It’s Saturday April 8 and we got home on Monday April 3. I can't remember if I mentioned it but our plane left Mumbai at 3:20 a.m. meaning we arrived at the airport a little after 1:00 a.m. We arrived in Colombo at 6:00 a.m. and got home about 7:30. We fell into bed and slept until 11:30 and unpacked and puttered and napped off and on the rest of the day.

This week I managed to get some sort of bug and was in bed with a fever on Thursday and resting on Friday. Today I managed to get out of bed to run errands with Ron but came home and went back to bed, as I have no energy.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any hotter here, it is now hotter than the gates of hell. One day I checked it is was 90 degrees and the humidity was 95 degrees. You can’t even imagine how hot that is. Consequently, I water the gardens as soon as I finish breakfast. Veena was a saint and watered for me while I was ill. This is supposed to be the hottest month of the year and sometimes May is just as hot. I may have to check into an air-conditioned hotel. Just kidding. I wouldn’t mind a trip to Nuwara Eliya about now. Many people from Colombo head for the hills during April to get away from the heat. Unfortunately it is a five-hour drive and even in an air-conditioned car it can get uncomfortable.

We leave Wednesday night for Kerala in SW India. We will be staying in Kochi aka Cochin. We hear it is beautiful and are eager to see it. I can only hope it will be a relief weather wise. Next week is a huge holiday week: Tuesday is the Holy Prophet’s Birthday (Islam), Thursday is poya day (Buddhist) and Friday is the Tamil and Sinhala New Year. So everything pretty much closes down. Our laundry/dry cleaner is closed from April 11th- 16th so it is a good time to travel. Ron gets Thursday and Friday off. Unfortunately there is only one flight home and it is in the morning so we will just have Thursday-Saturday to tour the area but being as experienced as we are we will make the most of it.

We have categorized our vacations into three categories: vacations of obligation (this is when you visit family and relatives), tourists on speed (this is when you have a brief period of time and want to see everything because you may never come this way again, and finally what RB calls PMB (park my butt) This is when you wake up and stroll down to breakfast and then go the to the room and grab your novel and stroll out to the palm tree and get a lounge chair and sit there until time to take a morning nap or time to eat again. Nap in the afternoon and go back out and read some more under that tree. Well, you get the picture. So Kerala will probably be tourists on speed. In Mumbai (Bombay) we were very good about slowing down and resting each day as we were nursing bad colds.

Ron had his out of town field staff in town this week so he wanted a party on Thursday night. I agreed and did most of the shopping and made arrangements for catering on Wednesday. It is a good thing since I had a fever on Thursday and didn’t get to attend the party downstairs. Ron pulled it off like the champ that he is. Geetha couldn’t stay to help so he picked up the food and ice, chilled the drinks (our refrigerator is quite small so drinks need to be iced), did set up and cleaned up afterwards. What a guy! I would be as rich as Bill Gates if I could clone this man but alas, I won the husband lottery and am content with that.

Last night I managed to sit up for two episodes of West Wing and we completed the third season with three to go on our DVD packet we bought. It will be a sad day around here when we finish this series. We have loved watching it. We never saw it when we were in the states as we went to bed early and rarely watch TV. When we were in South Africa there were some movies showing near our hotel that we wanted to see but we had no free evenings so didn’t get to catch any. Munich is coming to town so we will go to our first real movie theater in Colombo when it is playing here.

That’s it from paradise where it currently is hotter than the gates of hell.