Back in Zambia many months ago, Trevor and I attended a "close of service" conference to talk about post-Peace Corps life. We talked at excruciating length about reverse culture shock-- the notion that the adjustment to home can be much more difficult than going away in the first place.

Along with our absolute glee over being home, we have both experienced darker moments of melting down in the grocery store, momentarily forgetting which is the "right" side of the road, and missing our quiet routine, free time, and friends in Zambia.

Having adjusted to life in Zambia, we now see America with a much more critical eye. I'm especially having trouble with the way people here fritter away their time (Facebook!) and money, then complain about being broke and overbooked.

The upside is using this information to make better decisions about how to craft our own new/old lives. And lots of practice in keeping our big mouths shut!

You've may have noticed that I'm not updating this blog much now that I'm back in Americaland.

Even though every day with Trevor is an adventure (and we continue to travel, just much smaller journeys!), I'm not feeling all that inspired to post anymore.

I may shift over to my craft blog soon-- when/if I do, I'll put a note here!

While I used my intermittent internet access to stay in touch with America while we were in Zambia, I hadn't counted on technology connecting me back to Africa. I guess I figured I would only keep track of Zambia by way of our remaining Peace Corps friends.

But to my happy surprise, more and more of my Zambian friends are popping up on my Facebook list. This morning I heard from a buddy in Chadiza that a colleague Trevor and I worked with closely died unexpectedly last week. This guy was young, probably in his mid-30s, with small children. His untimely death comes as another grim reminder to me of what Zambia taught me again and again-- life is short (especially for Africans with crap health care and limited public services!).

I don't know the circumstances of our friend's death, but coincidentally another friend in Zambia posted on Facebook that she saw three dead bodies on the road yesterday, reminding me to be grateful for ambulances. Amen to that.

Over the past two years, Trevor and I spent a lot of time scheming ways to fix up our home in America. Trevor mostly wanted to dig his hands in the garden. Me, I'm more interested in the interiors.

We spent one year in a mud hut with dirt-colored walls and another year in a tiny house where the landlord didn't even want us putting pictures on the wall. Upon taking possession of our own home again, I made a visit to the hardware store for gallons of paint-- mango, yellow, robin's egg blue, minty green. Our rooms look like an Easter basket.

A new couch is on its way to replace the dirt-colored one passed down from my grandma. Also, we replaced our fridge. The new one has an ice maker.

Trevor and I loved the street life in Zambia-- countless people cruising the roads by foot and bike at all times of day, in town and way out in the bush.

Still, we yearned for our friendly and safe neighborhood back home, both when we lived on a walled compound (locked in with our argumentative and often drunk landlords) and when we lived on a family compound in the village, where we could only escape constant scrutiny by hiding in our dark little hut.

In America, we live in a funky old house with a huge yard, around the corner from my parents and a mile from a flourishing downtown with an impressive public library. Now that we're home, I walk the dogs around the block and chat with the friendly neighbors, feeling very Mr. Rogers. We eat dinner at the picnic table in the front porch and greet the strolling passersby. All last week, folks stopped by in to welcome us back to the neighborhood, bringing fresh strawberries, lettuce, and flowers from their gardens.

Even though I am surrounded by drip-covered cans of paint, half emptied boxes, lamps with no bulbs, and complicated to-do lists, I am so incredibly happy to be home in my home that is filled with luxuries large and small.

I've got a contented little dog sighing on the couch next to me, a laptop that's repaired after contracting nearly deadly viruses in Africa, a very secure wireless high-speed internet connection, and ice clunking out of the ice maker I insisted on installing in my new refrigerator.

Best of all, I have upcoming dates with friends and family AND a husband on his way home from day three of his perfect new job and leaving Sunday for a conference while I audition a potential second dog.

And I am soaking it all in.

On our drive up to Fargo last weekend for the marathon we had many hours to admire the stark but bewitching Midwestern landscape. Barns, fields, cows, etc. We also had the opportunity to indulge our love of road food (Fritos, giant fountain sodas, a cooler full of sandwiches), rest areas (especially the info centers staffed by friendly, helpful senior citizens; the ones in South Dakota even gave out commemorative pins and called the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead for opening hours!), and radio (the highlight: hearing the tie-breaking extra inning of Sunday's Cardinals game).

I love how the highway also incubates great conversations. We talked about how we might use what we learned in the past two years to shape our future.

And the future is already underway-- we've swung right back into painting our house in preparation for moving in over the weekend (we hope) before Trevor starts his new job Tuesday!!

In the week since we've been home, I've remembered how frantic and busy life in America can be. Catching up with friends and family, making way too many trips to Target, fixing up our house to move back in, job interviews (Trevor, not me), eating our weight in tortilla chips (me, not Trevor) ...

All this, and we're headed to Fargo this weekend for a marathon that we signed up for back in January. Those initial slogs through Zambia's rainy season seem far away now. Trevor has kept up with his training schedule through all the travel and time changes, but I've struggled with motivation and now a cold and a weird pain in my knee. Luckily I'm only doing the half marathon. If I have to, I'll walk. Or crawl.

I have debated whether to continue writing the blog now that Trevor and I are back home, and I've decided I will for now. After all, life with Trevor is always a journey!

And we're still traveling! We spent part of this week on the road, visiting family in St. Louis. We observed that culture shock hits much worse in the city than our relatively sleepy little town. St. Louis takes America to the extreme, with its sprawling strip malls and multi-lane highways full of Hummers (seriously!??!) and angry, honking drivers. Although I love having the opportunity to buy a 32 oz. Diet Dr. Pepper for 59 cents, I didn't miss family drama or traffic.

Well, the journey is now complete-- we're home, at least in our hometown, if not in our own actual house (that will be another week or two). We managed to dodge the cloud of volcanic ash and arrive just a few hours late instead of days late as I had feared.

It's fabulous to be home! Although we're still a little jetlaggy, we're soaking in what's left of the spring flowers, catching up with family and friends, eating way too much of everything, and plotting our next steps. Trevor already has a job interview.

Maybe we'll get slammed by the reverse culture shock that everybody has warned us about, but for now I'm loving the grocery store full of a zillion choices, listening to NPR while I go for a run wearing whatever I want and not getting stared at or commented upon, and letting the dog sleep on my pillow. (Although she snores.)

I feel like the universe is messing with me as I nervously scroll the interwebs trying to figure out how I might change our airline tickets if, in fact, the Dublin airport does not open back up in the next 36 hours. This is one of those times I'm cursing myself for booking online instead of through a human being, and for not buying travel insurance.

I just want to go home. I would swim if I could, though my giant heaps of luggage would quickly pull me under.

As we walked from Amsterdam's Central Station back to the hotel where we're meeting Trevor's dad and brother, we lamented the fact that the family had to arrive on such a gloomy day and after the Queen's Night festivities. Not only did Trevor's brother miss the flea market, which he would have loved, but the normally pristine streets are filled with wet garbage. And a lot of other really icky stuff.

But when I walked our laundry around the corner, I saw scrubby Dutch people out, sweeping the sidewalks. And the sun keeps peeking out.

Now, if they would just hurry up and get here!

We went out late yesterday afternoon just to see what all the Queenès Night fuss was about, only to find that just about every street in Utrecht's city center had become a long, skinny garage sale. We walked around in the increasingly packed streets until just past dark, around 9:30 pm, and bought a few small things. The market and accompanying party were allegedly going to continue all night but it started thundering and raining around midnight, which quieted things down a bit.

In the morning, a few hardy souls were setting up their stalls again in the drizzle, but other people had dumped their wares off the tables and abandoned the junk on the streets. A dumpstererès delight!

By accident, we've landed in Utrecht just in time to celebrate Queen's Night (and day), an overnight, citywide drunken party commemorating the Queen's birthday. According to our hosts at the Hostel Strowis where we're staying, the entire city will also be filled with a giant flea market.

Knowing us, I'm more nervous about the flea market than the party.

After a full day of strolling around Amsterdam, shopping like the day after Thanksgiving, lamenting all the treasures we lost in our bags, and being somewhat relieved to be rid of what we could freely admit was four giant bags of mostly junk, arrived back at our hotel to discover our luggage was on their way over from Schiphol airport.

Praise be!

Now, not only do we have our original stuff back, but Trevor has an entire ensemble of Dutch hipster clothing, complete with purple trousers!

Also, during our travels, Trevor dumpstered a giant pile of old maps, so now we have even more crap than before. (And remember how before, it was already way too much stuff, mostly garbage? Yeah.)

I knew we had re-entered civilization when we landed at the Cairo airport and promptly spent $30 on breakfast.

But aside from sticker shock and disappearing luggage, I have to say that it's a complete pleasure to be back in the first world.

We flew almost directly north from Johannesburg (according to the in-flight map, we actually flew right over Chipata!) and even though we traveled for 24 hours, we didn't change a single time zone. But we left behind blistering equatorial weather and the worst mosquitos in 27 months, landing instead in gorgeous, cool spring weather with blooming daffodils and sunlight until past 9 pm! Plus sidewalk cafes, jazz on the radio, free high-speed internet, coffee on every corner, and people who mistake us for locals.

"Praying for the best" did not turn out to not be a winning strategy this time.

We managed to arrive in Amsterdam without a single delay, but our bags did not.

Things got off to a bad start when the check-in agents in Lusaka tried to charge us $590 for overweight bags (a dubious claim, since they somehow got much heavier between being weighed at the office and arriving at the airport). Then the agents offered to help us sort out the manner if I could give them "a little something to buy drinks."

When they mocked the size of my bribe, I knew we were in trouble. But I could not have guessed that "trouble" would mean they seemingly did not check in our bags at all. All four have completely disappeared from the airline's computer system, though we have the claim tickets.

Well, the silver lining is that, as noted above, Trevor finally has a legitimate excuse to share my underwear. (Though we bought him a new set of clothes-- including undies-- on the way to the hotel.)

And in our frenzy to collude with the gate agents and make it look like we were making our bags lighter, we threw a ton of stuff from our checked bags into our carry-ons, so we have a bunch of things that would otherwise be lost now. And my carry-on contains the clothes I planned to wear on the holiday, so even though Trevor landed with nothing but a toothbrush and sandals, it could be worse. We have money, so I think we'll manage somehow.

Normally, we travel light-- for example, once we spent two weeks in Europe with carry-on luggage alone, including bike helmets.

I had hoped it would be the same thing for our trip home, seeing as how we're traveling via Europe, with about ten billion stops along the way. But alas, we have managed to accumulate even more stuff than we came here with, which is even more incredible when you realize we have jettisoned nearly everything we arrived with and acquired all new stuff while we were here.

As a result, we've spent the morning madly weighing our numerous bags and checking airline websites to make sure we're within the limits. As with our reservations, I can't get a definitive answer so I'm about ready to give up and just pray for the best.

That's it-- after a few teary speeches, handing out of commemorative patches, and ringing of a bell (actually a tire rim, but close enough), we're now officially Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.

Seeing as how we're still not 100 percent sure we're going anywhere tomorrow (more likely: we leave Zambia and sit in Cairo for... awhile), this seems a bit premature. But still! We're done!

I spent most of yesterday drooling and talking funny after my date with the dentist.

Friends have expressed disbelief that I willingly underwent dental work (fillings) in Zambia, but I have to say that the dentist office here is way more modern and fancy than my dentist at home-- murals painted on the ceiling, a killer sound system, pina colada-flavored numbing gel!

Also, I have heard such horror stories about getting Peace Corps to reimburse medical expenses once you leave the country that there was no way in hell I was getting on a plane without getting every possible problem taken care of.

As a bonus, Trevor was very amused by the drooling.

After watching the news last night i started fretting that the our cos

trip will be scuttled because of the volcano. And that we will forfeit

our plane tickets and room deposits plus have to find a new way home.Still feeling anxious i got up to discover no breakfast at the hotel,

then at the office there had been a change of schedule making me

instantly late for a doctor's appointment. Now i'm sitting in the

doctor's office with a bunch of sneezing and screaming kids while i

wait for the medical officer to fax over the form she was supposed to

give me at the office.And i forgot to bring a book, so instead have been working on my final

financial statement that appears to be laughably unbalanceable.Holy monday from hell.

We had our going-away party Friday night, and although several friends were out of town, we still managed to have a rollicking party.

Me, I managed to drink an entire bottle of wine by myself, and thus spent my last full day in Chipata suffering (and sleeping) through the worst hangover of my life.

At least I had an entire day to recover before getting in a truck to drive to Lusaka. And I wasn't doing anything, anyway.

When we went to Europe a few years ago, we were just past security in the Amsterdam airport waiting to fly to London when a gang of terrorists got arrested trying to blow up a flight... from London to the United States. Now we're a week from flying back to Europe when a volcano over Iceland closes a massive swath of airspace over Europe.

At least for now it looks like the cloud will blow away by the time we travel, though who knows how long it will take for all those stranded people to move along.

Seriously, a volcano over Iceland?

Like my mother insisting that her enormous cats aren't fat but fluffy, I have a remarkable capacity for denial in regards to moving.

At the end of any move, I always manage to convince myself that we just have a few little things left that will fit in a sandwich bag. Of course, those last little doodads wind up being a giant pile of randomly packed sacks with a DVD, a battery, three safety pins, a pen, half a bottle of ketchup, a mini screwdriver, and a banana.

This morning we hired a canter truck to bring said random junk to the PC house (where we will dump it in the free box!), so we have officially moved out of our place. We are now living out of suitcases until we get home. Woo!

I want to take this day to thank the taxpayers of the United States for giving me and Trevor and our thousands of colleagues worldwide the opportunity to serve as Peace Corps Volunteers. Your (admittedly unintentional) tithing to the US government makes this experience possible for all of us.

I hope that our two years here has provoked some small positive change in Zambia, and possibly even in global peace and understanding. (Even if the positive is vastly outweighed by the karmic debt of killing thousands of innocent people elsewhere...) I know that our service here has had a huge impact on our lives, and that we could never have done it without your financial support.

Thank you!

We've started the painful process of saying goodbye to the surprisingly numerous friends we've made in Chipata.

Last night was an especially difficult, though delicious parting with our Italian friends/ my yoga buddy (cheese! lots of wine! gallons of pasta! onion foccicia! pastries!) made slightly more painful by the late hour and mass quantity of homemade strawberry liqueur.

I look forward to returning home not just because of my friends and

family and dog and taco bell. I also miss our cozy mr. Rogers

neighborhood with friends we can stop by and visit, a shop around the

corner where we can buy the sunday new york times, the picnic table in

our yard from which we often greet friends strolling by with their

kids and dogs.I am especially missing that at this moment, as i sit outside our

locked gate, waving taxi dust out of my eyes as i wait for Trevor to

get home with our one key. If i were locked out in america, i could

walk to my parents' house or seek refuge with a neighbor- we know most

everybody on our street. Here, i swat mosquitos and get stared at by

all the strangers passing by.

Thank god It's friday, not that the arrival of weekend will change the

things driving me crazy today, like the power going out just as i put

muffins in the oven, the grocery store being out of cheese and coffee

going on three weeks now, having to get Trevor to inspect my neck to

confirm the giant lump is just a pimple and not a fly larvae hatched

under my skin. Lifting my feet so a scorpion can scuttle under the

couch, listening to whatever lives in the roof scrabble around above

my head, tucking the mosquito net around my bed only to find myself

trapped inside with a lizard.Oh zambia, you are working my nerve.

Thanks to a harmonic convergence of electricity, repaired computer, and functioning internet, I was finally able to book the hotel rooms for the trip to Europe we'll take on our way home from Zambia. We'll travel from Lusaka to Johannesburg to Cairo to Amsterdam, then goof around in Utrecht, Hamburg, Bremen, and finally to Dublin and Chicago and HOME!

We are really stoked about the trip, but honestly our eyes are on the final prize, home. Home!

As we get ready to leave the country, we're getting rid of all sorts of things that aren't all that easy to get rid of, like the random piles of currency we've managed to collect from our neighboring countries. (We'll keep the coins, of course. Trevor the collector.)

I just sold one little pile of cash to a friend who's going on vacation to South Africa next week. Not sure what to do with the Malawian kwacha, but we'll figure something out. And our remaining Zambian kwacha will turn into Euros for the vacation that we are starting to have real hotel reservations for, woo!

A reader wrote in (woo!!!) to ask if Peace Corps finds jobs for us after we leave.

Ha!

I wish. They do offer lots and lots of advice, and we get "non-competitive eligibility" in case we want to work for the federal government (it means we can skip some hoops in getting hired; our service here also counts as years served for vacation and retirement). Other than that, we're on our own.

And let me tell you, it ain't easy looking for a job from a place with intermittent electricity and dial-up speed internet that you pay for by the MB. This is why we're not really going to start looking until we get home in May. I hear the economy is getting better little by little anyway. Maybe by May there will actually be jobs.

We've been emptying out our house by moving the stuff we're discarding over to the Peace Corps house at a rate of about one backpack load a day. Today I walked to the house carrying my old hiking boots (which I bought on the street for the Mt. Mulanje hike) that I was going to dump in the free box.

Instead, as soon as I passed through the market, a guy asked me if they were for sale. When I said yes, a crowd of taxi drivers gathered around me, and within two minutes I had sold them for half of what I originally paid. Sweet!

Trevor traveled home from his bike trip by way of a bus ride that left at 2:45 am and made him puke three times-- and says it was worth it after doing the big ride. Having him home was the perfect way to celebrate Easter-- even if we didn't have a single piece of chocolate. (Wah!)

For Trevor, the best thing about our move to Chipata has been the fact that he has made Guy Friends. Since it's a looong holiday weekend, he and his two insane biking pals have taken off on an insane biking trip.

They left at 4 this morning. When he texted me at 10, they had stopped for tea (he's with English Richard, did you guess?) and had already cycled 90 km. He said it was great.

I'm so, so glad I'm not with them.

Eating fresh avocados just about every day.

Having ridiculous amounts of free time.

The smell of the night-blooming flowers in our yard drifting in the windows at about 8 every night.

I took Ashlee (my replacement) with me to pay the electric bill. We also stopped in to file a complaint with the manager. The guy who came to shut off the power was in the office, separating a giant stack of bills that had apparently been accumulating for months.

This was after the manager told me the billing and shut-off departments are different, so he had no way of knowing who had not received their bills since December, even as they went around shutting off service (and, coincidentally, collecting huge reconnection fees). This was also after he told me how they were so understaffed they couldn't possibly deliver all the bills. Even though they managed to find two guys to come turn off our service.

On a completely unrelated note, the power then followed its regular, random schedule and shut off for 14 hours.

The guys from the power company came today to shut off the peace corps

house electricity despite the fact that we haven't gotten a bill since

december. I managed to intimidate them into going away, though they

did come back to ask for chocolate after they noticed the housekeeper

and guard having their post-lunch sweeties. That's when i stopped

being polite and just about slapped the guy.Speaking of power, i am officially a lame duck now that my replacement

has arrived. At this moment she is riding all around eastern province

to meetings i would have had to attend otherwise. Woo! That's power i

am all too happy to hand over.

I spent this entire week waiting for and making increasingly frantic

calls about money to arrive so i could pay expenses for workshop

participants who came from all over the province to learn about hiv.Naturally the money arrived on the last afternoon of the workshop, ten

minutes before the bank closed and exactly when i was scheduled to be

somewhere else, talking about writing with the snappy artist group.By now you would think i'd have learned not to look forward to doing

something i enjoy, because between zambia and the federal government

my plans will always be ... adjusted.Now It's saturday at least, and as a bonus the power didn't go out

until after i made coffee.

Mr. Ngoma's brother-in-law has been accused of growing pot. When the cops came to arrest him on Monday, the brother fled. So instead, the cops arrested Mr. Ngoma's sister and her baby.

They have been sitting in jail all week.

I met this guy Mr. Daka through the writing group that I'm working with; he was also one of the arts council people who escorted us to see cave paintings last week.

The other day Trevor was drinking a beer with him and found out by accident that several years ago, Mr. Daka's sister went to the US to study. Unfortunately, she died while she was there. A kind sociology professor raised money to send her body back to Zambia.

Naturally, she was studying in my hometown, at the University of Missouri, the school where Trevor and I (plus my entire family) studied, and where we both worked (plus most of my family). Naturally, the professor that organized the fundraiser was also one Trevor studied with. Because this is, indeed, a very, very small world.

Maybe it's because we're short-timers in Zambia now, or maybe it's just the thing that happens to people who live in Africa for awhile (our long-time-Africa-living friends seem to bear this out), but I find that I am not nearly as riled up by Zambia's daily annoyances as I was two years ago.

The power, for example, has gotten bad again lately, but I no longer feel that an hour or two without electricity every night is even worth complaining about (as long as I've gotten dinner cooked by then, that is). Shoprite was out of cheese again for a couple of weeks, and I actually caught myself thinking that I depend too much on cheese so maybe it was a good thing. (OK, I did moan about it quite a bit as well. What can I say? I love cheese.)

The computer at the PC house got the blue screen of death and got shipped off to Lusaka. This has been somewhat inconvenient for work purposes but even worse for emailing, since our laptop internet has been jacked up for several months now-- I'm currently using the laptop, and the internet works but kicks me offline after every single page load. Maddening! But whatever.

Today I'm not going to write about how over Zambia I am; I am happy to report that my soon-to-be-former home and I currently enjoy a cautious detente that I hope will hold out for 33 more days.

The funeral next door is what's over, or at least the loudest part is. After three days of ritual wailing at 5 am and 9 pm, dozens of mourners piled into the backs of pickup trucks, and singing a soaring call-and-response tune, drove away with the body.

They returned several hours later, and people still fill the yard over there, chatting and cooking-- plumes of smoke are puffing up over the wall fence as they cook shima for the crowds. Now, instead of wailing, it sounds like a neighborhood barbeque.

One of our neighbors died. Nobody told us this, but we were able to deduce it from the subtle hints, such as the ritual wailing that began around 9:30 last night and again at 5 this morning.

Also, the neighbors have erected a giant tarp/tent in their yard, directly behind ours, so that the men can sit under it while the ladies chat on the verandah, just like a village funeral. Someone else arranged branches across the path in front of their house, a signal for cyclists to walk past and show respect.

Rituals like this make Zambia seem like such a civilized, community-minded place. Knowing about funerals makes me feel like we have picked up a bit about the culture over these past two years. (Sometimes I wonder!)

The PC house pets are due for their shots this week and I had been fretting about taking them to the vet , because the vet is afraid of dogs. Sophie is the mellowest, most scaredy-cat dog I have ever met (she hides when strangers come to the gate) but still, the last time Sophie got her shots, the vet made us muzzle her and even then could barely drag himself close enough to give her the jab.

Also, I was not excited about putting the cat in a basket to drive her to the office (we would have walked Sophie; being in the truck makes her pee herself).

Imagine my relief when the agricultural supply guy in the down shops called to say he'd brought rabies medicine up from Lusaka. Simon and I were psyching ourselves up to give the shots when we found out that one of our volunteers (who, as luck would have it, arrived in town yesterday) used to work in a vet's office. Done!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! We celebrated by driving around with the district culture officer and some other Zambians to some EP historical sites, like the site of a battle between the British troops and Ngoni tribe back around 1902, way out in the bush and marked with a concrete slab that's had two of its three informational plaques pried off and stolen. Oh, Zambia!

Also way out in the bush we visited the sites of several ancient (nobody knows how ancient, maybe 400 years?) rock paintings, which frankly were pretty disappointing non-representational blocks and faded shapes that could have been animals or birds or random scratches.

On the plus side, we chanced upon a female PCV who had nearly finished biking from her own site to a friends' about 60 km away. This blew the minds of our Zambian colleagues way more than the rock paintings did ours.

Happy daylight savings time!

Nothing has sprung foward here-- we continue to enjoy our 12-ish hour days, especially since Friday was a holiday so we had three of them in a row to enjoy.

I marked the end of the long weekend by strolling down to the vegetable market, which is blissfully empty on Sundays, and buying potatoes, onions, eggplants, rape, and green beans. On the way home I chatted with a friendly guy on a bike and managed to once again avoid conversion.

The rule around here seems to be that if a neighbor's fruit hangs into your yard, it's yours to pick. Because I really wanted to make lemon bars to take to the movie party, I decided that it would be ok for me to use a rake and coax a few off our neighbor's tree. The first one (gorgeously yellow and the side of a softball) fell on the wrong side of the fence dang it, but I got enough to make the lemon bars. The bars were delicious.

We also enjoyed banana pancakes made with little green bananas I bought from ladies who sell them just in front of the dambo where they grow. And fresh avocado on toast, which is unbelievably delicious.

I'm going to miss fresh fruit.

The power went out while I was cooking up vegetables and General Tso's soy pieces for Richard's visit Thursday night. Lately when the power goes out, it's only for a little while, 20 minutes or so. So we drank wine and waited.

After nearly an hour we decided against starving to death and lit the camp stove. Trevor watched the stir-fry on the stoop outside while I ran back and forth with bowls of chopped vegetables and sauces. I had boiled the rice already, so I wrapped it in a blanket and let it finish cooking on its own.

Luckily I had already baked a cake for dessert.

After noticing the huge imbalance in the book roster (at left), Trevor complained that it looks like he doesn't read, at least compared to me.

Let it be known that Trevor does read. Every day! However, I don't keep track of what he reads as well as I do my own input. Also, he tends to choose dense, chewy books that take weeks and weeks to finish (plus he is a thorough/slow reader who actually looks up words he doesn't know instead of skipping over them like everyone else on the planet). I tend to be a skimmer, plus I freely abandon books that aren't working for me, plus I try to balance heavy stuff with quick novels, plus I am a natural evening person so I often end up reading way into the night while Trevor is sleeping like a normal person.

So there you have it. Trevor reads! Everybody reads! Three cheers for reading!

Trevor was in heaven yesterday: he got to hang out with the Smithsonian's curator of American music (and fellow jazz nut) while interviewing him for a piece the U.S. Embassy will send to Zambian radio stations.

After the interview, we got to bond with the jazz guy and the Embassy staffer over lunch and our common Midwestern roots.

In the evening, we attended the main event, a powerpoint talk and live solo performance that featured two odes to our home state (Kansas City and St. Louis Blues). Turns out the jazz guy is not only a historian, but an impressive pianist. Also, the Embassy hosted a reception with free beer. Thanks, taxpayers!