YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ

John's Home-To-Be

Dearest Friends,

Right around this same time, we made a trip to the Family Bookstore, and according to my diary "we just about bought them out!"  I must have been stocking up in preparation for John's move offshore.  You can get a pretty good indication of where my thoughts were heading at the time, just by scanning through my bookshelves.

At the top of my reading list were Europe On $10 A Day and an historical novel called The Greek Treasure.  These books were the first indication that John and I were falling out of love with life overseas.  It was one thing to be experiencing it together, quite another if he was going to be stuck offshore full-time.  We had heard rumors that while people like our friend Toad got to leave and come back on a predictable schedule, and had one week per month where they were totally free, the engineers who were sent offshore tended to get stuck out there if there was no one to fill in for them on their week off, and the week off was kind of a joke anyway, since they were expected to go into the office whenever they were onshore.  So, just in case we got fed up with this arrangement, we started looking into our options.  Turns out, we had only one -- to "drag up".

B&R was not going to transfer John to a nice cushie job back in the States when they needed him there in Bahrain.  However, if he were to force the issue by dragging up (quitting), they had to pay our way back home, ship all our stuff back for us, and there was a good chance that if he re-applied with them once we were there, they'd find him a position in the States -- the definitive word there being "chance."  On the plus side, we had also heard that with the plane tickets they gave you, you could stop as many places as you wanted to on your way home, as long as you didn't back-track on yourself.  Judging from my reading material, I was busy planning our first stop!