Tsunami!

Young Andrew left yesterday for his Classroom Without Walls experience in Indonesia. This is a very exciting program. The kids spend 3 days at the Loola Resort in Bintan. They have all kinds of scientific and team building activities, they cement their relationships with classmates and since they are in 7th grade, probably fall in and out of love at least twice in the 3-day time period. Also they sleep on the sand and tangle with sand fleas, ticks and whatever else is teeming on the shores of Indonesia. Since our personal effects are still floating somewhere on the Pacific or the Atlantic or heck, the Dead Sea for all I know...Andrew got all new stuff. No makeshift crap, no hand-me-downs. He was thrilled! I waved goodbye to him yesterday when he got on the bus, and walked back upstairs with a woman who has become my good friend here. She was a bit misty-eyed about the whole thing, I was calm and collected. He is my 4th kid, after all. Plus I am too old to freak out over this stuff.

I thought about my friend during the day, and when I knew she was on her way home from work, I sent her a text and invited her up for a cocktail. You know - to calm her jangled nerves. That is, after all, what friends are for...

She came up like a house on fire. Apparently there was an earthquake in Indonesia yesterday. A 7.3! We are both California girls, so we know what '7.3' means... Between the two of us we have the most basic of geographical knowledge, as in none. Luckily, I had hung a world map on the wall when we first got here - it has teeny little writing that is practically illegible. This served to add to our panic. We were sure our kids were buried under a grass hut somewhere in this godforsaken country. We googled and clicked and researched and shared one pair of reading glasses and decided that the kids were at least 700 miles from the epicenter. Whew! I poured us both a double.

We read about the possibility of tsunami too. But I don't think that will hit for at least a couple days...