What’s in Play

Even though I am now leaving Baghdad earlier than planned, I’m not leaving anytime soon. As I understand it, I can leave between Sept. 21-30. By all but historical and Biblical accounts, that’s pretty much a long way off. There is no rush for me to find my next assignment.

And that is one of the silly things (I was going to say “the silly thing” but reconsidered) about my job. Every few years, I have to apply to another job, except it’s not a job, it’s an assignment. No matter what happens (God bless tenure), I have a paycheck, even if no one wants me. The saying goes something like, “You have a job; you have to find an assignment.”

Finding an assignment is basically finding a job. There are lists of assignments that are due to come out, list of ones that are open now and then there’s word of mouth about assignments that might be coming out. There also seem to be some one-off heads-ups about others; I’m not sure if those wind up on some official list later or not.

My position, basically the bottom on the totem pole, has a bunch of openings. Unfortunately, the way it shakes down is that the ones that are at my paygrade are mostly in DC. Well, being on the bottom of the totem pole, even if it’s the higher portion of that bottom level, doesn’t afford me the ability to both live and eat in DC. I like visiting DC, particular when I am getting per diem, but those jobs don’t allow for that and I’d prefer not to. Plus, seeing as how I’d either have to live in Virginia or Maryland and thus give up my Florida residency, I just don’t want to go there. Literally.

Most of the jobs at my level are in DC. The few that aren’t require a language that I don’t have. In many cases, jobs have time to learn the language built in, but these particular ones don’t What’s happened is that all those jobs have been spoken for; the main list I’m looking at came out in September and what’s left is what doesn’t appeal to most people and what has had people sign up but bail out.

I really don’t want another job not at my level. The base pay is the same and the “differentials” vary according to site, not position, so in some cases, the lower-graded jobs wind up taking home more, but it’s a lot harder to look ready for the next-higher level when you’re not even working at your current level. And since I got promoted my first year in Istanbul and this job is also a “downstretch,” technically by the time I leave here I’ll have already been at a lower level for three years.

I realize it makes no sense to normal people, but those who work for my employer understand it, but it boils down to there are not a lot of jobs out there at the moment for my pay grade. There are jobs popping up all the time and I’m content to wait, but I’m being pressured to lock something in.

Since I’m not hot for DC, I found four alternatives and, geeklily enough, hammered out the facts. For me, the job is more important that the location, so I left those out:

Posts currently available

A

·         05 DCM OMS position

·         Winter –TED December

·         Zero differential

·         No language time built in, but FAST language course available 11/4-12/20

·         Three years

·         OK’d cruise

·         Post gets rave reviews

B

·         06 POL position

·         Summer – September 2019 TED

·         15 percent differential

·         Language-designated 2/2 Spanish

·         Area of the world I haven’t visited

·         Three years

·         Interviewing tonight

C

·         06 P/E position

·         Summer – August, but is vacant now due to coverage switch

·         25 percent differential

·         No language

·         Not a position I’d look at otherwise; incumbent said it’s 80 percent travel arranging

·         Three years

·         I know hiring person and will interview tomorrow.

·         Same bureau as a previous tour

·         Post gets rave reviews

D

·         04 HRO position

·         Summer – August/Sept 2019

·         Has been officially ceded to EL but is still showing on NOW list. (

·         Would require curtailing for 7/8 HRO course

·         30 percent differential

·         No language

·         Desired skill; would provide training

·         Two years

Of course, as soon as the figurative ink dried (does anyone use ink anymore?), option D got yanked. (The “ceded” part; apparently there are no takebacks.) And option A, the only one at my grade, was also ruled out of play.

So that leaves B and C. Quite honestly, if I had seen the full list at the beginning, not just the leftovers, I wouldn’t have looked at either. It’s not the cities themselves, it’s that B requires language and C just doesn’t scream my name, plus I’ve lived and traveled that part of the world heavily. But C pays the most because of the differential.

Since I spelled out the options there, I’ve had both interviews and both are heavily recruiting me. For B, Spanish is the stumbling block; it’s not just one of those things that’s nice to have when you take taxis or grocery-shop; the person in the position right now used language, especially written, in her work on a daily basis. And I don’t have it. I could start tomorrow and work at it, but if Peace Corps taught me nothing about myself, it’s that I am not a good language learner. It scares me.

The other job doesn’t sound interesting, but I know the people there and they like me and were trying to come up with a different position. Both those jobs are open because the person penciled in have lined up a different job in Foreign Service. The B one is trying to find someone who speaks Spanish. If they can’t, there’s paperwork they can go through to try to exempt the recruit to get in with out it, but it’s not a slam-dunk.

What happened for the C one is that of the two admin positions, the big-league person changed sports altogether, C simply called up the next person down to fill the spot. The position that’s open is, in a way, the AAA spot. Since they found out I’m available, they’ve offered to ask the call-up if she’d prefer to stick to her original minor-league team, so to speak, or stay in the majors. Since the paperwork has already been done, it’s her call, not the coach’s, although the league gets a say. I’ve said if that big-league jobs comes open I’d take it, but right now I don’t know if it is.

If it is, it’s an easy decision because the job is “at-grade,” plus it’s in the 25 percent differential city and they’ve OK’d me to basically take off January to take my cruise. But, like option D, it might be too little, too late.

Going to be drinking a lot of root beer in the coming months

The cafeteria in my Hundred-Acre Sandbox has a phenomenal amount of options. With some restrictions, it’s all-you-can-eat-and-take, and wise advice given to me early on was to never leave without something. As safe as it feels here, it’s possible something hits the fan and we wind up hunkered down for a bit, so it’s a good idea to pack out a couple of Magnum bars here and there, right?

Most times I leave, I slip a thing of yogurt, a pack of those Crystal Light water enhancers, chocolate chip cookies, stevia packets or soft drinks into my pockets or bag. When I return to America, y’all might want to remind me that this would not be a welcome behavior in convenience stores.

Occasionally, the supply, wherever that comes from, runs short. People hoard things that are coveted, like soda water. (Yeech!) When I arrived, there was a selection of soft drinks, but they didn’t have root beer. Suddenly, root beer appeared and I started doing the five-finger thing two cans at a time (we do have a drinks-from-the-cooler limit, and I abide by it) at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Getting root beer before it ran out became an obsession, but all of a sudden, I realized that I had an entire shelf of A&W root beer. This is not in itself a bad thing, of course, but the thing that didn’t happen was running out of root beer. Apparently the maybe six weeks I was here with no root beer was unusual, not the presence of it.

It wasn’t until I had an entire shelf full of root beer that I realized that I was pretty much set, even if the root beer disappeared as quickly as it appeared. I drink one a week – it’s my reward on the weekend – and essentially, there’s a tour’s worth of it there. I’ve told people that if everything really does hit the fan, come to my place with vanilla ice cream.

   

With all the root beer I need to last through my May 2020 tour, I thought I was set. Well, yesterday I got a call that’s forcing me to start drinking root beer.

The DC office called and, due to shifting priorities of the administration, my job’s being eliminated. Yes, it’s not just journalism! As of this summer, my position and two similar ones are among a bunch more being eliminated. Normally, the tours are 12 months but I’d extended to 19, so basically what’s happened is the extension is being taken away.

People seem to think I should be up on a rooftop somewhere, but this is what happens in this job so I’m rolling with it. Since normally we know our new posts about a year out, I’m a behind the curve but there’s nothing I can do about it so there’s no point in worrying about it.

No matter what happens, I have a job; it’s an assignment I need to find. Right now, the pickins are really, really slim, but something will come up. I’m going to try to not think about it for a couple weeks anyway. There are some other work deadlines I should focus on because they come due earlier anyway.

Besides that, I have some root beer I need to get working on.

On the Far Side of the world

Still getting back into the rhythm after a long stretch away over here. For some reason this week in particular has knocked me. I’m exhausted.

As a morning person (don’t hate me), I usually get up at 6:10, go to breakfast, go back to apartment and hang out until 7:45, at which time my phone sounds this “get your motor running”-type alarm that jolts me into brushing my teeth, filling my Nalgene with tea, grabbing my latchkey lanyard and running out the door.

For whatever reason, I’ve had a hard, hard time getting up. I’m not one to hit the snooze button, but I’ve basically gotten out of bed at 6:30 daily. I really don’t know what’s up, although I’m taking a typhoid vaccine over seven days and wondered if that might be it. Fatigue isn’t listed as one of the effects, but who knows.

Friday’s my Saturday, and usually over weekends I still wake up at the same time, run for an hour and then go back to bed. In the evening, I do tae kwon do, albeit badly. This morning, I could only bring myself to do half an hour running. I just couldn’t. Tonight, I’ll go in early and do the other half, but today, it wasn’t happening.

Good job!

Maybe it’s because I redid my fitness routine post R&R and now instead of step class three times a week, I’ve cut that to two and added boxing. I also am trying to opt for the pool more and did that last night before boxing.

Today I can barely lift my arms. I try to do a lot of the shoulder rehab in the pool and it hurt even before boxing, where I totally did the punching thing. That might be tied to the fatigue more so than the typhoid, I suppose.

I’m also on a new assignment and even though it’s not physically exerting, I work a little late every night, which puts everything after leaving on an accelerated schedule. I’m getting into a routine at lunch a couple days a week where I take home an extra cup of soup and a piece of cornbread for dinner rather than going to the cafeteria in the evenings because there’s little time.

This place really really is like a cruise ship. There’s so much stuff to do that work gets in the way!

Last Sunday, our community rah-rah person (there’s a title, but it means nothing to people outside the job) put together a “Kindness Rocks” event, where we painted cheery rocks, thus channeling Leila and Riley. This was extremely hard to squeeze into my social calendar since Sunday is a work day and I’m super busy, but I cut half of salsa class to paint some.

The rock-painting event was several hours and people cranked out some really pretty ones, but mine were not among those. It was kind of amusing because Rah-Rah, who’s extremely sweet, would come along and talk about other people’s in detail, like, “Oh, this looks just like the Pinterest one you copied!” and her encouragement to me was more like, “Good job!”

I’m no artist. It was fun, but I did learn that rushing through rock painting doesn’t work well, especially when you need layers of paint. There just wasn’t time to dry. And painting little designs, or words, on small rocks is ridiculously hard. I made a cute little boat (if I do say so myself) but when I tried to write “Life is a Beach” on the back, it didn’t turn out so well. And, when I thought about the sentiment later, it didn’t make a lot of sense. If you’re on the boat, you’re probably not on the beach.  And I tried to paint a little eyeball followed by “Rock” but it when it was done – and I was out of time – it wound up looking like an “O.”

Merry Christmas to me

The next arty day will be making little hearts for Valentine’s Day. I think I will skip that because I really needed the salsa refresher. At Latin night, which was pretty dead, I drug some guy out to dance and promptly stepped on his feet. It was still fun.

But as busy as I am on weekdays, I pretty much chill out of weekends. Yes, I get up and work out for an hour, but really, after that, there’s no much. This morning I was so tired I came back from that half hour and put in a load of laundry. I set the timer to remind me it’s in there – the laundry room is down two hallways – and promptly fell back asleep. That rarely happens; sometimes I manage to sleep for 20 minutes, but I was gone the whole hour. The alarm woke me up from some weird dream. Then I stuck the stuff in the driver, set the timer for 45 minutes and same thing.

I’ve no idea what’s going on but decided to do little else this weekend but tackle my Christmas present to myself, The Far Side collection. Way back when, I had all the books but sold them after Peace Corps when I needed money. Now, they’re in a three-volume collection with lots of commentary from Gary Larson. It’s been so much fun to re-read these, although somehow I’m not getting ones that I thought I got before. Others I’m seeing things that I’m pretty sure I never noticed before and am cracking up. Man, they’re funny. Sure, sick and twisted, too, but what worthwhile isn’t?

The difference between Texas and Scotland, so to speak

Just back from my first long vacation and I’m trying to get re-acclimated to work life. With the shutdown, I think everyone’s adjusting. Though mine has been so much better than many other federal employees. My particular office is as unaffected as a federal office can be. There have been some adjustments buy by and large everyone is working and most of us are getting paid. I thought everyone was because I’ve been getting a paycheck but today, sitting around the knitting/cigar circle, I found out not everyone has been.

Anyway, I got back on Thursday, which is our Friday, so I’ve had my weekend to get back into the swing of it and over jet lag. Not much success in some of those areas, but I’m trying. Today I’ve done very little. I woke up and ran at 6, then did laundry and tried to stream a movie before church at 10, but it’s now 6 p.m. and my $45-a-month internet, the slow one, is still only halfway through the movie. In between, I ate a fabulous brunch in the cafeteria (oh, how I missed spinach omelets!)  and did the knitting/cigar circle thing. The weather outside has been gorgeous these two days I’ve been back.

 

The weather in Australia was gorgeous, too. I spent a little over two lovely weeks playing from Cairns down to Sydney. Cairns had the Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Rainforest, then I took the train to Airlie Beach and spent four or five days sailing to the Whitsundays and flying over the GB Reef. We did a float plane and landed about 100 kilometers out, seeing the cute heart-shaped reef before snorkeling the reef there – what an amazing view. There is so much life under the sea, even if people freak out about the reef bleaching.

One of the little islands – nothing but a sandbar, really – was a total bird and turtle sanctuary. We could only walk on a little part of the beach there to pull on our fins, and the noise from the birds was incredible. It wasn’t turtle-hatching season so we saw none of that but there were three on that particular snorkel.

The next two nights I had a little midway stop in Rockhampton, or maybe it was Rockhaven. Rocky, the locals called it. I’d bought a rail pass and decided to break up the trip and just picked that one at random. I got in at midnight, and my AirBnB host picked me up at the train station, which was really nice. I didn’t do much the next day except walk all day, go to a movie and get a haircut. That probably sounds boring, but I can’t do any of that at home, so it was a lovely way to spend a day. Oh, I also ate at Nando’s, which was a treat.

For the first three stops, I had AirBnBs reserved and did pretty good. I walked everywhere, averaging probably five miles a day. I enjoyed eating in the AirBnBs for the most part; I miss cooking. When I went out, I mostly ate fish and chips because … why not? I love them, and I was on the beach.

I had a lot of trouble pronouncing things the Australian way. Too many times, I garnered scorning stares when I said “Cahns” for Cairns. Apparently it’s “Caans.” Airlie Beach was another touch one. And don’t say “Rockhampton” (or maybe “Rockhaven”) because you will really be distained. It’s “Rocky.” Period.

But for all the guff I took for my Ozzie attempts, I could have given it right back for some stuff that came at me. In Rock, as I was buying a little something for Riley, the clerk asked me if I was from Texas. I sounded JUST LIKE a friend of hers from there, she said. I had to giggle. No one from the Lone Star State would never mistake me for a Texan.

In Brisbane, though, I really did a double take. Someone asked me if I was Scottish. It wasn’t a joke, either, and the person was a native English speaker. HOW can someone possibly mistake anything for a Scottish accent? To me, that’s about the most prominent (not to mention sexiest) accent there is. I can’t even imitate it. I guess all non-Australian accented people sound the same to people who have Australian accents. I mean, there is a world of difference – no, makes that WORLDS of differences – between Texas and Scotland and me. I’m mean, I’m flattered and amused, but let’s get real. I in no way sound neither Texan nor Scottish. But thanks for trying.

My trip was great; we’ll see what the financial damage comes to later. Something came over me and I bought a really cool ground opal ring. I think that’s what it’s called. It’s dark brown with flecks of green. I also bought a hat, which I will probably never wear but it was my third trip to Australia and I looked at them each time and finally caved. The hat was really hard to get back without squashing it.

Movies were on my agenda, and I saw three in addition to the flights. “Holmes and Watson” kind of meh. Part of it was I was totally jet lagged and I fell asleep twice. I might have missed some parts.

In Rocky, both “Instant Family” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet” were showing and I asked the sales person for advice. She said she’d heard “Instant Family” was good, but “Ralph is Ralph.” And that was good enough for me. I love John C. Reilly and the visuals were fantastic. Later, in Sydney, I saw “Mary Poppins” and it was very much worthy. (So tempted to say ”supercalafragilisticexpialidocius.”) There were no catch songs this time around and I saw each plot twist coming down the pike, but that wasn’t bad in this case. And even though the particular song wasn’t in there, I’ve still had “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” going through my head ever since.

My friend Linda, whom I stayed with in Sydney, treated me to an amazing show at the Sydney Opera House. We went to see “The Heights,” which was playing for only a week or so. Holy cow, it was outstanding. I’m not even sure I could pick the best actor; they were all spectacular. I didn’t see the orchestra at first and later realized they were behind the stage. I’ve no idea how they did it, really. The entire performance was incredible, even if I did see those plot twists coming, too.

Other Sydney highlights included a walk around Bondi Beach, Cockatoo Island (site of old prison and ship-building factory) and the Blue Mountains.

On the way back home, I stopped in Amman for two days. One was dedicated to doctor visits, which was pretty successful. I didn’t know I had to pay cash so I kept running to ATMs, but the whole thing was a bargain. The dental visit included X-rays and a massive overhaul of my bite guard, and then I saw the specialists on my foot and shoulder. He ordered an MRI and get this – I made an appointment at 4 p.m. for it, but when I realized I had to pay cash, I walked over there to ask how much it would be so I could get the cash out. I said I was coming at 4 p.m. but, if they could do it so I could be done by my 2:45 dentist appointment, I could do it then. This was around 1 p.m., and to my utter shock, they said sure. So I ran and got the cash, which was harder than it should have been because the bank upstairs from the MRI place didn’t take my cards, and the next bank two blocks away didn’t have an ATM (something I did not think possible) and I had to go two more blocks downhill to find one, meaning I had to run back uphill four blocks to get back to the place!

At 4 p.m., I finished with the dentist and went back to the doctor’s office (five blocks downhill) to see if I could make a follow-up appointment for the next day to get my MRI results. I realized going there that I hadn’t asked the MRI people when the results would be done, although they did tell me they would get them to the doctor. When I went into the doctor’s, related that and the lady said, “Oh, they already brought them by. If you want to just wait you can see the doctor in a minute.” That would never, ever happen in the U.S. And for all that – the dentist and fixins, what amounted to two appointments with the orthopedic surgeon and an MRI, I paid less than $500 AND got the results right away. Why our health care is so bad I just do not understand.

The result of the MRI is the surgery was fine except he did not repair my bicep, which is still torn. The new guy said he would have fixed it but recommended right now an anti-inflammatory and more range-of-movement exercises. That’s fine with me; I mostly just wanted to know I hadn’t re-screwed it up again.

I was supposed to go to a physio the next day but figured I already know the exercises so I talked to the concierge at the hotel and hired a driver to take me to the site of Jesus’ baptism. That was really cool. The Jordan River has shifted through the years due to dams being built, so the actual site is a dry spot off the river now. It completed my trifecta of the sites of Jesus’ birth, baptism and crucifixion.

And now I’m back. Really no idea what’s going on at work. Since I was in Erbil before, it’s been six weeks since I’ve been here. I’ve pretty much stayed on top of emails but haven’t really done a deep dive into anything. I learned I am supposed to be “bidding” on my next assignment but I should get that fixed quickly. People are coming back from the shutdown now, though, and it’s (rightfully) a low priority. There are people with way bigger issues than me.

Been there, bought the T-shirt.

Wrapped up three weeks in Erbil with a run to Carrefour! I got “out” again, and that second time, hit the mother lode. Carrefour is a Walmarty store, with all kinds of groceries (but no garlic Tabasco) and then your variety of clothes, toys and stuff like that.

It was my one chance for a souvenir, but since it was like most chain store and filled with stuff made in China, I declined. I tried to get Riley a couple of hair thingies for a care package, but once I got to the register, I learned they didn’t have bar codes. Since the store had opened early for us, there was no staffer in the jewelry section, either, so I couldn’t get one.

So I made do with other stuff, like the Albeni Twix-like cookies, which I love, but I couldn’t buy much since I headed home on New Year’s Eve.

Erbil was nice and I’ll probably be back before I leave Iraq, but if not, I sure made the most of it. Besides the two store runs, I hit paydirt with a couple of Ace Hardware Iraq mugs for Wendy and a Kurdagonia shirt for me.

What’s that, you ask? Well, Erbil is the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It’s an autonomous region in the country, and the Kurds don’t consider it Iraq. I wanted a Kurdish flag but couldn’t find one, but I did get the T-shirt.

It doesn’t stay Kurdistan; they’re some American’s idea of a bootleg off the Patagonia brand. They’re not sold on the compound, but I got lucky and whoever it is who sells them happened to bring them in for an hour, so I plunked $35 for a cool hooded T-shirt.

I went with the hooded T-shirt because it was darn cold there, and needed a long-sleeved shirt to work out in. It was just so chilly, and wet. I hope that the next time I go back I get the same housing but that it’s a bit warmer outside. And inside. It was so cold inside. All the rooms that a person spent time in had a wall AC/heating unit, but that still left the cross-through parts of the house amazingly cold.

Now I am back in Baghdad, where it’s about 10 degrees warmer, but I won’t be here for long. I’m headed to R&R shortly, and am spending New Year’s Day trying to unpack, do laundry, repack and recover from traveling so I can get ready to travel again.

Looking forward to getting Down Under, although I have a stop first in Amman, where I’ll see a dentist and an orthopedic surgeon to check on the status of my shoulder and foot recovery. After that, I’ve got three long flights that should plop me in Cairns when it’s all said and done.

I’ve got some side trips lined up and all my train tickets booked so I can wind up in Sydney on whatever it is I’m supposed to wind up there. I’ve really lost track of what day it is. The holidays-on-weekdays thing really mixes me up big time, not that I minded having three holidays in a two-week span.

Hopefully, it’ll be a blissful three weeks and not as expensive as I fear; I’ve paid off what I could up front, including a float plane tour around Airlie Beach.

I’m still not feeling burnt out or anything, but I am looking forward to hitting Australia again and seeing the Great Barrier Reef.

Safe travels for everyone in 2019!

You can go home again

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.

There once was a woman who lived in a CHU. Thankfully, it wasn’t me.

We had container housing units at Hope Village. You might not have seen these, but you can picture them: A tractor-trailer, minus the tractor, divided into a couple of rooms. That’s a container housing unit, or CHU. Hope Village’s didn’t have any sort of plumbing because we had a separate trailer for it, but the ones here in Erbil are “wet,” meaning they have a tiny bathroom in them. But no kitchen or washer and dryer, two things that I really appreciate for a three-week TDY.

Fortunately, I am not living in a CHU. Instead, I’m in a giant house that’s designated for female TDYers here. Right now, there are three of us. The other two are in two of the three upstairs bedrooms, which is also where the washers and a bathroom are. I’m currently the lone occupant of the downstairs, which consists of 2-3 bedrooms (really it’s three, but one is half the size of the others and only contains an iron), a giant kitchen, a bath and a half, an oversized hallway that’s both longer and wider than some bedrooms I’ve had, and 2-3 oddly configured sitting room/living room/formal dining rooms. I think these used to be two separate rooms, because there are two doors within a two feet of each other that lead to the oversized hallway.

They’re nice digs for a couple of weeks and I’ve really enjoyed cooking. Since the temporary employees meander in and out, it’s kind of hostel-like (though absolutely not hostile). There’s a lot of random leftover ingredients laying around, like pasta, spinach and garlic.

Since basically our compound here is literally a couple of city blocks, there are little grocery stores (smaller than 7/11s) that sell the basics, which is perfect for me since I’m a basic kind of person. I got rice, macaroni (I didn’t know about the cache at first), milk and eggs and then loaded up with carrots, onions and potatoes when the veggie guy came.

And I got outside! The coordinator sent out an email for a supply run (my employer would capitalize the “s” and “r” but I refuse to). I didn’t even know where it was but I signed up. I just wanted to go “outside.”

Oh what fun! The outside world! Iraq! Lovely Erbil, Iraq. Which, since most cities look very similar, a lot like anyplace in Turkey, Morocco and Jordan, but who cares, right? I was outside!

Only a few people can go, and since we don’t drive, we all went together in a motorpool ride. Everything’s coordinated and such, so we only had an hour, but that was plenty time to hit the grocery store, what since I didn’t need groceries and all. I did manage to buy these cookies I discovered in Istanbul that are basically Twix bars, brownie mix (we’re doing a Christmas potluck), a couple Snickers bars, milk and juice. Oh, and, quite randomly, a nail file. I’d tried to buy one from both Target and Walmart, but neither would allow the $1 metal item to be shipped to me. And then I found one in Erbil, go figure. Also about $1, but most everything else seemed cheaper. I got a heavy bag of groceries, handed over a $20, and got enough change to go to the coffee shop next door and have Iraqi tea, which, let’s get real, is the same thing as Turkish tea. Not a bad thing, of course.

The downside of the whole “outside” trip was me managing to pull my back getting out of the car, which, since we’re American, was a giant Suburban or something similar. By bad luck of the draw, I was in the back seat and, getting out, managed to step out in massive pain. If I had been anywhere else but on my one shot at being “outside,” I would have gone back to bed. I hurt so bad and basically eased myself through the whole shopping trip. At one point, I went for a bag of rice on the bottom shelf and instantly regretted it.

What it is with backs that makes them somehow susceptible to the silliest movements? I remember two other times when I hurt myself. One was playing softball, when I reached down to get a ball at the backstop and couldn’t get up. The other was when I went to play with Kocur, who was more than delighted that I brought myself down to her level and then couldn’t get back up. So much more convenient to play with her, right?

Yesterday after the “supply run,” I pretty much loafed around in pain. I’d gotten up early and ran, so I didn’t feel bad about that, but I did eat a Snickers, a small bag of malted milk balls (alas, not Whoppers, but he best I could do) and a Twix-ish cookie, but that was over the course of a long day, not in a sitting.

With a little of the scrounging thing, I also tracked down some chicken that clearly had been in the freezer for longer than my two roommates had been here, so they were fair game. I had baked chicken and rice plus spinach.

And Star Wars. For some reason, two of the channels here are playing Star Wars, like all of the way through. They’re different channels, probably run by the same media conglomerate, but very definitely, Star Wars was on one channel and The Empire Strikes back on another, so go figure. For whatever odd reason, they skipped The Force Awakens (though they did Rogue One) and went directly from Return of the Jedi to The Last Jedi. Han Solo, I guess, isn’t out on TV yet so it wasn’t in the mix. But was nice having the Force with me as I spent the day in pain.