As you can see, I’ve decided to tinker with the site a bit. I like this new theme and layout quite a bit, but I’m going to continue to customize it over the next few weeks so expect some changes and the occasional hic-up. I also upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress and I think it is much better. This upgrade also went very smoothly, unlike my last one (a major reason I stopped blogging for quite some time.) The only problem I’ve encountered is that all of my categories for my posts were deleted. I’m taking advantage of that to switch to a “tag” style of organization, but it will take a while to tag all the older posts. You’ll see the tag cloud over on the left hand side. For those of you unfamiliar with a cloud organization system, the larger the font, the more posts in that category.
I went and promised more regular entries and then proceeded to go silent for several days. I’m kind of a jerk that way. I had a good reason though. I went out of town to do a little traveling with the wife and her visiting parents. We decided to go to Crimea.
This week I was the volunteer to assist in the classified pouch run. Every so often the embassy sends and receives a batch of classified material. This requires some American officers with security clearances to go out to the airport and meet with a Diplomatic Courier who arrives with the incoming and departs with the outgoing.
At a McDonalds in Kyiv. Conversation is in Russian which somehow makes it funnier.
Young Man looking at the McDonalds menu board:
My crazy wife has tried to convince me that this sad blog still has readers and they are desperate for information on the happenings of my life. There is only one big thing to announce really and that is our next assignment. We’re going to anti-Ukraine.
We received our bid list last week. For those of you not up with Foreign Service lingo, the bid list is the list of job assignments available to me for my onward post. Although the list has about 400 different jobs around the world, because of many different limitations, there are really only about 20 that we need to be concerned with. I have to submit my list in about a month with 20 options ranked in preference.
There is something inherently wrong with living some place where you need to feel grateful when the temperature finally surpasses the freezing mark. After about two weeks of temperatures hovering between 10F and 17F, we’re finally to the point where my dog’s pee doesn’t instantly freeze into a yellow puddle next to the tree in front of our apartment.
The details on the situation are still a bit fuzzy, but a U.S. diplomat and his embassy driver were shot and killed in Khartoum, Sudan yesterday. He wasn’t much older than me and it doesn’t sound like he was doing anything any different than I was doing on New Year’s Eve. Scary stuff.
One of the strange aspects of Kyiv is the cost of living. It is very hard to quickly say whether this is a cheap or an expensive place. In the same way, it is hard to describe this place as Third World or First World. Ukraine seems to be in both places at once.
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