Out of Mongolia

When we married, I was actually a better cook than my wife, since she had always eaten her own mother's cooking and couldn't do anything except boil water and fry potatoes in buckets of oil. Given her Soviet heritage, I didn't want her to even try. I was ready to become the family cook.

Before our trip, my wife bought hundreds of chicken drumsticks and put them in the freezer to make sure there would be something for us to eat when we got back. Very thoughtful (except to the flock of chickens that had to die for her cause). For a while, that was fine, but soon we both got tired of drumsticks. So I took him to the supermarket. We came home with bread, spaghetti, canned food, eggs, and apples.

Now he's learning to eat like a 22-year old right out of college. It's horrible, but he loves the change. And it should keep us alive until my wife gets back. 

Although I don't obsess about work during vacations, I like being able to delete unimportant messages and forward anything urgent to other people. It makes the transition back to work easier. I can be sure that there will be no surprises waiting for me, and I know I'll have a lot less in-box clutter to clean up. Not having the Blackberry meant I'd be worrying about work for the entire vacation.

I was wrong. I hardly thought about work at all. The issues I had been stressing about became as distant as memories of high school (I didn't become a stud until I was 30). Only the day before I flew back to Mongolia did I start to think about work-related issues, but even then, it was difficult, like trying to remember something important when you're completely wasted.

Everyone told me I was lucky to get a such a complete break from the office. But instead, I was alarmed. Not by the sea of unread emails waiting for me, but by the fact that I was able to stop thinking about work. If you love your job, for real, how could you stop thinking about it?

When I got back, I had nearly 1,000 unread messages. There were a few unpleasant surprises, and it took me longer than usual to get back into the job. Pretty much as I expected. What I didn't expect is that every evening, and every weekend, the switch goes off again.

I'll have to think about this.

I'd love to spend a day in an airport taking pictures of sleeping people, sprawled out in creative ways wherever they can find a space. It's amazing how they just let themselves slip into unconsciousness among hundreds of strangers, many of whom have cameras. I have a theory that people who can do this are special. They have a gift for trusting other people. I like them.

Someday I'll have visit the center. I can't imagine what they've got in there that is so worth protecting from the peace-loving citizens of Mongolia.

I was making a video of the snowstorm last night, when two snowflakes landed on the lens at the exact same moment. The flakes swallowed the two street lamps in the background. They lit up the screen of my phone with a golden light. It almost looked intentional.

How depressing.

"What's that strange sound, dad?" he shouted. I rushed down down the stairs and listened. Water was trickling through the pipes and into the radiator. I knew what this meant: the heat would finally come on. An hour later, the radiators were nice and warm, fueled by inefficient, Soviet-built, coal-burning power plants. We were all incredibly happy.

Although it's only September, we've been freezing for the last few weeks. I've been sleeping in clothes and I no longer kick my kids out of bed: I'm grateful for their body heat. This Monday, they missed the school bus because the battery in our kitchen clock was too cold to kick out its full 1.5 volts, causing it to lose about five minutes over the weekend. And we stopped putting leftover food away at night, since the entire house was like a big, walk-in refrigerator.

In Mongolia, homes and buildings do not have their own heating. Heat and hot water are produced by power plants and distributed by insulated pipes throughout the city. It goes on every year on September 15th, and will go off on May 15th next year. We have eight months of heat to look forward to. And, of course, eight months of cold weather and horrific pollution.

Besides the lack of heat, we haven't had hot water in nearly two weeks. But today, in spurts of red, it came back on. My wife was in the kitchen at the time. She cried out with joy. If we had a bottle of anything, we would have opened it to celebrate.

The forecast for this Saturday is a mixture of rain and snow. Lucky us. But at least we have heat.