A colleague ran me down the hill to Montpelier to look for a charger for my phone, but to no avail -- neither of the stores we tried had the right kind. But to my great good fortune, she happened to have the same brand of phone as mine, and her charger works for me, and she very kindly has let me borrow it for the entire time I'm here; she'll use her car charger instead. Very sweet. So yes, you can reach me by cell phone again; leave a message if I don't respond, as I'm probably teaching.
One absolutely appreciated aspect of this program that I did not realize was that all our food (free to faculty :-) is provided by the students of the New England Culinary Institute. It's not as quite good as what you'd get in a restaurant, since they're cooking in large batches for hundreds of people at once, but it's still several notches up from normal college food. Just for an example, dinner tonight offered a tomato bisque with warm fresh bread, salmon cakes with remoulade, green beans and pearl onions, roasted stuffed butternut squash, and parsley dill new potatoes. Not to mention an assortment of fancy desserts for our delectation -- I had a lemon tart, though it was difficult to pass up the bread pudding and the chocolate mouse with chocolate ganache. I'm going to gain ten pounds this week, I'm sure.
Karina isn't sure what to do about Sri Lanka either, although luckily she has travel insurance so I think she can get refunded for her flight. All up in the air. We're fretting about spread of disease, the status of Galle Face (our lovely beachfront hotel in Colombo) and the general chaos. Feels terribly frivolous to even think about our holiday with such horrible loss of life in Sri Lanka (up to 22,000 dead), and still no word from my more distant relatives, but at the same time, we need to make decisions soon, especially if we're going to try to get immunizations and the like in time. :-(