SOME DAYS YOU'RE THE WINDSHIELD, SOME DAYS YOU'RE THE BUG

Summer was getting off to a great start!  Too bad it had to go and take a nose dive.

Good news first.  We had visitors from SSFY!  The first to show up was FM, one of the Irish engineers that we liked so much.  He had been transferred here to Bahrain, so when we heard he was arriving, we jumped at the chance to be his welcome wagon.  We gave him the grand tour of Manama, took him to a baseball game, and then to a barbecue dinner and dance at the American Club.

The next to show up was a bit of a surprise.  Remember the Three Musketeers?  The guys John started work with back in Houston, who then all went to SSFY with him?  S and A were the ones who caught malaria, and BW is the one who's now-ex-wife refused to step foot in Indonesia.  BW had not been transferred to to Bahrain, but perhaps he was scoping it out as a possibility, for he decided to stop in for a few days on his way back from a business trip to Tehran.

The biggest shockeroo came when this fellow showed up on our doorstep, but he wasn't a friend from Indonesia.  He was my sister's on-again-off-again Dallas architect boyfriend, for about fifteen years.  As it turned out, his firm had sent him to oversee the construction of some housing they had designed in Saudi Arabia, but there were some issues with his visa, so he had to leave the country for a few days.  This was before the causeway between Saudi and Bahrain had been completed, so to get from one to the other you boarded an airplane, went straight up in the air, then pretty much came straight back down.  Anyhoo, he was definitely a surprise!

On May 31st my friend BD gave me a lift to the beauty salon at the Gulf Hotel, so I could have my hair done.  That evening John and I got all gussied up (not in that outfit though -- I'd have been stoned if I'd gone out with that much skin showing!), then went to the Hilton hotel to dine on Chateaubriand and visit with the same waiters we'd dined with on our honeymoon in Singapore.  It was our first anniversary!  I couldn't believe we'd already been married a whole year.  I guess it's true, time does fly when you're having fun.  John's gift to me was that beautiful brass lamp for our entryway.  If that weren't enough, on June 2nd we got word that our air shipment was due to arrive in about five days, and all the furniture we ordered would be here around July 1st!  Happy dance, happy dance!

Two days after the shipment was estimated to arrive, John came home and dropped a bombshell.  The ship with our goods never showed up.  That meant another month of waiting, at the very least (unless we found out it had sunk somewhere).  According to my diary, I cried all through lunch.  And, oh yeah, our car was in the shop again.