Isn't that the stuff just north of Capetown?  I've been there.  Its pretty boring.  Capetown is in a little wet microclimate caused by Table Mountain in what would otherwise be the middle of the Karoo.  It was the only place in that part of the world that had enough fresh water to make a settlement possible.

Yes!  Exactly!  You've been there!  How cool.  It's like Hawaii.  In geography in third grade we learned that everything around the world at our latitude was desert, except for Hawaii, and we were not desert because of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, which reach up high enough to snag moisture out of the air.
And the leeward sides of the Hawaiian islands are, indeed, desert.

They probably tell you it mixes up the air or some bollocks like that.

Relief Rain: Saturated maritime air rides up the mountain slopes and expands adiabatically as it rises and the barometric pressure consequently falls. This expansion cools it until it reaches dew point and clouds form.  Yes.  It's called adiabatic cooling, and I believe it is 1 degree (or a little bit more) for each 1,000 feet it rises.  Under given conditions of temperature and saturation, dew point always happens at the same height, so the clouds have flat bottoms.  The droplets in the clouds grow until they are carried down again below the dew point altitude, and they fall through the air at a rate dependent on their size, so if the clouds get big enough the droplets will grow big enough and fall fast enough to keep on falling till they hit the ground before they evaporate completely.  Bingo! Rain! QED.  I just thought you'd like to know.

I do know, thank you.  I'm from Hawaii.

Good. They taught us some awful rubbish at school about air currents mixing up, and we live in a relief rain zone too.  I couldn't understand where it got the mixing energy from, feeling tired after mixing a cake.  (We didn't have an electric mixer when I was a kid.)  It just doesn't happen on that scale, air is thick stuff, just ask a fighter pilot.  The teacher didn't have the imagination to realise it.  I didn't know then that other people couldn't do that trick of pretending to be an air current or a gear wheel or whatever.  When I did find out, I made my living out of it.

Hmm.  This I'd like to see.  Do you spin around, emitting a pocketa-pocketa noise, or is it a thin whining?

Sometimes the thin whining if it is difficult, but usually it is restricted to imagination.

You haven't lived until you have seen Table Mountain with its table cloth. When there is a mild east wind and the mountain sticks through the inversion layer, you get a thin trickle of uplifted wet air flowing over the top of the mountain forming a thin close layer of cloud which drapes itself down the leeward side as it evaporates and looks for all the world like a piece
of white linen. I've never seen a good photo of it, you'd think they'd have it on postcards, but the time I saw it, it was much clearer than any postcard shot, and it was the only day I left my camera in the hotel.

The Koolau Mountains do the same thing, but not so often.  They frequently have what we call a "lei" cloud, which is a long narrow cloud that forms about a hundred feet below their peaks.  Mount Rainier, which fills most of the windows of my house, has a little lenticular cloud that develops over it some days.  It looks like  a cap hovering over it.

When I was installing a machine in Capetown, the customer CEO was very hospitable and having arranged my accomodation, asked if there was anything I needed.  I thought I'd be cheeky, and asked if he knew anywhere I could
get a ride as crew on a yacht.  He didn't sail himself but sometimes crewed for a friend, CEO of a sister company, so he arranged for us all to have dinner together and go off sailing one weekend.  It was really fun.   This guy kept his yacht in a marina in the big Atlantic bay about 100km north of Capetown.  He told me it was a much better natural harbour than Capetown but they had not made the settlement there only for the lack of fresh water.  We drove up through the Karoo for a couple of hours to get there.  Of course they were taking advantage too, as soon as we got afloat they left me to it
and sat back with the beers.  So everyone was happy, I got to play with an expensive yacht, and they got driven around the bay for the afternoon, and just had to haul the odd jib sheet now and again and point out the local landmarks.  I found some waterproof factor 15 transparent suncream, which meant I never burned and didn't have to go around looking like a marble statue either.  Its kind of important when you don't have hair, and hats tend to be unstable on yachts.  I've used it all up now, and have never seen that stuff here.

We have gobs of it here, and I'd be happy to send you some.

Well, only if you can send sunshine too.  I don't exactly need it often in this country.  Thanks anyway, and if I feel a foreign holiday coming on, I'll ask.

When are you going to come to Hawaii?  I swear that I will meet you and The Kid there and take you to all the cool places.
Alternately, if The Kid is interested in museums and stuff, there are tons of neat museums here.  An Indian museum, a kid's science museum, a doll museum, etc.  And of course the EMP, otherwise known as The Building That Looks Like Vomit.  But it's great inside -- they have a feature where you can stand on a stage in front of thousands of (not real, but realistic) screaming people and be a rock'n'roll god(dess)

God give me money.  I'd love to, but between cash and school holidays (with associated premuim prices) travel is difficult.  I have a good friend in LA who has been asking me to visit for years, and a girl in China that wants to marry me, but that had to go on ice when I got ripped off last year. Probably wouldn't have worked anyway.

(brr) Of COURSE she wanted to marry you.  Anything to get out of the third world.  Well, if and when you do go to LA, you could at least take The Emperor Of The North (a train) up the coast to Seattle.  It is inexpensive, and stunning scenery.

"It wasn't the High Veldt or the Low Veldt or the Bush Veldt but the 'sclusively dry and prickly Succulent Karoo.  Catharine would lie in the bushes looking like nothing in particular until along came a rock rabbit, when she would jump out and get her husband to breathe on it, until it ran away in fear of its life to join the Aboriginal Flora."

Wow, Tim, are all the boys in England like you, or are you special? 
I love it when people know what I'm talking about.  Not many people in the U.S. know their Just-So stories.

Of course I'm special.  I suppose Just-So Stories were pretty popular in the 50's, so most upper and middle class kids of the baby-boom generation were probably introduced to them.  Of that group, those with young children may well have read them to their offspring and so become more familiar in adult life.  Even then I don't suppose too many would be able to mangle quotes from it without looking them up.  And modest, too.  : ) That is partly down to hearing that tape over and over quite recently, and partly from having read them out loud many times over the last few years.

Do you know, they told me that rock rabbits are actually pachyderms!  The attached picture of one, with chips, is actually atop Table Mountain but they are all over the Karoo.  The locals call them Dassies.

Yes.  They're also called hyraxes.  I think they're very cute, but I don't know if they make good pets. 

Yes, that is the proper name.  I never heard of anyone keeping one.  I don't know if they are edible either but according to Kipling the Leopard and the Ethiopian got a big tummy ache after eating them.

Very cute picture. 

As they are wont to do.

What beautiful pictures.  England just looks the way countryside is SUPPOSED to.  It is mysteriously RIGHT, I don't know why.  Race memory?
Or media imagery.  Christmas cards.  Bing Crosby singing about a White Christmas.  Where apart from here is White Christmas just rare enough to wish for, and why should Americans want to sing about it when for most of them it is either always or never?  I never understood that.  "May all of your Christmases be in sub-temperate latitudes"?

Oh, not for most of them at all.  About the only people who can count on having a white Christmas are those in, like, northern Minnesota, North Dakota, and maybe Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  Sometimes upstate New York, e.g. Buffalo's Big Blow this year.  Everyone else is just grimly frozen and gray.  The big snows come in January and February, for the most part.

Nonetheless that was the reason I took the photos, and whenever these weather conditions occur I feel the need to photograph the scenery.  Also, having views like that was one of the reasons for buying this house.  It was definitely not reflected in the price, so I suppose it doesn't appeal to others so much, just my little secret pleasure.
How weird.  I would think that would definitely be a selling point.  Our house sells for $15,000 more than the one next door (well, it would if it ever got sold) because of the big Mt. Rainier views.
Of course, people think it's cool.  Me, I just see it as a better view of the source of the mud and ash flow that is eventually going to suffocate/boil us to death one fine day.  But it is kind of pretty, especially right at twilight when it appears to be suspended in the dark dark blue sky.
Possibly it is offset by the Pakistani community occupying about 60% of the houses on the road, and by the fact that it is one of the larger houses in a low-income area, so unaffordable to the community and uninteresting to the wealthy.  Personally I have nothing more against the Pakistanis than I have against the low-income drinking class which occupies the rest, probably less.

Ah.  See, Pakistan is part of the world that has always interested me.  I want to go there.   I think the shalwar kameez (the long dress and trousers that a lot of the women wear) is the best-looking clothing for women on the planet, and if I wasn't afraid of being thought a poser, I'd wear it a lot.

You certainly wouldn't look out of place here.  Or in a black 'bio-hazard suit' (burkah is it called?).  Seeing it written there I wondered, does kameez have an etymological link with camisole?  I would guess.  Think of the word chemise.

In sailing I learned a mnemonic for the cardinal point marks around a hazard: West is two black cones stacked point to point, like a wasp-waisted little black dress - Western woman.  East has the cones stacked base to base, like a burkah - Eastern woman.  Totally unforgettable.  North (both cones up) and South  both cones down) seemed obvious enough without mnemonic.

Natasha's school is around 50% Pakistani, Lyudmila the racist immigrant was furious and tried to get her into another school.  I was quite pleased that she failed, because it is a nice school, and I think living near to your schoolfriends and spending a minimum time travelling to school are more important than fine tuning the quality of the teaching or mixing with a 'better' catchment population.  I don't regret it.
I think so, too.  I think part of school's purpose is to introduce you to the people you will truly be working with when you are an adult, not the people your parents wish you would be working with. 
And as Britain is no longer and will never again be lily white, I think it's grand that she has brown friends.  Most of the world is brown, after all.
In as far as it goes, yes, but of course she cannot play with -them- outside school, their parents would not dream of letting their children go to a non-Moslem house. 

Oh, GOD, do they not see that that is interpreted as standoffishness and will not lead to happiness?

Probably, but they interpret their religious rules very strictly.  Maybe GOD should have a word with Allah.

That would be taking integration too far.  So she doesn't really count them as 'friends'.  Not that it's just the Moslems, one of her white school friends is not allowed to visit because her parents think Natasha is 'spoiled'.

Huh?!?  I believe that any child whose mother dies is entitled to a little spoiling.  She doesn't seem that way to ME, but then I don't know her.  Now, Artyom...

Of course it is never that simple.  Firstly the opinion was formed before Lyudmila got cancer, and secondly, it's mostly -their- problem anyway, what it really is is that  they don't want to expose their own family inadequacies.  This girl I think lives with her grandparents, father absent, mother inadequate or something etc etc.  I don't pry.  Not a moral stand, I just don't care.

Ah.  And raised by the standards of two generations ago, she probably is spoiled.  I know I was.  Well, consider the source.  Whoever's parents they are, they didn't raise THEIR child to be a good parent.

Now Artyom...  I am getting around to feeling I have done enough to pander to him and will have to get a big stick out.  I think I have to accept that this problem is not going to go away if I ignore it for long enough. "Artyom, this is the road.  Allow me to introduce you."  With only nukes left in the armoury, I have to devise a credible threat that doesn't actually lead to war but gets him off his arse.

You should talk to Allan Grossman.  He has had much the same problem.

Maybe I will, we'll see how it goes.  Did he reach a satisfactory solution?

I think they have reached détente, at least.  He would certainly understand what you are going through, though, and he is an excellent listener.  Shall I set it up?

Let's wait and see the current manouevre goes.  From people I have talked to it seems a pretty common situation.  It seems hard to find a kid in that age range who doesn't behave like that.  I seems to be something to do with the society our generation or the one before created for them.

Surely there's something like alt.support.parenting-teens.

Yesterday I told Artyom I thought it was time he found himself somewhere to live, and that I wasn't prepared to go on supporting him indefinitely.  His response was that he would go to the factory where he had been working previously and see if he could get his old job back, and failing that, apply to join the military.  Well, I don't take issue with any of that, if it happens.
The military are recruiting quite strongly now; after years of cutbacks they are suddenly flavour of the month again with the Government. 

Does the British military have the same kind of deal that we can get here, where if you sign  up for ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) they will pay for most of your college, and then you will graduate as a lieutenant, and either be able to go career-track through the military or go into the reserves, and pray you never get called up?
I think that is a wonderful idea, and if I had it to do all over again, I would do that.

Yes, something similar with student sponsorships, but you can't do that if you already flunked college.Oh.  That must be the difference between your military and ours, where we tutor people.  You can just keep trying over and over. It does sound like a good deal, although there was one famous-for-fifteen-minutes one who might have had second thoughts.  She was an RAF sponsored student, I think at Cambridge.  She was featured on the 999 program after being taken for a ride in the second seat of a Harrier. During a terrain-following exercise in the Lake District (lots of terrain there) a bird-strike took out the windscreen and the pilot's facemask and broke the pilot's jaw.  The passenger was screaming "What do I do! What do I do!" and he was unable to reply.  She took the cue to eject from the rocket assisted departure of his seat. Well, she appears to have had SOMETHING holding her ears apart.   She went, some 1.5 seconds from impact, well outside the envelope: her chute was inflated by the fireball and she landed in the wreckage.  She escaped with a broken knee after the pilot dragged her from the debris

Around 100 intelligence reservists actually got called up this week, first call-up in nearly 50 years.

Oh, wow.  We have been having reservists called up periodically for everything since Desert Storm, so we're kind of used to it by now.  I am still stunned by the number of people whining, "It's not convenient for me right now.  I don't want to go.  I don't agree with why we're over there."  Hey, as far as I am concerned, you took the military's money already, so go do what you promised to do.

Could be worse, if he was in Russia he would be conscripted.  He saw a documentary on the Russian Army recently.  Seems like a Dickensian image of boarding school life, complete with fagging and all that stuff.

---

Catharine, I just read your post re your bone scan result.
Such wonderful and unlikely news.  Terrific!
I just hope the rest of the tests show such positive results, and that it 'sticks' that way.

I hope so, too.  I actually had to go and take several plain-film X-rays of my right femur
yesterday, as a result of the bone scan, so maybe I don't know how to read them as well as I
thought.

I guess one might have to take another look at faith healing?

But it was faith healing that I didn't agree in!  And, by the way, the spinal MR, read by the same doctor, showed that the spinal mets are back.

But, as I said in the ng, I think the MR would show that, it's showing the holes in the bones, not the cancer that caused them.  The holes take a long time to close even with the help of Aredia or whatever.  But the bone scan shows -activity-, and suggests they are at last headed in the right direction.

I am very sad today because I'm doing the horrible prep for the colonoscopy.  I'm a big crybaby.

Yuk.  Rather you than me.

It went well, and was a lot less awful than I expected it to be.  I remember opening my eyes at one point, and feeling a bad pain in my okole, and someone in the room saying, "Owwwwww", but then I closed my eyes and opened them again and the nurse was telling me my ride was there.

A home win, Catharine One; Drain Nil!!  [Catharine had posted an article to Usenet entitled "Am I circling the drain?"]
After seeing BC roll over Lyudmila and everything chemo could do like a tank over a marshmallow, it is great to see someone I care about beat the odds for once.
That's so sweet of you. 
Allan Grossman and Deborah will be in Seattle next month.  We'll all raise a glass to you in spirit.
What about house swapping?  I mean, if you and Natasha wanted to come to Seattle (or Honolulu, if I ever leave David and move back home), how about swapping houses for a couple of weeks or so?  Then all you'd have to do would be pay for airfare and groceries.
Sounds like a nice idea, when I've caught up with the finances enough to feel that taking a couple of weeks off wouldn't cripple us.  I'm getting there, would have been there already if I hadn't got ripped off last year. How too, too miserable.  Its slow because so much of my income goes on child-minding.  Now that brings us back to Artyom, it does seem a bit silly to pay a child minder while he lies in bed, but I have to think longer term, I can't just hire and fire whenever he gets or loses a job, or fit around his odd days' work. I live in hope that he will be working soon.

Get him to get trained in child-minding.  There is a crying need for normal men in child-care.  I assume he's normal, but just lazy.
That would go down like a lead balloon I'm sure.  As far as I know he is normal, but making the effort to get trained for something would feel like a commitment to making a career in it, and he has dreams of spending his life doing something a bit more financially rewarding and intellectually demanding than child-minding.  Admittedly the way he is going the dreams are likely to stay a very virtual reality.  It would mean admitting that the laziness was congenital, not just a passing difficulty.  I am sure he still sees himself getting over this little difficulty, getting offered a plum job on a plate and becoming some sort of wizard, but then he rolls over and goes back to sleep.
I thought that way at that age, but it got beaten out of me.

---

I'm still very nervous about all these videotapes that conveniently show up in bombed-out rubble.  Frankly, I think the much bigger story this year is the collapse of Enron.  I think Enron's officers are far more evil than bin Laden.  At least he (I don't think) is in it for the money.

That is another story entirely, and far more real and intractable.  Could we go around bombing corporate fat-cats?  Could we perhaps recruit bin Laden to do it?  It sounds like his sort of field, he could hit his real targets and win popularity with the western populace at the same time.

One could wish.  My sister says that, at Thanksgiving, some of the people at my brother's house were his next-door neighbors, the COO of Enron and his family.  My brother, the last time I saw him, (which was in September) told me to tell David to sell his Enron stock: that a "little birdy" had told him to do so.  As far as I am concerned, that is clear evidence of insider information and it infuriates and shames me.

I think you commented in another place that there has never been a society that was not ruled by thugs and bullies, or some such.  So what else is new, a rather bigger piece of thuggery that usual?  I don't know the details, but that is what it sounds like.  This is free enterprise isn't it? 

Yes.  I think it was the Treasury secretary who said something like "Companies come, and companies go.  It's part of the genius of capitalism."  To me, this exposes the hazards inherent in the way we buy and sell stocks now.  We rely a lot on what analysts say.  Analysts rely a lot on the information coming out of companies via their auditors.  Now we know that it is possible for auditors to lie.  ARGH!

The genius of it is that accountants, lawyers and other parasites get to rake off a cut every time they come and every time they go.  Also the transition does a wonderful job of revaluing the assets and laying off staff without all those annoying redundancy payments.
Look at the UK railways.  The infrastructure was sold off to the private sector (Railtrack Plc.) a few years ago, a nice boost to the treasury war chest for handouts and tax cuts before the following election (although not a loony as the 3G mobile phone licence auction), and it has just effectively been renationalised without compensation on the grounds that it was insolvent (which it was because the gov. decided to stop paying its subsidy).  The seemingly crazy part is that the government still expect the private sector to invest in whatever successor organisation takes over the assets.  The investors are willing, but remark casually that the price has gone up.  Now they know they have to carry the risk of the gov. having their hand in the till, they will charge a lot more interest, which will of course
have to be paid by the good old taxpayer.
Now ain't that good for the City, ie the institutional investors, pension funds, investment trusts etc.  Just when they thought the shit was really hitting the fan as inflation disappears and interest rates approach zero, and parasitism loses its profitability, along comes the gov. and demands a huge loan over decades at premium rates.  Wasn't that convenient.  Of course, heads will roll, they may have to sack the Minister for Trade and Industry or someone for his 'incompetence', but the gravy train will keep rolling and all the boys will be happy.  I'm sure the minister will get a few nice non-exec directorships or something for his troubles if they can't find another scapegoat.  He is after all a saviour.
Am I the only one to ask "who profits?"?  If they held a murder enquiry after a company was killed, that would be the first question.

Now they're saying that the chairman of Enron had to start selling stock suddenly to meet personal loan payments.  Hmm.  As he has made a public fetish of living frugally for the glossy business magazines over the last few years, one wonders what those loans were for.

This is human nature, to try to rip off one's fellows, although some of us manage a veneer of civilisation over it (that seemed to stick better than elbows-off-table).  Just ask the ghost of Karl Marx.  The probability of the population smoothing out into an equilibrium of near-equality is about as likely as all the mass in the universe becoming equally distributed throughout it rather than clumping into stars.  Nature is lumpy by nature, entropy increases.  Any physicist could have told him that all animals being equal is an unstable low-entropy state.
Our government has just woken up to the fact that CEO's of major public companies and utilities are hired  at vast fees, with contracts which include termination penalties.  So it is actually in their interest to blow it totally and get fired because then they get an early termination payment. No-one, it seems, writes in clauses requiring the executives to actually -perform-, or relates bonuses to share prices or whatever.  Gravy train!
BTW elbows-off-table reminds me of a funny line in the cartoon 'Shrek' which seems to have stuck with me.  The home of irascible ogre Shrek is invaded by fairytale characters, as he discovers when seven dwarves dump Snow White's casket on his dining table.  His reaction is "No!  Dead broad OFF the table!".  Now that is what I say every time Natasha brings one of her toys to the dinner table. Excellent.  There should be no toys at the table, anyway.
I seem to have got a dose of some sort of alliteration bug: popularity with populace, equilibrium of equality, Nature by nature. :-o

Hmm.  That's in the DSM-IVR as a symptom of disassociative psychosis.

Hmm.  I highly recommend the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, starting with "The Golden Compass."  It, especially, is right about at (what I imagine as) her comprehension level, and it's very exciting.

I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never Kipled. (Hardy-har har) I bet you have!
Wow!  Do you read to her in Russian, or is it an English textbook with only Russian notes?

The latter I am afraid.  They are good because they aren't edited to death like most of the available editions of children's classics.  We also have an Alice in Wonderland in a Russian edition, a lot different from the Disneyfied edition one usually finds.

I don't like the Disney version at all.  I actually prefer "Through the Looking Glass."  It has informed a lot of my dream imagery; or is it that the imagery in it is universal dream imagery?

My Russian is extremely limited, I can just about comprehend enough words to understand the general gist of the notes.  Maybe.
Lyudmila hoped I would marry a bilingual Russian woman who would keep up Natasha's spoken Russian, but it doesn't seem to happen. 

 

There has to be something you can do.  Maybe a Russian phone friend for her?

Motivation is the problem there.  She'd rather phone an English friend, it would be like doing homework, and I don't think it would be sustainable.  I can't even get her to keep in touch with friends who she doesn't see regularly, even though she enjoys their company when they do get together. Its to easy to just phone her best friend all the time.  Only when she is away on holiday does anyone else get a look-in.  She has been a bit better recently, but she is still good at cutting off people.
She puts up with friends if their parents are my friends, like the surgeon's kids, but they've moved a few miles away and to another school now. Oddly I knew the place they bought, a farm with an airstrip.  It was previously owned by an eccentric aero-engineer who was a light aircraft enthusiast, and who married an Azerbaijani woman, which is how I got to know them.  He had filled in the ditch between two fields to make the strip.  I had heard of him before, read in the local paper about neighbours complaining about him having a flying club at his farm.  We visited them on New Year's eve 1996 or 7ish.  His wife had just completed a research dissertation on environmental factors in infections of sheep's eyelids.  "Upper or lower?"  "Oh, upper of course!"   Her daughter, a doctor, was taking her UK medical exams to convert her Azeri qualifications to UK (I later learnt that she failed).  He and I talked engineering and planes and air-accidents until the small hours.
He showed us a video of his flying club, since ceased due to him working mainly abroad.  Talk turned to his problems with his neighbours.  He didn't know why they had suddenly turned on him several years after he started the club.  He said they complained it was unsafe, but none of the accidents had been blamed on the strip.  WHAT?!?  Um, how many accidents?  Only two, both pilot error, one guy and his wife had been seriously injured aborting a takeoff, the other had walked away.  "If you've got to come down, go to full throttle at the end, then you get lots of airflow over the control surfaces and you get the best choice of impact site." he commented.  The problem was the strip ran uphill from the farm, so takeoff was generally downhill, with the farm outbuildings as backstop.  They were lower than the strip, but hard if you fell on them.
Anyway, the point was that the surgeon's kids are hyperactive, tease-and-bully types and give Natasha a hard time, but she put up with them because it was convenient for me.  And it was good education for her, she generally managed to give as good as she got.  The brightest and worst one is the second son, who is almost a year younger (though in the same class) and smaller than her, so it sort of balanced out.  And now he has gone she can be top in maths, he was the only one who could beat her consistently, I reckoned it was because he had "math" in his name, Matthew.

L did introduce me to a young Russian widow who lives near my parents (with a son about 12), who however shortly afterwards went off to live in Russia in pursuit of some job.  It didn't work out, and she is now back in Scotland.  I called on her when visiting my parents at Christmas.  She's quite cute but nothing special I think. 

And here I thought that all that mattered was that she be quite cute.  I'm impressed.

Good grief.  She has to be stunningly beautiful, hourglass figure, devastatingly intelligent, an heiress (or non-exec director), bilingual (at least), expert in bed, wonderful with children, suffer slobs gladly, and not expect flowers.  Oh yes, and non-smoking and engineer-tolerant.  Or any of these.  Well, 'interested' would do.

Well, what about if she doesn't *expect* flowers but is fond of them, and brings them home herself so she can have them in the house?

I guess that just depends where she nicked the flowers.  Yes, it's nice having flowers around, but not so nice that I would pay for it.

Actually I can't quite figure out what I do want a wife for.  I'm sure they are useful for something, but I can't remember what.  Natasha would like a Mum, and I'd like to get laid, but I'm not sure either of those justifies the price tag.

We exchanged email addresses etc. but she did not reply to my mail.  That's how it goes, maybe she thought the same.  Or maybe her computer broke.
I tried talking to Russians on the 'net but that wasn't much good.  Mostly their English (or intelligence) is too poor to hold a useful conversation, and some of the more attractive photos on the agencies lists are plants from other agencies or spammers.  And anyway, international marriages are very expensive, I know from experience.

There's a huge hoo-ha going on right now in the murder trial of a man who, with a friend, killed his (quite cute) Russian mail-order bride.  She actually suspected that he was going to try to kill her, and left information with her parents in Kyrgyzstan.  They are here in the U.S., now, watching the trial.

That sounds pretty desperate, to go marry a guy you think wants to kill you. Importing brides I can understand on cost-effectiveness grounds, but importing murder victims is weird.  He must have thought he'd ordered a disposable model.
Taking "Till death do us part" a bit literally.
 I e-ed with a single mum from Kyrgyzstan for a while, but she sort of faded out.  Mostly there just isn't the bandwidth to make it take, either in the translation process or else in the brain at the far end.  Look how much bandwidth we use, Outlook Express says 432 messages total both ways so far. Doing that in a second language is damned hard work. Luydmila was after all an expert, having studied English all her life.

There's a state legislature bill right now that is aimed at mail-order brides.  It says that anyone who wants a mail order bride in the state of Washington must pay a fee.  That fee will pay for a criminal and marital history check, and translation of the results into the wife's language.  I think it's great, but I think it should be available to  everyone when they take out a marriage license.  Half the time when some woman is beaten to death by her husband you find out that he's been married before, his ex-wife had a TRO taken out against him, he's been locked up for
violating it, etc.

Medical tests too?  I guess it has to be federal else guys will just order them from a mailing address in another state.  Someone on the 'net was spreading a rumour that it works the other way too.  Mafya pimps hire girls to marry Americans, then they kill them so she (therefore they) get the estate.  This I can believe if the Americans go and get married in Russia rather than bringing a fiancee home.  My Chinese girl says to go to America as a fiancee you have to deposit a $10,000 bond to ensure you leave if you don't marry and stay married.  Obviously the buyer ends up paying that (which makes it rather pointless) so that must be an incentive to marry abroad.

Err, I don't know where she gets that information.

Maybe its some scam arranged by Chinese bride export agencies.  It's certainly not true for UK, you just have to convince the immigration authority that you are bona fide, and you have to have at least met.

We do seem to have a huge number of mail-order brides, both from Asia and Russia, in this area.  I thought we would have more in Hawaii, Nah, Hawaiian girls are just too gorgeous if present company is anything to go by. but figured out that guys who want to dominate their Filipina wife wouldn't do it in Hawaii, where there are LOTS of Filipinos to whom she can run for support and information.  That is kind of changing for the Russians here, though.  There are a LOT of Russian immigrants here.  I swim with a couple of them every day -- Pavel and Alexei.  They are more interested in improving their English than my Russian, though.  I, of course, want to know how they can afford to swim from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. daily, and don't they have a JOB, but I am far too polite to ask.  Every state and medical document is translated into several languages, and Russian is one of them.  I could get a Russian Driver's Education book for you, if you wish!

Not if it teaches Russian driving!<g>  Been there, done 5000 miles, got the tee-shirt.  Maybe it would teach Artyom to drive, but I doubt it, his English is better than his Russian and anyway he did eventually pass his theory.  I quit buying him driving lessons when it got up to around £1000 and he didn't seem to be taking it seriously.

Why do you have to PAY for driving lessons? 

When he was at school and couldn't be expected to pay himself.  You can do it yourself, but a) teaching someone you know to drive is one of the best ways to fall out permanently,  b) I'd have to buy another car, the van is clumsy and the insurance would be prohibitive,  c) driving instructors come cheaper than me.