(written June 19th)

I posted an ad on Craigslist UAE a couple weeks ago: "Share spacious 2 BR brand-new penthouse apartment with professional American married couple and laid-back cat. Room is large and unfurnished, and has own bathroom. Nice kitchen, huge living room and patio. Convenient to downtown and within walking distance of city bus terminal. All nationalities welcome." It was the only ad posted for the whole week. I thought maybe I should also put an ad in the classifieds of Al Khaleej, or Gulf News, but then I wasn't really committed to renting the room anyway. Our rent here is almost double what we pay on the mortgage in Washington DC, and moving to new places is always initially expensive, and I haven't been able to work at all due to internet complications, but still: it is our last precious time together as a couple, not parents, with no one else around. And our willingness to share our space sometimes makes us wonder. Maybe we just don't subscribe to the cocooning isolation of coupledom and like to bring our community into the boundaries of our home? Or maybe it's our family backgrounds, the constant romping in and out of extended family and extended guests (at the Dakin residence, and the Gravois also had a permeable family, expanding and contracting). We wonder. It's unresolved.

 Over the next three weeks I got three responses: two Canadians, and an NYU business student here for the summer. I clarified the situation: the temporariness determined by a normal average gestation. The Canadians were scared off, but Josh the business student was not, and two weeks later showed up at our door, having come straight from the airport. A business student? Again we wondered. He sounded very business-like on the phone. But we had tea and sat on our new couch and actually liked him. He's nice. And, not surprisingly, from the San Francisco bay area.

 When I moved to DC in 2000 I was really lonely, and put an ad on Craiglist to meet people. At that time, there were about twelve posts a day on the DC board. I got about twelve responses, and all of them were California transplants. So there you go. It's quite useful, sometimes -- the early stages of a resource.

 So he'll stay with us for a while. He might stay a week, or two, or a month… we'll see. He just can't stay past the end of July. And having a stranger around motivates me, slightly, to account for my day. Did Ireally sleep for four hours just now? Well, Jackson is still asleep, what does he have to say for himself.