14 SEP 25

Early morning hours... Oxbear somewhere in North Korean air space... texts me later at 5AM from Seoul... two flights left...

Ninety minutes later Yali blasts from snores to shooting-down-the-hallway-to-the-shower in under ten seconds... he will not sit in the pew without a freshly washed scalp of midnight locks...

Twenty minutes later he's watching his snake nudge at the worms in his dinner dish... radio gothic pipe organ accompanies the scene as Justin contemplates whether worm is friend or food... eventually chooses “food”...

Returning mid-morning from Rally Sunday at church... kids tumble out of the car back home... sprays of late butterfly garden wave in late summer light... only a few yellow buds open for the winged things... poor success after such a dry summer... heat index shot past 100 once again...

While Oxbear is flying south to Bangkok...

The Big House is crawling with cousins for a few hours... another exchange of hand-me-down clothes and easy thoughts in busy lives... tots running in and out in pigtails and pirate hats and wedges of watermelon... Patience the giant amongst them as Yali and T sift through minifigs in the other room...

Puck to work by four o'clock... pushing back on his dentist appointment tomorrow because it's “unnecessary” he says...

Yali is asking for chili dogs by five...

Patience back into her Australian kids detective programming...

And following a coffee-and-orange-juice in Bangkok... Oxbear boards his final flight to inner Thailand by 8CST... eventually concluding thirty-seven hours of travel setting up a week in the steamy jungles of monsoon season...

...while the faintest glitter of rain washes the windows that night back home...