So much has happened in one week! Julia's Mendo TimeBank got written up in the Ukiah Daily Journal: www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/ci_11824408; iola said blablabla and then, two days later, dadada; she started shaking her head back and forth which makes her a little dizzy; she banged a mallet on the drum to make a sound (now officially smarter than a lot of animals, maybe even Jackson); I forgot to get my and Iola's Indian visas so we are still here until tomorrow morning, and that might be it. It's a lot if you count things in tiny increments.

Last weekend we went up to Dubai and met a high school friend who I hadn't seen in 14 years, Jennifer McElhinny, and she is exactly, wonderfully, the same. She has a really nice husband and her baby Freya is two months older than iola. We also got a ukelele for John while we were there, so now he just wanders around the house strumming it, late for work, singing to himself. It's a little plastic $30 blue one, and he obsessively dreams of the upgrade.

The weather is still nice, but it feels fragile. For three days it was summer. Now it is spring again. In between summer and spring it was really sandy. You could barely see 500 feet away. I've been doing some stories on neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi, one of Mushrif where I always run, and one on Khalidiya where I discovered a new children's park for us to hang out in as long as the weather will let us.

This is a picture I just took right now, with Feraz, who is nine. When I say her Pakistani nannies, I count him as well, because she loves him. I can't take pictures of the sisters; I tried and my pictures mysteriously disappeared. Suppose I deserve that for trying. They are spinning around.