Changes

It’s time to change the tagline of this blog. “The year I walked away from grad school” isn’t really appropriate anymore. The title is still applicable to the Foreign Service process, though.
Any ideas?

Anatomy of a great date

1. Dinner, with musicians and watching spontaneous dancers
2. Hop out to Brooklyn’s Hotel Delmano
3. Sample fantastic concoctions and discover new single malts in an ambiance reflecting a speakeasy from the ’20s, all the while in a bewildering, curiously confusing thrall over the other and the situation
4. Chat up and make friends with the bartender, who in turn, generously offers the two of you samples of some brilliant single malts.
5. Close down the bar
6. Laughing, jumping in a cab to a hole-in the wall pizza joint
7. In-hand, onward to the next destination!
8. Musings, laughter, further down the rabbit hole
9. Separating due to previous commitments…..
10. Cancelling your noon appointment due to fatigue. Oops.

Musings

Now that I’ve got a start date, it seems that it’s so far away and at the same time, so soon. I’m in NYC, and there are so many people I want to meet up with and places to see, things to do, etc, before starting. It’s nice; freelancing and living in an awesome town on a bit of a working vacation for two months. I’m one month in, one two go, and I am definitely going to miss living here. Living the single life in Manhattan is friggin’ awesome! Apparently my life is a) the beginnings of a Rom-Com; b) a real-life sitcom; c) Karma at work; d) Sex in the City. 😛 Not too sure about the last one, but hey, I think it’s flattering.

On the upside, the paperwork is chuggin’ along…. Got the final salary determination settled, signed and faxed my agreement letter yesterday to State HR. The immediate baggage (UAB, or the stuff that gets sent to me in training) is scheduled for pick up, and I’m working on arranging my storage stuff for later in the year, as the majority of my stuff is in my parents’ basement, close to FSI.

An anatomy of a good date

1. Spontaneous dinner date
2. Oops… minor location error
3. A good start over dinner and conversation
4. Wandering for brew under the glare of Times Square
5. Ginger Man drawing us through the cold to spar over brews
6. Closing the bar down
7. Willingly diving into spice
8. Movies and Music with tongue-in-cheek humor
9. Scent
10. Heading our separate ways in the wee hours of the morning.

A different sort of waiting

I’m now counting down the days until the start of A-100 and there’s plenty of paperwork to keep me busy. The updated CV has been sent and the formal offer received. The question with that is whether or not I’ll appeal the salary calculation. It’s a step or two lower than I think I’d like, but I need to do the math to decide if it’s work pressing.

In parallel to this, I’m organizing my packing; sorting between HHE and UAB, the former which is going into storage and the latter being sent to training. The thing is, I really don’t have all that much stuff, so it makes the organizing easier.

Also in parallel, are the additional paperwork involving health insurance, banks, etc, etc… Kinda telling that a fat, 2 inch thick, packet arrived in the mail with everything.
Even though the first thought when I saw the packet was, “Whoa!”, I still have the giggles over the fact that it’s really happening.