Chok Dee

Last night I saw Jens off. He caught a train to Bangkok (it was 2.5 hrs late), and should be boarding his flight to Mumbai as I write this. As we enjoyed those two bonus hours of brother time at the train station we marveled over how much one's life can change in a matter of weeks. He plays poker online for a living, so most of his day is spent doing just one thing, over, and over again (actually, he does a lot of data mining, and acording to his numbers, he may be the most consistently successful online poker players in the world. Hope I haven't outed him). So flying to Thailand, seeing our parents and grandmother, traveling to Angkor, putting 1600 km on a rental car, and helping his brother and sister-in-law pack up to leave Thailand for good, makes for a busy month, and quite a change of pace from the preceding year. Jami and I did those very same things with him, and now, as we camp out at our friend Andrew's place, we take turns scaring each other about returning to the States. We've had a fairly cozy life here; five hours of work a day split 60/40 between us, cheap rent, cheap food, space to work, time to work, and time enough to make a baby with out trying too hard (or at all really). We're a bit sad to leave, and aren't looking forward to the reentry shock. We'll see how it goes this time, but this would be my third bad case in less than ten years. Makes us wonder if we're cut out to be Americans.

I've been editing and uploading photos from the holidays for the past three days. I'll post some to this blog, but the impatient among you can head over to my flickr page. I would recommend the Thailand or Cambodia sets.