A couple weeks ago, Shawn started taunting me with the promise of a surprise coming in the mail. Well, on Monday, it arrived….

Buttons! A box of random buttons purchased on e-bay. I am not very e-bay savvy, so I had no idea that you could even purchase such a thing. But what a great husband, huh? He not only deals with my craziness, but encourages it.

(And as you can also see, I immediately began to feed another one of my obsessions: organization.)

We woke up this morning to a fresh layer of white outside. One of the good things about having to take Laika on her morning walk is the fact that I get to see the snow before it becomes a muddy, slushy, polluted mess. Which doesn’t take long on a weekday morning.

Since Laika and I have been taking longer and longer walks lately, I’m getting to explore more of the city. One of the things they seem to like to do here is place life-size-ish statues of ordinary people doing ordinary things in random parks. Here’s one we discovered today.

Laika thoroughly amused two teenagers in the park by trying everything in her power to get the dog to play with her. Apparently he just wasn’t interested.

Working for the government somehow involves a lot of rules and regulations. Crazy, I know. When the bid list was initially posted, there were approximately 400 jobs on it. Shawn is required to work in a consular position for his next tour in order to qualify for tenure, so that brought the list down to about 320. Still not too bad. However, the next two considerations - language required and timing - brought the list down to a whopping total of 24.

Okay, so there are still some good options on the list; it’s just full of places that we never really thought about going. Some of these jobs will probably fall off the list after the first group of officers bid (people who are in more “difficult” posts than Kyiv will bid first). Another unanticipated issue is that several of the jobs are on islands, which for the most part means quarantines for pets. So we have a lot of thinking to do about that.

The bottom line is that Shawn is required to bid on 20 posts, so we already have it narrowed down to what is going to be on that list. Now it’s just a matter of research and deciding what order to place them in. The next few weeks are going to be busy ones.

For a Doberman, Laika is a huge wimp, particularly when it comes to cold weather. She cries and shivers violently when we make her go out on walks if she thinks it’s too cold - which has become pretty much every day for the last 3 or 4 months. So with Shawn’s permission, I made her some clothes. (Note that there is no pink. One of Shawn’s rules was that if I was allowed to dress her, it had to be subtle.)

And for the first half of December, my biggest project was a costume for the Embassy Christmas party. They already had a Santa costume, but needed a Snegurochka costume, so I stepped up. I was very happy with how it turned out. I wasn’t given a lot of guidance to begin with, so I did a lot of research to figure out exactly how it should look (and what I could do with the fabric that was provided to me). My other challenge was that they want to be able to use this costume year after year, so it needed to be able to fit people of different sizes.

If things go well, I should have some more completed projects to share in the next few weeks!

Step one for starting anew: I left my job on December 28th. I don’t want to get into too many details here, but it was just not the right thing for me - personally or professionally. I was there for under three months, but it was a daily struggle. I finally decided that it was really best for me to walk away at the end of last year in an attempt to salvage the time that I have left in Kyiv.

Step two for starting anew: Take the dog for lots and lots of long walks. Laika has been somewhat of a holy terror for the past few months. Shawn and I have examined the situation thoroughly and have come to the conclusion that she is just a really high energy dog. Extremely high energy. When I was working (even just part-time), neither one of us had the time or energy to give her the kind of exercise that she needs to be happy and not annoying to us. So my new “job” is to take her on at least 2 one-hour walks per day. We are hoping that this will lead to less barking/biting/running/jumping in the evenings so that we can enjoy our free time (and again salvage the time we have left in Kyiv).

Step three for starting anew: Find something to do as a “job” that I actually enjoy doing. I’ve started taking random sewing and alteration projects from friends and plan on advertising myself as a seamstress to the rest of the Embassy community soon. Of course, there’s the random bureaucratic red tape and loops to jump through before I can do so, but I’m working on it. I’ve also got some other ideas in the works, but I’ll save those for another posting.

So there you have it. No actual resolutions, but my attempt to enjoy 2008 more than last year. It is -11 degrees (C) today, which is bringing my general outlook down a little, but the sun is finally out, after being absent since October. I think the two probably cancel each other out. Remaining evenly content sounds like a good place for me to be on January 2.