Not very daring, huh?

I was starting to like you

 

what isn't?

 

More daring for my wife. I grew up in Oklahoma and the Tennessee Valley is just like it except not as much wind and dust. We still have Dr. Pepper in the Coke machine; chicken fried steak comes with white or brown gravy, and; inhalation is not treated as a break in conversation.

Bob Wilson

 

That is indeed a good point. Where's your wife from?

I'm looking forward to the week after next, where I'll be somewhere that has Irn-Bru in the Coke machine.

 

For some reason, I'd always had you down as living somewhere bigger in Japan. No idea why.

Kyoto is probably my favourite small-to-medium city anywhere in the world. It's big enough to have what you need, but small enough to be very relaxed. And having grown up in one tourist town, and having lived in several others, I reckon I could handle the tourist crowds.

One of my best friends from university lives there, and when I visited him I loved it. The kids did too. They were particularly impressed by あのん 祇園本店, which had the most extraordinary range of cream puffs (and almost nothing else, but why would you want anything else?), and by 壹錢洋食. (My younger daughter thought the statue was hilarious, and my elder daughter thought it was brilliant that they made a big show of giving you a menu even though it only had one thing on it.) They both loved the railway museum too. But just walking down the river or through the streets is an excellent thing.

 

Further west - more Christopher Brookmyre country. But I do love Ian Rankin's books. Are they a big thing in America? And Edinburgh is a fantastic place: if I had to live in Britain again, I think that would be my first choice.

We're also going to North-West England, London, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Siem Reap. We'll be to the West of Glasgow for my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary (IT'S A SURPRISE PARTY, SO DON'T MENTION IT IF YOU KNOW THEM), which means we get to see all the Scottish relatives in one hit, rather than doing the usual huge amounts of driving, and we'll be in North-West England to see my parents and sister and her family. Vietnam Airlines is offering free stopovers both ways, so we're taking full advantage.

It should be a really lovely trip. And I can drink Diet Irn-Bru to my heart's content.

 

She grew up in the Maryland side of the DC area, Silver Springs, when it was still a town. The only way I could get her to come down was to promise that when the project was over, I'd find another job on the DC beltway. Five years later, the project was coming to a close and Holly started editing my resume (to her great amusement.)

But one day she asked, "Bob, do we have to move back to DC?"

Me, "Why baby?"

Her, "We have so many friends here."

We'd gotten involved in the square dance community.

Six weeks later, I got a call out of the blue from a former co-worker and I left GE to work for Boeing in January. Three weeks later, GE laid off 34 midlevel engineers with almost identical work profiles. I remain convinced there were 35 names on that list and I dodged the bullet.

Six months later, GE moved the Huntsville plant to Florida and the average IQ of both communities increased.

Bob Wilson

 

Yes, it should be a lovely trip: I'm really looking forward to seeing my parents. Normally I go there one year and they come here the next, but they couldn't make it last year. And for my sister, it's just too much of a challenge for her and her husband to get their young son loaded onto a plane for such a long journey, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing them too.

My Mum is as Scottish as can be (apart from the whole living in England for nearly 50 years thing). My Dad sounds like the Dad in So I Married An Axe Murderer, but is of Irish-Italian heritage. So we have a tartan - and I got married in a kilt - but it's my Mum's clan's tartan, not my Dad's.

I really liked the Complaints books. But the Rebus ones are brilliant: they really bring the city to life. I've got all of them on my phone, so I won't be bored on my upcoming very long flights.

 

Ahha. I can certainly see how that would happen. While I'm looking forward to going "back home" for my holiday, I really wouldn't want to leave Sydney. If you settle somewhere at a crucial point, I think that's you.

...

It sounds like you really lucked out with the job move.