Breathing a big sigh of relief right now. The federal
government has shut down but I’m one of the people still cleared to work,
however, I got an email telling me to “remain in TDY status,” which I
interpreted as “stay where you are until the whole thing blows over.”
Fortunately, I learned that’s not the case. What the person meant was “continue
as planned and go home as scheduled.” That is a huge relief because I’m due to
return to Baghdad at the end of the year and am there long enough to,
hopefully, do some paperwork and some laundry and then repack and head off to
my three-week vacation. Erbil is nice in its own way, but there’s no place like
home.
Beyond school, I’ve never taken three weeks off at once, and
it’s a lot of planning. My hope was to get stuff paid for in advance so that I
will have empty credit cards once I land. As a result, the thought of having to
postpone or cancel the trip was freaking me out. I think in one day last week,
I charged four side trips that averaged $200 each, and that’s only a portion of
what I’ve pre-paid. With few exceptions, lodging and transport (trains and
planes) have all been charged and paid in advance. This is going to be a trip
like Alaska was for me: really big and so expensive I really don’t want to know
what the total cost winds up being.
It’ll probably be my only grand scale trip, though. I’ll get
four long vacations in the year and a half I’m here but the next one is to
America and the last one will be my first cruise, so it’ll be paid off before I
depart. The remaining one is up in the air but I’m not in any rush to plan it
and package tour sounds good to me.
Erbil is still good, too, although I am really chilly right
now. Our housing units are on par with Morocco’s but most of the rooms have
individual wall AC/heat units. To go from my room to the kitchen, I have to
leave a warm fuzzy room with a nice rug and walk over cold tile through a room
with cold, concrete walls before I get to the kitchen. There’s a heating unit
in there, but since the door to the wide-open hallway is always open, it’s
usually not worth it to turn it on.
I spent quite a bit of time in there over the weekend because
we had a Christmas potluck dinner and I offered to bring mashed potatoes. Since
I was the only one bringing them and you have to have mashed potatoes for
Christmas, I bought a huge amount of potatoes. Scrubbing and chopping them kept
me warm, and then I went to boil them. There were two giant pots in the cabinet
and it took both of them. Although the potatoes would almost all fit into the
bigger pot, water did not. I wound up spending about an hour boiling them so I
could then mash them. It was warm.
And thank God, there was a potato masher. When I volunteered
to bring mashed potatoes, it didn’t occur to me that a kitchen could not have a potato
masher. I mean, I own two. But I hadn’t checked before I bought the taters, so
I was really relieved when I found them in the third drawer I ransacked.
Fortunately, there was a cutting board. I hadn’t known this
until my second morning. I make hash browns and eggs and couldn’t initially
find the cutting board but on the second morning, I found it hiding behind the
clean dish rack.
One of my roommates, the one from Albany, has been here for
months and didn’t know about the cutting board. I timed my potatoes so she
could have time, room and pots to make enough deviled eggs to feed a refugee
camp. As a result, I’d abandoned the kitchen for warmer pastures and didn’t
notice she was slicing eggs and chopping scallions on a plate. When I circled
back later, she lamented about the lack of a cutting board, I showed her where
it lived. She had no idea, poor thing. It was a lot of eggs and scallions.
In other news, I still haven’t seen “The Mule,” but hope to
on my vacation. No clue if it’s playing in Oz, but we’ll see. Anyway, in doing
a slightly stalker-ish Internet search for a different reason, I discovered
that Toby Keith sings a song for the movie and there’s a video with clips from
the movie.
I found Karen! She is behind Dianne Wiest, wearing the ivory
dress and sitting with her movie husband. I can’t wait to see the movie. Clint
Eastwood rocks.
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