It was hot in Seattle and when we walked into our motel room I was grateful for the air conditioning. It was too hot to take Norton for a walk, as muc... as he wanted to go. I found a park nearby with some shade trees and took him over there for a few minutes. He was panting and when we got back to the room, he collapsed on the cool tile of the kitchenette."There's a supermarket just up the street, Rick. Let me use the car and I'll get something for dinner."I tossed her the keys, knowing her. She had of course said yes. And it was hot, yes. Em had pretended to be scandalized by this, but she wasn’t. She filed it away for possible future experience of the same phenomenon. Now she was in Hong Kong for the first time on her own and staying at a very plush hotel in Central. It had a great view of the harbour and a very big bed. Em was on a tight schedule of meetings and business dinners but the two nights at the end of her program were unallocated. She made a mental note to keep at. My ears picked up on it when boys in one family talked about how hot one of the girls in our group was in Dutch. The other boy commented on two others. Both teased each other about being too chicken-shit to talk to them.Jokes on you, boys.The three girls went over to pull the boys off to the side and started speaking to them in Dutch. The girls didn’t know the words the boys used and asked them what they meant.“How can you now know what that means? You are girls, not boys dressed up to look. "You and Dad are super close, I know that ithurts." Yeah, but now Mom may be losing her job, and she's applying forProfessorships all over the county. I've been looking at the envelopesof letters she is getting from those colleges, she is applying toschools in the South...." Where they don't have ice hockey programs." Yeah, and my friends are here, and Joan is here."I try my absolute best to maintain a 'poker face' about Joan. I thinkthe Donster could do so much better, but he has been.