Live, from Bangkok

Hm, ok, well maybe a few hours old by the time you read this. But I can swear that as I am writing this I am live! Wooohoo!

Ok, I guess I'm a little giddy because I finally completed the descriptive analysis for the Thai data. I've been working on it all week trying to meet the deadline of today, and I did. About 400,000 records, about 400 fields per record. It shows that Thailand fits right into the epidemiological pattern that TASC saw in Vietnam and Bangledesh... namely, that injury is a major killer of children and the major killer of kids older than 5. For a developing country, that's a very important finding. With scarce resources to invest in health and education, a society is basically throwing away that investment if a kid makes it to age 8 and gets killed because he was playing in the road.

Anyway, that's work. Today is the last official day of Songkran, and I have not been immune to the water. I've been hit twice so far... and I'm sure it'll be very wet on the way home today. Mind you, when I say I've been hit I mean that I've had a bucket or hose turned loose on me, completely soaking any and all clothing.

Have a luncheon tomorrow with Chit, one of the leading public health scientists/advocates in Thailand who also works with TASC periodically. We'll go over the data I finished today. Oh, the other funky thing is that MegaBoss is planning on me speaking at a donors conference in Atlanta sometime in the fall. That'll be intimidating... the audience will be some pretty important folks at UNICEF, the CDC, and other public health institutions, not to mention the donors. Still, it'll be fun. A free trip to Atlanta... wait, is that a good thing?

Hm, what else. I guess that's all for now. I'm still mulling over the question of foolish dreams vs. ones worth pursuing. I think I'm gonna give this one a little chase... but I'm not 100% yet. Oh, I also have to write a letter to Tulane to declare my candidacy for the phd program. It looks like my teacher will have plenty of work to keep my on the payroll come the fall... now it's just a matter of 1) getting focused, and 2) getting accepted. Do I want to come back to Tulane? Is it possible for me to stay here and take classes remotely? Would I want that? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

Thupt.

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