I write as I watch the infinitesimal drifting snow descend, just beginning to make a checkerboard pattern on the flat roof of the bank building across the street. It's cold enough to think of making waffles as my common cold makes its common exit - lengthy, episodic, and just present enough to abrade my face.
The hardest events of the year are over now (soon to be replaced by the new hardest moments of the year), those being the return to work rhythm, offshore inspection, open house, observation, and the dreaded parents' night. The parents' night, as it always does, ended up being much ado about nothing, and a source of free oddly-bottled dutch style coffee and macarons. I got 30+ years into life without having a macaron, incidentally: I could think of worse ways to get diabetes.
The apartment has been improved since I arrived on a sweltering Saturday evening in August. The multitudinous legions of long dark hairs left by the previous occupants have been given a solid thrashing, an entire floor has been torn up and replaced, doors painted, a new giant bed delivered, the dryer demystified, and the toilet/vanity replaced. The only cost here was my sanity as I swept and swept, only to find the hairs had made another feint out into the exact middle of the kitchen.
This ignores the other improvements, such as the mountain of houseware-type things that became immediately necessary after Lynette arrived but that I had somehow survived without before. Ignored, also, would be the products of scavenging - my neighbourhood is a pretty ex-patty one, and so there is turnover and thus stuff put out for free regularly. Yesterday I collected two nice bedside tables, to go with my earlier free 27 inch TV and $250 super-vacuum that had, bless its heart, a plastic spoon stuck in the hose (thus, thrown out...fixed in 3 minutes). This comprehensively beats buying such things, in my opinion.
I've hosted large dinners at my house, but think I'm out of that business for a while; the disadvantage is that nobody else has the facilities (or seemingly, the desire) to hold dinners I could cruise into and escape from as a fatter person. It's just as well, in a way, that I'll be tropically away for the Christmas season, as I can dodge playing chef/butler/scullion boy.
It'll be interesting to be in Vietnam for Christmas, as I imagine there won't be ice falling from the sky. I think I'll celebrate with a mai-tai, preferably in a coconut, inevitably in shorts.
I have my first confirmed visitors to South Korea, following in the footsteps of Tangle and Tyler who visited darkest China (respect) - Lynette's mother and father. They've arranged moderately comfortable flights and a nice looking airbnb not too far away, and cherry-picked the warm start of May to drop by. It will be interesting to see them here, as their recent travels seem to have been limited to shuttling back/forth to Amsterdam. Seoul is a place where things can be as comfortably western as you can possibly expect in Asia, I'd imagine, but that can get fairly exotic if you turn down a side street; I really recommend anyone come visit, but I understand the cost being a barrier to most.
I'm off to loudly blow my nose and make waffles, because I have to and because I can. It can keep on snowing all day for all I care; I loaded up on food at the Costco already. Because, you know, Asia.
