Happy Independence Day to those of you that celebrate it! I’m spending the day with my two favorite pets - Peema and Laika. I briefly considered dressing them up in some red, white & blue concoction and snapping an adorable photo for the blog, but decided that was too much work and one or all of us would end up wounded. I have enough scars from the puppy as it is (she likes to bite and scratch everything…especially things that move).
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We are at the end of week 1 of the struggle to obtain reliable internet access for our apartment. Last Saturday Shawn and one of our Russian-speaking friends went to the office of a company that supplies the internet to our building. According to Shawn, it went fairly well. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” we thought.
Our first shipment of belongings has finally arrived! Last night we slept under our own familiar blankets again. And Peema had a great time whooping up and down the hallway, attacking her scratching post and doing fierce battles with her favorite toy, Blue.
I know that you all must be anxiously awaiting more details from our trip and first (almost) two weeks here in Kyiv. Unfortunately, we still don’t have consistent internet access at home, so I’m using a computer at the Embassy, which means no pictures for now. But we’ve taken quite a few, so I’ll add them as soon as I can.
I’m currently at “home” (as much as it feels like home so far, anyway) using slow, unreliable dial-up internet access, so this will be a short post. I just wanted to let everyone know that we made it to Kyiv safely and are slowly working on learning our way around this crazy, crazy place!
So things are finally happening…Shawn got his travel orders this week. For those of you outside the Foreign Service community, travel orders are the bureaucratic ticket to everything. You must have your travel orders to get your plane tickets, ship your stuff, and do pretty much anything else required to get ourselves from here to Kyiv. After weeks of begging and bribing people to get these orders, we finally have them and are on track to actually leave the US.
I spent three days this week in a class called “Regulations, Allowances, and Finances in the Foreign Service Context.” Going in, I expected to be bored out of my mind by piles of useful information. Instead, I was mildly interested and completely overwhelmed by the piles of useful information. My main concern now is: Is it bad that my To Do list consists mostly of other To Do lists?
Yesterday was Shawn’s official Swearing-In Ceremony at the Department of State. Not only was it held in the most impressive looking room I’ve ever seen, but the key-note speaker was none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Tuesday was Flag Day, which is the day that all the members of the current A-100 class find out their first overseas assignment. It took place in the Field House on the campus of the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington at 3pm. The employees had been forced to sit through normal classes all day, but were released early to meet the throngs of family and friends that descended upon FSI to show their support (and in the case of the spouses, find out their own fate as well).
After much pressure from my family and friends, this is the start of my blog. I admit that putting too much of myself on the internet makes me nervous, but I’m willing to give it a try. So here I go…