Learning the language

Home leave was fun while it lasted.

Well, not really, but it is over. I accomplished very little but had a little bit of fun. Saw some extended family – trips to S.C. and La., plus visited St. Augustine and saw Scotty Emerick. Those were the highlights.

Lowlights were in abundance, but there’s no point in dwelling on them. Batgirl was appreciative of a couple extra hands for the tummy rubs, so I’ll cling to that. But home leave’s over now, and I’m parked in D.C. for the time being.

 It’s only the first week, so I’m still settling in. One more Target run and I think I’ll be good – I forgot a couple things on the first pass-through. So far, I’ve been to Harris Teeter, Target, Amazon Fresh and Trader Joe’s, plus put in an Amazon order. It’s amazing the amount of crap you need to start off, only most of my crap is food. I did buy a silicone trivet/microwave shield and some reuseable silicone baggies, but everything else has been food. I’m starting from zero and should be here several months, so there were lots of staples to acquire.

 Since I’ll be going to campus daily and there’s no much around, the plan is to bag lunch. I’m essentially a middle-school student when it comes to bringing lunches. So far, I’ve brought peanut butter crackers. Since I’m coming from the land where caramel M&Ms and WintOgreen Lifesavers have flowed freely, I’m trying to cut back on sweets. There’s been early success on the ability to do that, but unfortunately, the scale added a pound rather than deducted one.

My temporary apartment is fine. There was a list and the orders were to pick four and they’d get me in one. I remember my first pick and this is not it, but it’s next door and they’re all the same anyway. The only difference between this one and that one is that this one has an outdoor pool instead of an indoor one and the other one doesn’t allow dogs. I swear in some of the paperwork, it sounded like this one didn’t, either, but the barky little dog down the hall begs to differ.

 But the digs have everything you need: a washer and dryer, biweekly service, a gym and a concierge for when the Amazon packages arrive and you’re out of town. One thing it doesn’t have is a pull-out sofa, which surprised me but I’ll deal with it.

I’m almost done moving in, which basically means I finally figured out where all but one of the light switches go to. There’s a lamp I thought was broken, but after much experimentation I discovered the control diagonally across the room, no where near it. I’m not sure I’ll ever use that lamp, but it’s good to know where the power is.

Probably the smartest thing I’ve done here is get an Arlington library card. Now, I love me my Leroy Collins Library, but this Arlington library – woo-hoo. It’s fantastic and barely two blocks away.

The job itself is going to be brutal. I’m learning a language, which sounds super cool but it’s not my strength. However, I really, really want to be successful and hope that I can land on some method of study that works for me. I’m just not one of those people; my strengths lie elsewhere.

There’s a test to evaluate language aptitude, and I took it this week. Although the official results aren’t in yet, I can pretty much guarantee I know how it ends: I suck. There were five sections and I only felt comfortable with one of them. It was where you were given an abbreviation of sorts for a word – think messaging. You were supposed to define the word. So if it was SCRBL, you might select “mixed up.” That section had a bunch of questions and a short amount of time; I got the impression no one was expected to finish. I didn’t, but I got pretty far despite leaving some blank.

The test isn’t graded for credit; it’s a measuring tool. We’d been told guesses didn’t count against us, but since this was to measure something, I felt it was more honest to leave blanks. And boy, did I. The last section was basically a short-term memory test and I only answered about three out of 20-25. Two had been used as examples in the instructions and one was the word for “wolf.”

So now begins a slog in which I have committed to doing something completely out of my wheelhouse. I am pretty freaked out over it. Lots of people take language and the classes are small. Mine has four people. The teacher asked us what our goal was and what we considered our biggest fear. The others said something like “mastering the language/speaking well” and “messing up” but when it was my turn, I told them my goal is to manage my expectations and my biggest fear is holding up the class. It may be a very long spring/summer.

Some of it’s magic and some of it’s tragic

I’m halfway through home leave; French looms in a month. It’s been … well, I know to manage my expectations. This home leave has revolved around the care and feeding of Zippy, who really needs to consider an assisted living facility. I’d planned on visiting some with her and maybe lining stuff up, but she wants to stay in her own house, which is understandable. But since I will be departing in less than a month, she really needs someone to look after her. We had someone visit but she’s opposed to that. Her solution is for me to quit my job.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve been to one funeral and two more people from my youth have died. In addition, two more families have called in hospice for people. Both my sister and her husband have upcoming medical procedures. It’s not been fun, but it’s centering around Zippy.

Most of my home leave has revolved around downsizing, cleaning, chauffeuring, and entertaining her, but I’ve squeezed in some stuff for myself. One thing that wasn’t supposed to be for me was a trip to visit my aunt in South Carolina. Zippy was supposed to go to that but wound up in the hospital earlier that week and didn’t feel up to the trip, so I went solo. Had a blast; we did two garden club events and had good food and good conversation. Lots of new dog hair, too, with Clyde, the teenage Golden.

There’s another upcoming family trip; Zippy and I – as well as Rally and The Bat – are headed to Ruston to meet up with her brother and family (and dogs), who will be having a short graveside service in memory of my aunt, who died in the fall.

Batgirl is having a wonderful time having me here. She doesn’t have to use her legs because I cuddle her and carry here everywhere. She’s such a sweet, spoiled little monster. Also demanding, but that’s what divas do. She’s still my little baby, even though she’s 13 years old.

I’m coming off a lovely weekend in St. Augustine, where I have only been once before, which would have been likely 30+ years ago. Leanne, the expert, booked us a lovely lunch at the Columbia and, much later, we had upstairs balcony seating at Meehan’s Irish Pub because I wanted Fish and Chips. We stayed across the bridge for the evening so we could visit the lighthouse easily in the morning, so we finished off Saturday night with ice cream from Cone Heads. Lovely weekend with unanticipated beautiful weather. We’d been prepared for rain on Sunday morning, but it was gorgeous both days.

Last week, I had a short stay over at Leila’s, which turned out to be one of those good/bad visits. Her grandfather wound up in the hospital and her car was on the blink, so I jumped in to help with transportation and some little household repairs. I had a lovely visit with Blue and finally got some time to visit Leila after she left her grandfather in the hands of other family members.

Leila had to come into Tally the day after I left for something and we (and Blue) met again at Harry’s, where I used a gift certificate from a friend. I’d never gone before and man, it was fantastic. I brought Zippy home some shrimp, but it cannot have been better than the grouper I had.

 Late that evening, Leila called me and asked if I knew who was going to be in Tallahassee the next day, which was Thursday. I had no idea, but it was the day I was taking the car for repairs first thing and then delivering Zippy to the dentist at 1:45, so I didn’t really have any free time. (Not counting sitting around and waiting on Honda to fix the mirror.)

And enter the magic: Leila had just discovered that there was to be a press conference to announce the renaming of A1A Jimmy Buffett Highway and Florida’s new JB specialty license plate. He was by far her favorite entertainer, so this was huge for her. However, they (“they” being either the folks at Margaritaville or the State of Florida, I’m not sure) also brought in a shirttail member of the Coral Reefer band to play a few JB tunes following the press conference. And that member happened to be one of my favorite songwriters, Scotty Emerick.

Totally love the guy’s music and seeing him perform has been a bucket list item forever. Living overseas for a couple years at a stretch makes this difficult and a couple years ago I attempted to see him at Key West Songwriters but fell short. Since at that show he performed with Dean Dillon, I couldn’t score tickets but I did *hear* him play because someone kindly directed me to the back door and I hung out there and eavesdropped.

And last week, an opportunity to see him fell into my lap. Fortunately, the car got fixed and Zippy got a ride to the dentist so I did get to see him on the Capitol steps. The gig wasn’t for his stuff but for 4-5 Songs You Know By Heart, but it hit the spot. I told Leila I’ve now seen him play and heard him perform his songs, so taking those together it’ll have to scratch the bucket list item because I don’t see it happening again. He wasn’t at Songwriters last year and starting this year I’m out for four years straight, so this may be it.

But it was a lovely bit of magic in what’s been a fairly tragic home leave.

A Christmas miracle

Back in Florida for Christmas for the first time in I can’t remember. It’s definitely warmer than in our nation’s capital, but it’s still chilly, especially in the mornings. My motivation for 10k steps daily has waned a bit because mornings are 38 degrees. Since I do not have a lovely gym right across from me and am reduced to pounding pavement, there’s not a lot to encourage me to wake up and go. Especially since A. it doesn’t lead to weight loss and B. there’s nothing else to do all day anyway, so I can walk around the neighborhood later.

This chapter of No Place Like Home should be two months long; I’m not due back for language training until the end of February. I may have scheduled something earlier, but I honestly can’t tell from the schedule. There’s a two-hour class I have to do in a couple weeks, but beyond that, there’s nothing.

It’s all about Zippy. Yard work and massive home repairs are on the calendar as soon as 2024 hits and there’s also the matter of getting a new side view mirror because Zippy toasted the current one. It’s held up by a lot of tape and a prayer. This is no vacation.

I have a ton of leave to burn, though, and penciling it out, I will still have a bunch left over when it’s all said and done. It’s a little bit crazy, but it’s a nice crazy to have. Right now, I have three pots of leave and they all runneth over.

Anyway, Christmas at home is fine; Batgirl is happy to have another human to rub her tummy. We don’t do anything for the holiday, but I did get to a Christmas Eve service, which was nice. What’s not wonderful is having three people in the house and only two bathrooms; I’m having to share a tiny bathroom and I’m crammed into the third bedroom, which has little spare room. That’s bad because I have all my Sandbox furnishings – 400 pounds – with me. Much of it is in the garage and I’ve gifted Wendy some stuff I brought, but the rest has to hang somewhere. It’s household stuff, so I’m not using it, but it has to stay somewhere until it gets shipped to my next post, which won’t be until September.

It's crowded, so when I had the opportunity to cat sit for almost a week and have a whole bathroom – as well as Netflix and the whole house – to myself, I jumped. YAY! I spent Monday-Friday elsewhere, catching up on some movies, including the wonderful Christmas film “Love Actually.”

While there, I did try to walk a little. There’s a circle and I’d do that every morning, popping in a “Stuff You Should Know” podcast and throwing on headphones. Somehow, though, upon return, I can’t find the headphones anymore. It’s no great loss; they’re the wired ones that come with the phone, and the left one stopped working about three weeks ago. It’s a mysterious loss, though. It’s not here; it’s not there, but it has to be somewhere.

And now that I am back at No Place Like Home, I don’t have any headphones. Somewhere in the 400 pounds of stuff, there’s a wireless set but I have no clue where and don’t feel like digging. That wireless set is the third set of those I’ve bought. A cheap pair I got in Vilnius blew out and I left those on the free table. The first set was with me in Minsk. I remember one really cold morning (there were a lot of them) I went to the big grocery store and, in that no-man’s land between the first sliding door and the second one, the left one fell out!

Man, that was upsetting. I hunted and hunted for that thing; I mean, it couldn’t have gone far; it’s not like I didn’t notice it had fallen out. I got on my hands and knees and looked underneath ATM and vending machines – places no human eye (or hands) should ever encounter. But no dice.

Eventually, I bought a replacement off eBay but quickly discovered (quickly after the agonizingly slow delivery, anyway) it wasn’t exactly the same and was therefore not compatible. (Say mine was model 831 and the new one was 832.) Bummer. I went with the wired forever and then caved and bought the cheap ones in Vilnius. Pair No. 3, the one in a box somewhere, is corded together so I’m not worried about losing those, but I have to find them first.

While unpacking, I rooted through my backpack and felt something hard in this little bungie thingie on the strap. It’s for your MP3 player or something; I never use it. (My backpack dates to MP3 players.) I dug through the mesh to identify the object and it was my long-lost headphones! Truly a Christmas miracle.

Weirdly, I found the mismatched set in my 400 pounds of crap and reunited Lefty with Righty and tossed them in the charter together. A blue light blinked suspiciously, but Lefty charged up like a trouper.

That thing fell out of my ear well over two years ago and I hunted forever for it. The whole time, it was lodged in mesh maybe 8 inches from my ear

Discovering D.C.

Since I am in Washington temporarily, I’m trying to explore as much as possible. Still being acclimated to Sandbox winters, it’s a bit chilly for me but my goal is to do one touristy thing a weekend. Various Smithsonians are always good bets. There are so many of them!

The first weekend I was here, I went to the Air and Space Museum on the mall, which is being renovated. I’d been there before but love to wander. Another weekend, I went to the Native American one. After taking a week off of museums for Thanksgiving, I finally got to the larger Air and Space Museum branch, which is the Udvar-Hazy one near the airport. It was my third time trying to get there this stay and it was absolutely worth the wait.

It happened to be the 20^th anniversary of the museum, so it was packed. I arrived right before it opened and the line was at least a block long, but once it opened everyone went through quickly.

Holy cow, what an incredible place. It’s in a series of hangars and whoever did the planning must be some kind of Tetris wonder. There were scads of (mostly) winged aircraft, some of which were absolutely huge and some of which were nowhere near as large. Someone, way back when, must have done some blueprint or something and figured that you could fit this giant winged aircraft that took up a huge footprint and still have room to put other just-as-impressive (but smaller) aircraft, quite literally, in the wings. For example, there was an Air France Concord – which is one long beast – with multiple smaller aircraft strategically placed underneath. Other plans, gliders and balloon buckets hanging from the ceiling.

A lot of the aircraft were experimental and my big takeaway from that was that there are some really brave (or possibly stupid) in the world. Some of the prototype helicopters, in particular, reminded me of the thing that Barney Rubble tried to design on the very first Flinstones episode. The home-built planes and gliders were equally impressive.

The bombers and other wartime planes were amazing. One looked like a boat, and some absolutely looked like spy planes. Mostly because they were, like the Lockheed Blackbird, the epitome of “stealth.” My favorite bomber, though, as the “Flak-Bait,” which wasn’t on display. Instead, the Smithsonian folks had opened its workshop, so to speak, to visitors.

In the workshop, there are people cleaning, repairing and restoring potential exhibits. I’d caught a glimpse of the fuselage from the upstairs viewing room (it’s nor normally open to visitors, but the anniversary was special), and when I went through that hangar, stopped to look. There was an older gentleman standing on the other side of the “us and them” rope designating the walking path. I started talking to him about the plane and, since he seemed to know a lot about it, asked what his connection to it was. Turned out, his dad had been the pilot.

This is why it’s important to talk to strangers. They have amazing stories. The guy didn’t work at the Smithsonian, but had come to visit on the anniversary, and when the employees realized who he was, they asked him to step on the working side of the rope and chat with guests, and I just got lucky. He had some great stories about the bomber (a B26). I asked him how long his dad had flown it, and he said most tours were 25 missions long, but his dad flew 75. That’s incredible.

Since he said his dad, who’d been 22 when he served, didn’t talk much about the war, I asked when he figured out the enormity of what his dad had done. He said he’d had the opportunity to pilot a small plane in and out of the base where his dad had been stationed. (It’s no longer a base and is privately owned.) He said when he was coming in for a landing, he realized he was seeing the same countryside his father had seen 75 times.

I’m so glad I got to chat with him.

I had hoped to find the control panel that Laurie and her team signed after decommissioning the shuttle Discovery, but that is not on display. An employee explained that there’s another hangar for storage and only a small percentage of their stuff is on display.

That was a bummer, but seeing the Discovery made up for it. Holy cow, it is pretty cool to stand next to something that’s flown over 150 million miles. Well, I suppose it would bore Laurie, but it geeked me out. It is impossible, though, to get the whole thing in one photo frame.

I would up spending a couple more hours there than I figured, but it wasn’t enough time. I’d gone with someone and think that she got bored, so I caved and came back a little earlier than I had planned, but, even then, it was a good 3-4 hours. There’s just that much to see, and it’s totally worth it.

Now I am down to two more weekends in DC, although one of those is just a Saturday. I am thinking the American History museum will be next, although I checked the website and Seinfeld’s Puffy Shirt is not on display. Ford’s Theater is a backup, and so is seeing the White House Christmas tree.

If I go, I am going to ask how they store the things that aren’t on display. It sounds like there’s more in storage than on display. This makes me curious as to if there’s a giant storage unit somewhere with stuff all crammed in it, or if it’s something akin to the where the Ark of the Covenant was housed at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

Oh, to catch a ride

My American Express card (member since 1990!) expires at the end of this month. A couple months ago (or so it seems; time’s a bit wonky these days), I got a notice that they would be sending my new card so I gave them my address in The Sandbox. Unfortunately, it didn’t arrive before I left, and I don’t think leaving five days early had any impact on that.

Although I put in a forwarding notice from The Sandbox to Uh-mer-i-ka, it hadn’t arrived as of two weeks ago, so I changed my address back to where it was and requested a new card. It’s arrived but I’m not there, so the card is meeting me tomorrow. I have a backup credit card, so no worries, right?

Well.

I have a morning flight tomorrow and in checking the metro schedules, I discovered that they don’t start on the holidays until well after I need to be at the airport. There’s a bus, but it leave a tad too late, plus it takes 45 minutes to go four miles.

No worries, right? There’s an app for that, or so I hear. I discovered that Uber’s not great here, so I got Lyft and started setting up my account. After putting in my backup credit card, I was all set. Or so I though.

When I hit “confirm,” Lyft informed me that I needed to set another credit or debit card. Since my old AmEx wasn’t set to expire until the end of the month, I tried that. No dice. I have the new card number, but I didn’t have that secret code that they’re now adding to cards. My alternate card’s website has a thing where I can see a PDF of my card, so I tried that. Nope, it’s not there. AmEx has wonderful customer service, so I tried them. After finally convincing the AI customer service voice that I needed a real person, the real person said those numbers are secret and AmEx itself can’t see mine.

Any normal day, I’d love that safety measure, but not today. 

The Lyft app allowed for other types of payments, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll just hook it up to my PayPal. It took about five tries of endless spinning and restarting the app several times before I could access PayPal, but finally had success. Relieved, I again went to make a reservation, what since restarting the app killed the one I’d been trying to do. A payment method and a backup, right? What could go wrong?

Well, it didn’t take. The Lyft gods took me to the “we need another card” page. I tried again with the card, but it didn’t work. I restarted Lyft again, changing my primary payment method to cash, thinking that I’d have cash and a backup credit card. No dice.

At this point, I remembered I do have an AmEx card, even if it’s not in my possession. Instead, it was being transported at that very minute from Seminole Land to Disney Land. I called Zippy (she wasn’t driving) and, after the usual Zippy-trying-to-hear rigamarole, convinced her to put me on speaker so Barry, who acted as interpreter.

It was a long shot and didn’t pay off. All my mail – Zippy refuses to shred anything, instead collecting it for to go through every year or so – was in her suitcase. Since they’d been on the road for two hours already, I asked her to text me once she got to Disney Land (two words, not the theme park) and if I hadn’t solved the problem by then I’d get back with her.

There’s always a solution.

I searched for options and found a taxi company. The stupid internet site wouldn’t let me order a cab from it – no idea what happened – but I called the number. And it went straight to voice mail, except it said the mailbox was full.

Seriously, how hard could this be, right?

After wrestling with whether or not to just have the hotel call me a cab in the morning, I realized that I could just have them schedule it tonight. I pulled on my .90 Target ghost slippers (post-Halloween find; my feet were cold) and asked the front desk if they could do it for me. YES!

Oh my. The front desk associate (in training) managed to get it done in less than four minutes. It’s funny how just standing there while someone is accomplishing something that’s you’ve spent 20, 30 minutes on is such a relief. It’s sort of like your frustration increases and decreases at the same time.

But either way, I should have a cab to the airport tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kicked off the island

Once again, I’ve been “evacuated” from the 100-Acre Sandbox. It’s been unreal, but not at all unsafe. Even though the Middle East situation is volatile, at no point has anything been aimed at diplomats in the sandbox, so this evacuation/drawdown/whatever feels a little extreme.

The whole thing is unsettling, though. I had been preparing to leave a whopping six days later anyway, and being told one day that you’re leaving the day after instead of in a week (on a nonstop flight, no less) is jolting. I’d been trying to prepare anyway for a gap (my successor doesn’t have a visa yet) and kept getting pulled to other things, so there’s no real SOP on my job. I can work remotely, but as I’ve discovered, the two things I really need access to are inaccessible.

The travel to D.C. – where I was to be on Tuesday, 10/31 anyway – was miserable. It’s possibly the worst travel day I’ve ever experienced.

We checked out at 9 a.m., each with a 50-pound bag, a 20-pound carry-on and wearing or carrying out PPE, which is heavy as all get-out. After weighing the bags four times in five minutes on different scales (??), we were brought in groups to the place where we catch the helicopter to our Sister Sandbox at the airport. There, we waited for a flight to Amman. We have a little plane and they kept going back and forth with groups. I know a lot of people at the SS, so I chatted with them and had lunch in the cafeteria. Whitefish and spinach, not a bad way to end. (I’d had a burger, fries, carrots and ice cream for my last meal at the main Sandbox.)

My flight got to Amman at 6:30, and boarding for my onward (my routing was Doha – D.C.) was to be in an hour, so that wasn’t bad. I ran up to the lounge, grabbed some chicken and rice and went to the gate, where I met up with some other refugees.

By 7:27, there were still no gate agents around. Eventually, someone came but no one ever made any announcements. They never put any information up on the sign, but we pieced together (which is hard since any information was given in Arabic) that nothing was going to happen any time soon. At some point, I got a text from the airline – the only one in the group of 6-8 of us who did – that said there was “mechanical trouble” and we would receive an update by 10 p.m.

We never did, but by that time we’d figured out that the flight wouldn’t go and somehow we had to get our bags back ourselves. The whole planeload of people had to. We saw people leaving in large groups and followed them, grabbing an airline person and basically forcing him to speak to us in English about what was going on. He explained (or tried to) that we had to get our exit visas canceled and get our bags. Telling him we didn’t have exit visas didn’t seem to register to him.

Meanwhile, one in our group was contacting the travel agency and trying to get us re-routed, and, as we followed the group outside of security – meaning we’d have to go back through again – we found a gaggle of people clamoring for … we weren’t sure. There was no information desk, no nothing. In asking for information, we got a QR code “chat.” I tried it and never got a response.

In the throng of hysterical people, a customs (or something) agent grabbed my passport as I was trying to explain that I had no exit visa to cancel. He grabbed it, and many other people’s, and went into a room.

Picture a hunch of hungry refugees at a door where people occasionally surfaced to hand out bags of food to specific people. That’s what happened – some immigration people (I guess) were copying a couple hundred people’s passports and handing them back out, calling names 2-5 at a time. It was a nightmare.

By this time, my group had been confirmed on a different airline scheduled for 3:25, and at this point it was maybe 10 p.m. Someone told me to make a scene and demand mine, so I tried to, politely, pull the diplomat card. I told one guy I didn’t need an exit stamp, so grab my passport, it was the black one. (Another guy in our group had his taken at the same time I did and he got his back almost immediately.) Well, it didn’t work. I think he moved me back in the line.

Finally, the airline guy we grabbed helped prompt, probably using his penis. Since I don’t have one, apparently my voice doesn’t work either.

Anyway, we then had to exit through customs, getting stamped out, and claim our bags. For the diplomats in the group, this wasn’t a big deal since we have a short line and free visas. But the poor contractors on the flight had to cough up $60 for a visa, only to grab their bags and then go check in again.

Since our rebooked flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 3:25 a.m., we couldn’t check in until 12:25, which meant we had to hang out in the crappy ticket area for about two hours. Finally, we got checked in and went through immigration/security for the second time and then headed up to the lounge for 2-3 hours – the flight was delayed until 4:20 a.m.

The lounge was nice and the whole thing was just so absurd. I went through the line to get food and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is exactly the same menu they had last time I was here.” And I realized “the last time I was here” had been 5-6 hours earlier. But we all got a table, got to know each other and talked, while some of us grabbed catnaps.

Finally, we went to the gate area, where we met up with a lot more refugees who had originally been scheduled for that flight. They looked fresh as daisies because upon arrival at 5-6 p.m., they took cabs into the city and checked into lovely hotels for a couple hours, showered, had decent meals and then set back out. We looked bedraggled and exhausted, but we all got on the flight to Frankfurt. I even got lucky and had an empty seat next to me.

Although that flight had some rough turbulence and we landed an hour late, we made it fine to the final flight. It was perfect. Although I cannot sleep on planes, I caught up on movies, watching the last Indiana Jones one (it tried too much), “No Hard Feelings,” “Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret” and “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.”

We landed and everyone dispersed, although we do have a WhatsApp group so, once we catch up on sleep, can get together and discuss the whole situation. It’s not something that people who haven’t been through it can relate to.

This morning, I woke up at 7 a.m. with a terrible migraine and I took a walk. I’m in Ballston and starting 10/31 I was going to be here anyway, so I got a hotel near where I will be then, since that other one wasn’t available today. I walked there this morning to figure out where it was and as I was nearing it, someone walked out who I thought looked familiar. I, not really loudly, called her name, assuming if it wasn’t hear she’d keep walking. But it was her! She’d been booted off the island a week before, in the first group and had landed there.

We took a long walk to Trader Joe’s and Target and just talked about the process. It’s just been unreal, especially since, so far, nothing that really screams “these people are unsafe, get them out of here.” We’re planning on dinner tonight and church tomorrow morning – there is one nearby.

Meanwhile, migraine gone, I came back to the hotel, took a long nap and woke up to the second quarter of FSU. I’m hoping to put this all behind me but it’ll take awhile. I’m still exhausted and the emotions are running.

But FSU is winning, so that is something.

Countdown is on

Well, it looks like I’m down to under 60 days in The 100-Acre Sandbox. Due to a personnel change, there’s going to be a gap when I leave and, since I could stay another month with only a marginal impact on my between-tour plans, I made the offer to remain here just a few more weeks but it didn’t work out.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that, although I tell myself I’m ambivalent. The truth is, there will be a lot of guilt involved because it will be a problem that I could have helped solve but it’s not my decision to allow me to do it. As a result, whatever I convey to my eventual replacement will be a game of telephone: I’ll leave instruction and teach as best I can someone who has absolutely no idea what my department is about, and that person will then have to convey it to someone else. It’s really not setting them up for success, which makes me sad. I worked really hard here but by the time the next person arrives it will be in tatters.

But this means I should return to Uh-mer-‘ka around the end of October, although I won’t head home for a couple months. A lucky stroke scheduling lets me leave on a direct flight to DC for training – no stopping in Amman for 14 hours and being crammed on a Royal Air Jordanian flight filled with families loaded to the hilt with luggage to Chicago or JFK and then Charlotte and Miami before getting home. Just straight from the Sandbox to our nation’s capital. The classes I need to take just happen to be offered the next week, so I get to break up almost a year of training with a couple months off – getting to spend the worst winter months in Florida and not DC.

But before I peace out of here, I’ve got another pickleball tournament to plan. We’re going pink for breast cancer awareness. In the weeks leading up to it, the big boss requested a pickleball clinic. Somehow this also fell to me, even though I’m not exactly a superstar. This past week has been a lot of pickleball. We – one other guy and I – decided to, instead of holding a big formal clinic, have one of the four courts available for lessons on the regular pickleball times. So three times this past week I’ve done “clinics,” although, to be honest, that’s basically what happens every Monday, Tuesday and Friday anyway. There are always new people and it’s usually me who gives pointers. In about 50 minutes, they’re better than me.

Although it’s noticeably cooler than when I left for Iceland, it’s still in the triple digits. Essentially, it’s gone from being 117 to 107, and there’s little shade on our pickleball courts. It’s quite toasty. Today, not a clinic day, I and the other guy decided to just got out and play, so it was two of us for 45 minutes and then another person heard the POP POP and came out for another half hour, then, as I was trying to leave, someone else came by and we played one game of four before I finally bailed. I sweat buckets and had to shower before church!

Looking at the sports and social calendar, I have spin class, pickleball and water aerobics plus two or three 5k run/walks before I leave. This will give me at least three more T-shirts from Sandbox events, and I have decided to make a quilt (meaning pay someone to make me a quilt) from all my event T-shirts. This morning, as I was cooling off between my post-pickleball shower and church, I hacked apart a total of nine T-shirts I had set to take back for a quilt. I have plenty more– I think I counted 12, and I am pretty sure I brought some home already – but figured why not lighten my load? This also means I’m committing to the quilt.

Now I am trying to buckle down and get everything done in this under-60-day period. My R&Rs are over and the next thing to look forward to is a really crappy flight, but at least it’s a nonstop really crappy flight. 

I will miss R&Rs from here. The normal time we take is something like a solid three weeks off, and that is not my usual travel method. It’s nice to be forced to do so. This last one was centered around Iceland and that was wonderful, but since my flight stopped in Vienna, I took a couple days there and went to Bratislava, then spent one day in Vienna before returning. Unfortunately for the Vienna part, I had a nasty cold by that time, but I took a walk and found a cool amusement park and took a bunch of pictures. Enjoy.