I am extremely tired today. It’s hard to keep my eyes open. I blame my urinary tract. As part of getting older, I now wake up every morning at seven and have to get up to pee. Once I’m back in bed, it’s hard to go back to sleep for that last hour so I often lie there, thinking and dozing, instead of being asleep. Then I get to work, and I’m a zombie. Damn bladder.

Speaking of urine the Peace Corps volunteer retrieved her dog yesterday. She was late, of course, but at least she came. I had been threatening to put the dog out on the street to wait for her, and I’m not sure Rani didn’t realize I didn’t mean it. (and even if I had meant it, no way would Kir let me do something like that.) But the dog was a pain. She peed any time we let her into the house, including on the couch and on my shirt. And she could never decide if she wanted to play with Tezy or savage her. Sometimes they’d play for hours, and sometimes she’d lunge snarling. So her week with us was spent mostly being an outside dog. We only let her in when she could be closely supervised. She slept outside. At first the dog didn’t seem to mind, but eventually she’d lie next to the front door and cry pitifully.

Last night, Rani did some work on the internet, I got ready for bed and choose clothes for the morning, and Kir sat on the couch with the dog, singing her a medley of songs he had adapted to be about a yellow puppy named Tezy. Kir is a total sap about our dog. I love that. Despite all the time, expense, prayer, sprints across airport runways, and international incidents the dog has engendered, I am really awfully glad we have her. We needed a dog.

Now that we’re in Turkmenistan, we especially really need a dog. She counteracts all the dread of everyday life with her sheer adorableness. That’s a good quality in a housemate.

Our landlady called me at work today. She explained that she had noticed we turn off the air conditioners when we leave the house, and was calling to tell me that we could leave it on because they would shut off automatically if there was a power outage, and she had brought us the manual so we’d be able to use the a/c properly. I said that we knew they would shut off automatically and that we turned them off because there was no point keeping the house cold when we weren’t home. This confused her, and she got off the phone.

Under the influence of Accordion Guy, Kir bought an accordion last week. (also because we’d decided that we need hobbies to survive) He’s been happily noodling away with it ever since, trying to figure out how everything works. He’s already got most of the keys mastered. We’re looking for a teacher. Luckily, Kir can take his lessons in Russian if he needs to.

I am jealous of his ability to figure out a musical instrument, and his confidence that he’ll be able to learn a new one. I consider myself pretty musical – played trombone and piano as a kid, have a good ear, remember music vividly after hearing it. But I know I could never write music, and music isn’t something I’d ever be able to just figure out. I don’t know if it’s a lack of training or just an intellectual lack.

It could well be an intellectual lack. There are other things I simply cannot do that no amount of training can help with. I can remember paragraphs of text, all the way to knowing where on the page a certain thing was mentioned, but I can’t for the life of me hold a map in my head of anything other than New York State. My mental faculties just don’t work that way. I also suck at strategy games – I am no good at either bridge or chess because I can’t plan my strategy several moves in advance.

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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.