On a recent market trip 45 minutes from home, a rainstorm sent my wife and I looking for shelter, so we gave Srey-Yuu's SuperCub an oil change.

🧑‍🔧 A Useful Pit-Stop 🏍️

The nearest town here in the Cardamom Mountains with a proper market full of fruit and vegetable sellers is 45 minutes away. We usually go once a week in the tuk-tuk as a family or just my wife and I on our classic SuperCub 90. On this day though we took Srey-Yuu's modern SuperCub 50 because it has 4 gears, it's fuel-injected and covers long distances better despite it's tiny engine. A surprise rainstorm sent us looking for an awning, and we drove right into a moto shop, so I guess it was Srey-Yuu's lucky day to get an oil change.

🐈‍⬛ Meanwhile At Home....

Sometimes Chairwoman Meow devours geckos and mice inside our home, and although it's not a big deal for me to do some occasional cleanup, my daughters prefer to keep their door shut to prevent any cat messes. On this day they apparently left their room door open, and of course Meow helped herself to the forbidden. When we arrived home we entered the house and this is the scene I found my daughters' bedroom, a nesting cat carefully camouflaged inside a dresser.

Chairwoman Meow is my shadow during the day, but she's usually on the floor nearby or on my lap. For whatever reason though, lately she's shown extreme interest in ASEAN Hive curation wor, or perhaps just interest in preventing me from doing it. Either way she never sleeps on the table, so this move was out of character for her, but I guess a cat is always testing new locations and textures.

She is a pleasant distraction and super preggo at the moment. These pics are from April 29th, and as I rebound from my Hive hiatus I hope to bring you back into present day content. My little innocent kitty is already on her way to motherhood, but hopefully after this batch of kittens we can make a road trip and get Chairwoman Meow spayed. It's not easy to find good homes for kittens in rural Cambodia, and hard enough already to make sure they don't end up as food.

🛃 US Visa Interview Fail 🙅‍♂️

After 5 years of fighting our way through the US immigration process, I finally managed to get an interview date for my wife in Phnom Penh. Unfortunately she failed her interview and the US Embassy seems unwilling to communicate with me via email, phone, or in-person visits for the last 4 months.

For this reason we have reached another dead-end, and now they won't grant my daughters interview dates or reschedule my wife another date. I really hate my country for things like this because we only want to visit for a few weeks, but we have to live through so many years of stress and struggling just to get some ink on a piece paper that allows us to magically cross an imaginary line.

🔥 Pensive Campfire Cat 🐈‍⬛

After our failed US visa interview, we turned around and headed away from Phnom Penh back to the Cardamom Mountains. I needed to sit around a fire for a night to clear my mind and relieve some of the frustration I feel towards the US Embassy and the whole unrealistic immigration process. My cat loves a good fire too, and if there is roasted corn involved she can eat half of a cob by herself. It's now three and a half months since the failed interview and I've called and emailed consistently ever since that day, but not a single thing has changed. It would be exponentially easier for my family to visit me here in Cambodia, but 'Mericans don't really travel well.