Countdown! #3, and ONE month exactly.

I will say nice things.

Details:
We leave Pohnpei soon (separately, as a result of a long story that I will not tell because it is not a nice story)...I leave July 2 (not June 25th, which is another story that I won't tell) for Oregon and Jonathan leaves mid-August, probably for an Oregon/Oklahoma tour. Then, I move to the Caribbean at the end of July.

I think I'm going to ask for an August 1 departure (from Oregon to Dominica) date. So let's get our kicks and our hugs in while I'm around! Jonathan will catch up with me in the Caribbean whenever he's done with his visiting; probably September sometime, so this will be the longest Jonathan and I have gone without seeing each other since we met.

Nice things: (We'll do a countdown of these, too)
3), the one that brought tears to my eyes:
Jonathan and I have a rather elaborate system for collecting and categorizing rainwater: The rain catchment tank has the best water, but since the collection system doesn't work (the pipes leak), it's rarely used (only during Rainageddon), and then only for bathing. In front of our house we have three garbage cans placed kinda' strategically to catch the run-off from our roof. Two of the garbage cans are metal, and they both now have to be used for toilet water, since they are super, super rusted. The third garbage can is Rubbermaid, and it's bright red. That's our favorite one, and we use it for bath water. Unfortunately, the metal cans were in the rainiest run-off spots--they never ran out of (toilet) water; the Rubbermaid was sitting in the stupidest spot for collecting water, so we'd run out of good water fairly frequently, and would have to resume our daily early-morning trips to the creek to collect bath water. I know the neighbors watch us, and we watch the neighbors, and we all love each other, but I was not prepared to come home Monday and see that they'd switched our Rubbermaid garbage can out. They moved it over to the rainiest-runoff place and moved a stupid metal can over to the dry place. They noticed that we only went to the creek when that water runs out of the Rubbermaid. And then they fixed it so we wouldn't have to go to the creek as often. I still am amazed, but I'm not sure why it amazes me so much. I guess: Who watches each other like that? Like, just quietly looking for ways to improve things for each other?

Man, if we hadn't moved to Kitti...

In other happy news! My friend Gina's coming to visit in four days. And a couple of days after she gets here, we start housesitting for some awesome friends who also, incidentally, have the sweetest pad on the island. (I know you might think it sounds weird, our being so excited to move out of the house after loving on the neighbors so much, but you only think that because you don't know how it feels to have no running water for seven months. I'd rather have no electricity, by a lot, and I am super excited to: Be clean, have clean dishes that also don't taste like bleach, avoid ingesting parasites, and share all of this loveliness with my friend Gina. Plus, in our housesitting place, we can shut the bathroom door and have the light on at the same time, which is extra important when you have guests.)

Okay, more later.
TM