the rescue, my nephew Johnny interjected the best line of the night, commenting to said beverage-cleaner-upper, “Get that girl a sippy cup!”  Perhaps, it’s not as funny in the telling as it was when it happened, but I convulsed so in laughter,  the contents of my bladder threatened to  damped further already drenched drawers.  When it rains, it pours, so to speak, or shall we say “leak.”

Okay, this is becoming too silly to be funny–the blogged equivalent of slap stick.  But try me again next time. Perhaps then, I’ll apply the same productivity to humor, as I did to taxes–a comedy accountant, of sorts.

Hooray!   I have not only finished grading, but have also gotten midterm grades calculated and submitted to the university.  It’s an enormous relief to have completed both tasks.  I feel like fiddling on the roof, “Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles. . . .”   I’m not kidding!  I still have a hell of a lot more to do before the end of Spring Break, but it does  indeed feel miraculous to have accomplished this much.

On the Asian front, S. reports having arrived safely in the far south of Vietnam in the Mekong Delta.  She’s exhausted, having slept little the night before she left, fearful that she would not wake up and miss her flight.  She returns to Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday, moves into our new apartment on Monday, leaves for several days in Hanoi on Wednesday, and then spends the following work week in Bangkok.   She may feel tired now, but I fear these back to back trips will only exacerbate her exhaustion.  I suspect  the lingering effects of her bronchitis might still be depleting her energy.

In addition to this marathon of back to back trips, S. needs to help me decide if Ralph will undergo surgery on Monday to have his ruptured ACL repaired.  The timing couldn’t be worse for my schedule, as I have to begin the final leg of my semester that morning.  However, in light of  our vet’s not being able to operate over Spring Break and my needing  to leave for Vietnam the first week of May, there may be no better time  in the foreseeable future.  So it’s now or never.

Wait–whether  it’s the Elvis song or the one from “Fiddler on the Roof,” this post includes more music than I know how to handle.  I may not be the most well-informed when it comes to popular culture,  but I do know one thing for certain–that  I don’t know how to end this without digging myself deeper and deeper into cliche, so I’ll not fiddle any more with revision.  Good God!  Could it get any worse!

It looks like S. has found us an apartment in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon–one bedroom, one bath, lots of light, and, most importantly, wireless internet access.  It is nothing special, certainly without  some of the comforts I’ve come to associate with Bangkok, but adequate and centrally located in the heart of District One, the section of town with the highest concentration of expats and western style restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues.  It’s a relief to know  this search may have reached a successful conclusion.

Or has it?  I’m a bit concerned that S. did not determine if the place has backup generators.  I had read and S. experienced the other day that electricity is not always available.  Monday, for example, her office had no power, and without the ability to generate their own electricity, her staff had to relocate to restaurants and cafes around  town that did have that capacity.  Not knowing whether we’ll have that ability frustrates me, especially since I don’t handle  heat very well and want to feel confident we won’t be without air conditioning. 

More comforting, however,  is the fact that I’ve finished grading my second batch of student papers for the semester–and even more exciting than that–the fact that I finished with a good chunk of Spring Break left to enjoy.  Yet,  it’s more the idea of recreation than recreation itself that I appreciate, since I still have gobs of other work to do.  But it would be nice to go into next week ahead rather than behind, and having the time to so position myself is actually a luxury. 

Plus, I suspect  the semester will move quickly once Spring Break is ended, and it will be no time before I find myself rushing to leave for Vietnam myself–and that  Saigon apartment  we may well swelter in this summer.  No, I  hope I’m  wrong about the generator issue, and if it gets too hot, maybe I can insist on a trip to the beach.   Maybe generators aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

S. is finally feeling semi-human again and successfully navigating the chaos that is motorbike traffic in Ho Chi Minh City.  On Sunday she walked without incident from her hotel near Le Van Tam Park all the way east to the Saigon River–a distance of, perhaps, 30 blocks.  That she felt well enough to embark on such a hike indicates to me just how much better she’s feeling.  I’m relieved–especially since I haven’t heard her cough since Saturday.  I think we’re well on our way to healthier days.

Tomorrow S. leaves for a three day trip to the far south of Vietnam, where refugees from the Khmer Rouge regimie in Cambodia eek out a bleak existence, living off of garbage dumps in the Mekong delta.  Her NGO is undertaking a building project in the region that will help house these people.  If you recall, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in the 70’s, exterminating more than a million ethnic Muslim minorities and intellectual elite–many of whom fled into Thailand and Vietnam.  It is the current generation of this displaced group that needs housing now in the south of Vietnam.

S. will return to Saigon on Saturday, before leaving for Hanoi in the middle of the following week–a three or four day trip to visit with members of her staff who office there and with our friends Robin and Luyen.  I believe I may have mentioned before that Robin works for another international NGO and Luyen is a Vietnamese fashion designer.  They met and married while Robin was working in a Vietnamese refuge camp to which  Luyen had fled during the war.

Back in Lexington I am enjoying Spring Break, not so much for its freedom from work, but more for the freedom it allows me to do the work I need to–a rare luxury, actually.  So far I’ve done little more than grade student essays and run errands.  However, the weather today has been lovely–warm sunshine.  I sat outside  in it  this afternoon while grading.  The  dogs enjoyed their opportunity to lounge in the sun and sniff the yard.  Inch by inch and foot by foot, they circled the fence line looking for God knows what, navigating,  noses to  earth,  with seeming disregard for the eventual success or failure of their search. 

If only I could experience such satisfaction in the process, in the mere doing of anything, less concerned about the outcome and more engaged in the nose-to-earth navigation itself–there’s surely something about the smell of soil  that keeps us grounded, mindful of the place we’ve all been planted.

 S.’s most recent observation about  Vietnamese culture went something like this:  “They have no respect for the sidewalk here!”  Yes, that’s it folks–the well-traveled woman we all know and love has  declared  that  “the sidewalk,”  those elongated paths of concrete and cement that border our streets and roads, merit  our “respect.”  She has established “the sidewalk”  as a social  institution of sorts–one that deserves not only care and maintenance, but also a degree of honor,  a place of prominence. a certain status, if you will.

Clearly, I make much more of this comment than it merits, but I do so to make a point–namely that I think I’m in trouble, that I think I am soon to experience a culture shock like none I ever imagined.  If you know S., you’re aware that it takes a lot to ruffle her cultural feathers.  She’ll eat any animal organ, consume the testicles or brain of any creature a culture requires of her.  She tends to embrace  the social norms of any nation or tribe she encounters,  no matter how seemingly unfamiliar they may be to her.  Given this fact about her, and given her sidewalk comment, fleeting as it may have been,  I suspect I’m about to receive a cultural kick in the ass of sorts.

You see, I’m a cultural wimp compared to S.–a light weight in terms of travel and ability to adapt to the extreme of anything, whether it be  diet, or temperature, or what-have-you.  I need order and routine, my cup of Lipton tea and can of  Pepsi Max, preferably both at one time, if you will, in double-fisted fashion, if at all possible.

So, you see, if S. experiences a cultural phenomenon as “pedestrian” to us as sidewalks to be strange in a place  or outside her comfort zone, this tells me more about the place than it does anything about the woman I love–namely that I had better prepare myself, that I had better duck and cover or run and hide, because much of what I associate with comfort and normalcy, what I consider to be as ordinary and pedestrian as sidewalks, may be hard to come by once  I step  foot  in this  place that could become  Oz to me, that may make  me  say, “I don’t  think we’re in Kansas anymore.”   Oh, I have no ruby slippers.  I may have to go shoe shopping.

My student Laura says the new Facebook looks like the old Twitter, which may indeed be the case.   I wouldn’t know a Tweet from a Squeak, but I’ll take her word for it.  She should know.  I, on the other hand, remain mostly bothered by Facebook’s forcing us to post “Status Updates” in the third person.  I had hoped the new version would eliminate that flaw, but no such luck.  If anything, it’s worse.  Yet this has not interrupted my addiction to the site.  I need a 12 step group.  I may require an intervention from friends and family who love me enough to pry my dying fingers from the mouse and bring me back to a world of face to real face communication–god, there we go with that image again.  The site is insidious.  It gets into your blood, and you’re  never the same. 

At any rate, while I was  instant messaging with my sister  last night (on Facebook, of course), I began to wonder why people don’t publish books of these abbreviated dialogues, like they assemble the correspondence of important people, so the rest of us can read what it’s like to be rich, or famous, or popular,  or behind bars.  Sometimes  Lynn is so damn funny, I imagine others might appreciate her humor and want to read her terse one-liners.  Our instant messaging works well  because  I provide the boring backdrop against which Lynn can pitch her comments.  The comic always needs a straight face at which to sling her zingers, unless of course she plays the more serious role herself and deflects amusing comments off her own shiny surfaces.

So much for my musings on the nature of comedy.  I know about as much about it, as I do about Twitter.

Good news from the blog gods–yesterday more than 100 people logged onto my site and read my  endless ramblings!  This is exciting and motivates me to write today–even though, for me, it’s late, I’m tired, and you may not care how many lost souls actually consume my  silly posts.

However, you may care to know that S. seems to be feeling better.  Please note that I use the word “seems” purposefully, as I am beginning to look less at her health as it varies from day to day and more at longer term trends.  Clearly one day of seeming improvement does not a trend make.  I should add that she at least looks better, though by “better” I  mean little more than  “less miserable.”  Interpret this as you will. 

S. has mentioned that so far Vietnam seems to lack the aesthetic of  Thailand and warned that Ho Chi Minh may not offer some of the creature comforts I had learned to associate with Bangkok.  Apparently the infrastructure of Vietnam has not kept pace with other places in Asia and what is there has not always been well maintained.  Is  this the impact of Communism on the country or the residual effect of war that seeps  into the very heart and soul and soil of a city and lingers even 30 years  after the fighting itself has stopped?

In addition to these aesthetic and infrastructure issues S. also describes what, even to her, seem to be strange traffic patterns.  For instance, several days ago a colleague from her Bangkok office warned that Vietnam had an over-abundance of motor bikes.  S. suspected this could not possibly be the case, as she had traveled extensively in places like India where the behaviour of motorcyclists was indeed bizarre and  frightened even her.  She has always told me that India was one country in which she would NEVER drive!  However, she mentioned this morning that she now knows what her friend meant.  Yesterday as she attempted to cross the street to her office, she was nearly  run off the sidewalk, when seeming armies of motorbikes merged onto and overtook every inch of the already crowded walkway, creating an extra lane of traffic to alleviate increased congestion on the street itself.  She said that as it is sidewalks nearly cease to exist, as shops overtake them, moving their goods out to the edges of on-coming traffic in an effort to accommodate a claustrophobic and suffocating lack of space.  On her Facebook page today, she even boasts having completed  her most recent crossing without having suffered bodily harm. 

Thank goodness  for even the smallest of successes, whether they relate to sidewalk survival or blessings from the blog gods.  We take what we can get!

Okay, S. is still quite sick, which upsets me considerably.  Actually, she had begun to feel better, or so it seemed, so I did not offer a health  update yesterday.  Now, however, her apparent relapse concerns me.  Plus, she  sounds  miserable–utterly so.  Perhaps, I’m over-reacting, but it’s difficult to be sick so far from home and almost as difficult to know someone you love is struggling in that way.

At any rate, S’s first 36 hours in Vietnam have proven fairly uneventful, outside of this health scare.  She visited her new office yesterday and met her staff of 40, a group that consists of Vietnamese and ex-pats alike.  Friday she will move to a hotel closer to the office, so she can begin an apartment search in that neighborhood over the weekend.  Gosh, it all seems to be happening so quickly!

In addition to worrying about S’s health, I remain busy on the home front, working this evening to assemble a panel of students whose work we will feature in the Undergraduate Writing Symposium.  I have approached a group of four.  Hopefully they will all be willing to participate.

I think I will hurry and post this with little attention to revision.  I want to relax with a book for a while before bed.  Recreational reading relaxes me like little else.  Thank God for good books and great adventure–if only now we can all stay strong and healthy or, at least, remain a little less sick.

Good News–S. has arrived safely in Ho Chi Minh City!  I always feel better knowing she’s settled comfortably in a new location.  So, now all of you can cheer along with me at this milestone, minor as it may seem.  Actually arrival on Vietnamese soil may prove more significant than I can accurately appreciate  at the moment, especially since this will be our home away from home for some months to come.  I’m especially curious to hear her impressions of the place once she’s seen it in day light.  She did mention, however, that she’s not terribly thrilled with her current accommodations, compared with the hotel she had just left in Bangkok which was twice as nice for less than half the price.  Though that may say more about the extreme affordability of Bangkok than any inherent flaw in her Ho Chi Minh hotel.

At any rate, I did manage to accomplish one significant task toward my own eventual departure for Asia–namely the purchase of a Blackberry 8830 World Phone.  This will allow me to stay in telephone contact with friends and family in the US.  Mostly we will communicate via Skype, which is free, but it’s important I have the Blackberry for emergencies.  It’ also fairly affordable for text messaging  internationally–not to mention being able to send and receive email from virtually anywhere.  All in all a good purchase and one with which I’m excited to experiment.

I might also mention in closing that S. is fighting a case of bronchitis that sent her to the hospital before leaving Bangkok.   The illness left her alone in her Thai hotel room for several days, alone and clearly feeling fairly miserable.  It continues to throw her into coughing spasms that are painful to watch and listen to.

Oh, well, this is clearly not one of my most exciting posts of the past month.  However, I guess it does manage to keep readers updated with recent developments.  Stay tuned for more about Vietnam as seen via daylight.  In the mean time, there’s much to be said for safe passage.