I spent this week becoming familiarized with Afghanistan via State’s “Afghanistan Familiarization” course. I learned a little bit about a whole lot of topics, but mostly learned that I knew pretty much nothing about Afghanistan before this week. For all the bad news the media covers, they sure don’t tell us a lot about what it’s really like.
One of the good things about working for the State Department is that they usually do a good job of preparing you for the country where you’ll be living. Often this means language training as well as history and culture lessons, but for countries that are designated high threat, there’s a course that is affectionately known in the Foreign Service as “Crash and Bang.” The reasoning behind this will quickly become apparent.
So…work has been keeping me pretty busy lately, but I finally got around to taking pictures of the projects I’ve been working on at home.
Lest you think that I have been doing no crafting, I’ve finally got some photos to share. I had to keep these to myself for a while because it was for a baby shower gift. Well, now the shower is over, the recipient is pleased (so I hear), and I can show off a little here!
Well, hello, President’s Day. Where did you come from? I’m pretty sure I just celebrated Christmas…
Now that Christmas presents have been distributed, I can share them here! My goal was to make everyone’s present this year, and even though I didn’t make that goal (It’s really hard to find appropriate handmade gift ideas for men…), I think I did pretty well.
As if the holiday time isn’t busy enough, Shawn and I took a quick getaway to New Orleans (NOLA to those of you in the know) over the weekend. It was a great time! Thanks to a surprise cold snap, we were a little unprepared for the weather and didn’t get to do as many things as I was hoping to squeeze in, but we made it work.
So…November has been a busy month. It’s already Thanksgiving day and I’m exhausted. But I’ve had some fun adventures.
Apart from the surprise October snow from two weeks ago, I’ve been doing my best to enjoy the fall. It’s been a while since I’ve experienced one, and it will be a while before I see one again. (Ah…the Foreign Service…) Last week we headed out to Shenandoah National Park for a few days to enjoy the changing leaves. Of course, the aforementioned snowfall meant that we were past peak leaf-viewing time, but we still managed to have a good time.