Update from TE

This place has been a bit quiet lately so let me fill you in on what I have heard from my perch just outside the kitchen and family room of my current hosts.

To start with, the real bread winner (rye and pumpernickel -- none of that Wonder Bread crap) lost out on her ambassadorship. Seems politics and the the impact of a poor policy in a certain far-away country ended up helping someone else. (Qualifications and talent are still having a hard time bubbling to the top.)

So now she is out looking for another job. She is in the running for a couple of good jobs outside the country. We'll just have to see what happens.

Over all, however, things are a bit depressing.

Of course, if she does get a job abroad I will have to find a new home.

As mentioned in earlier postings, I am seen as a bit of threat. So maybe it is time to change the rules and let the next generation learn of the joys of having a once-a-year bather and is mule stay a while.

On with the news.

The adult slacker, sorry, husband of the bread winner, picked up an extra class to teach this term. Seems a teacher needed major surgery just before classes began so the hubby here got the gig.

Slowly he is catching up on what he has to do for the class. So far so good I keep hearing.

Guess the school thing is working out for the older kid.

I hear occasional snippets of phone conversations and I noticed last month the whole group -- including the dog -- were gone for a few days. When the crew got back they were minus two people.

Seems the BW had to go overseas for a conference and that left junior going off to college.

The BW and hubby will probably go up to the school some time in October to deliver a few extra dorm goodies and to see the campus when it is full of students.

From what I hear junior is doing fine and making some interesting new friends. Seems there are some students in his new school that know come from other countries where the family once lived. Junior and these new acquaintances have mutual friends from the various international schools.

The remaining son is in his last year of high school. He's got a solid and hard class load but seems to handling it well so far.

He is looking seriously at other small liberal arts schools. He may even be looking further north.

The fact that both these guys want to go to schools in the frozen north must be some kind of reaction to having lived in tropic zones for the past seven years. Personally, I don't see it. I like my gold prospecting done in the heat. None of that Robert Service/Sam McGee/Dan McGrew stuff for me. ('tain't being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains)

(Well maybe one poem that does strike my fancy: The Three Bares)

So that's it.

Write if you get work. (Or quit it.)