Ian says Dell sucks and their computers are crap. This might be related to his computer crashing due to a faulty hard drive the day before he submitted his dissertation. Anyway, he asked me to spread the word and so I am. Ian, by the way, had the most astonishing bad luck I’ve ever run into. It’s not major bad luck – after all, he is smart, cute, American, middle class, and has a family that loves him, but in every possible small way. I was going to make a list, and was reading through old emails for input, and found myself laughing so hard that I had to stop, especially since most of his bad luck can’t be easily summarized. Kir is thinking that maybe we shouldn’t let him meet any of our unattached female friends, though. Why risk someone we love marrying into that kind of luck?

I am going to attempt to make Thai food tonight. Everyone cross your fingers for me. Lately, everything I make has been turning out badly, even hot cocoa. (We had to wash the dog because her fur was all sticky. It’s a long story.)

There is a chance that my visa will not be renewed in October when it expires. I am trying to plan for it, so that I will not be running around like an idiot if it happens. Unfortunately, contingency planning makes me feel like a fool. Somehow, it just seems ridiculous to make a whole complex plan for one small eventuality. And my colleagues agree with me. They keep telling me that well worry about the visa denial if it happens.

But I’m going to be traipsing around Central Asia for most of September (Dushanbe, here I come), which doesn’t give me much time to deal with the issue then. So I’ve been calling our Uzbekistan office to discuss using their space if I have to leave, figuring out how to export our car, and preparing a power of attorney letter for our office manager so she can ship my possessions if she has too. And all of it has me feeling like Chicken Little.

Or if not an alarmist, a time-waster. I suspect that same feeling is the reason we don’t have an emergency evacuation kit, an earthquake kit, or even a first-aid kit. It seems overly self-indulgent to spend time and money on something that may never occur.

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.