May 12, 2013

It was the perfect day to wind down after such a grueling road trip. I was up before seven and just after sending an email to my sister letting her know my Internet connection was working, she replied wanting to skype right away.

I finished my coffee and then spoke to my sister for almost two hours before my connection was abruptly cut off. We mostly talked about my mom’s deteriorating condition and the frustrating habit she’d developed now of not wanting to answer the telephone thus worrying everyone unnecessarily.

Esther also informed me that my niece Estefania had notified her at the last minute that she’d made other plans for transportation to her prom and would not need the services she’d been requesting for months. I haven’t heard from her since I asked to see a copy of her school grades.

The aspirations I had for her of attending a prestigious college based on her grades and extracurricular activities turned out to be just a mirage as she never really cared to study and detested reading all along.

I had some of the banana bread Willoughby had given me and a mug of foamy hot chocolate for breakfast. The combination tasted divine and made me question again why some people would settle for eating rice porridge every day.

I then got started on the “To do List” I had fashioned on the plane yesterday and got Max to give me the name and address of the restaurant where we’ll holding the May meeting for the book club. I sent out the notice right away.

With the much faster Internet connection, I was able to upload all my photos to Facebook along with copies posted to the Central Asia RELO and the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek. I also emailed Gulnaz all the photos I’d taken at her parents’ dacha.

I had a bowl of cereal and yogurt for lunch and even that tasted so much better than much of what I had eaten for the last three weeks. I took a long shower, did my hair and put on my favorite pair of pajamas to then watch a movie, “Grace is Gone”, starring one of my favorite actors, John Cusack. The movie was a very sensitive treatment of father dealing with the death of his spouse, who was serving in Iraq, and how he breaks the news to his daughters.

After thinking long and hard about the incident at the airport yesterday, I crafted a carefully worded email to Elvira, not to apologize since I didn’t feel that my reaction had been out of line, but to reiterate my befuddlement at her lack of planning so that our road trip could have come to a more harmonious end. She replied with a two line message saying she’d done what she had to do to comply with the paperwork requirement and was hoping I wasn’t still mad at her. No allusion was made to my original complaint.

Anna wrote to send me the tentative program for the CATEC conference and then I noticed the many mistakes in it such as missing articles, wrong prepositions and lack of subject referent. I started the corrections and got to page 17 before realizing the document contained 39 pages in all. Reluctant to undertake such a huge task on my own, I wrote to Anna suggesting we do it together sometime next week.

She replied to say the mistakes had been made by the presenters in their original submissions and that she wasn’t available to work on the document at all. The tentative program is to be emailed to Jennifer on Wednesday the 15 and she recommended that I complete the corrections on my own.

I agreed to do so as long as I could work from home as I was too tired to go to Lingua where most likely I’d be facing lots of interruptions anyway. I carbon copied Natalia, Gulnara and Jennifer on the message to cover all bases.