After four late night ice hockey games in five days, I take Friday off from work - I am exhausted. To top it off, I have the sniffles on Friday morning though I have no fever. After doing a few errands, I am getting worse and take an Actifed. By 3pm I am back in bed and dead to the world. At 6pm I wake up and find that the sniffles are gone - though I am still tired.
I get there and find him. I tell him of my concerns over who is (potentially) funding the effort. I let him know that it is fundamentally a personal concern that I cannot do business with a people who live in a country that violates human rights until I meet the people and see what their motives are. The human rights violations are exactly opposite to the goals of the project and I cannot understand why someone would be interested in creating life when they are already stifling and ending it. And I add that my concerns are secondarily a TRW rule that prevents me from doing business with foreign countries and tertiarilly (I actually use this word though I don't know if it actually exists.) a state department rule that may prevent me from doing business. He understands the concerns though he is visibly upset. When it looks like there are tears welling up in his eyes I give him a hug and tell him that we can work together if we find other sources of funding. Or if I am allowed to meet the principals and determine exactly what their interests and goals are. He agrees and says that because he is tired he has to leave. I wonder if I will hear from Ta-Wei again.
I am mildly shocked when a guy dressed as a girl begins speaking to a fellow patron in Vietnamese. Not because of the outfit, which was stylish with very tall high heels I might add, but because he/she looks like a westerner and I never would have guessed that he/she is actually half Vietnamese. (Though, of course, I did guess that he/she was a he.)
The alarm goes off at 5:40am and I pound it off. Eventually we wake up at 7am - a full three hours of sleep. The ChiChi has to head down to Little Saigon to buy things that cannot be bought in Indio where the ChiChi lives. I see the ChiChi to the door and to the car - a nice, large, white 1986 Ford Thunderbird. My neighbor is out watering the lawn and I say "I haven't heard about your trip yet". (My neighbor, a 60 year old widowed German lady, and I take turns watching each others' mail, houses, trash, and pets when one of us goes out of town.)
"That's fantastic. I didn't even know that you played. How much did you win?"
"Twelve dollars? How do you get twelve dollars?"
"The neighborhood lottery? What's that?"
I start to turn red. "And what were the other choices?"
"What do you mean?"
I continue to turn redder and redder. "No. Just a single payoff this time. How long has this lottery been going on?"
"I was just helping her with her sociology homework and the class ended." I try to change the subject with "Have you had many ants this summer?" And it works because we talk about ants and no mention is made of the lottery again.