Live from Virginia

My deepest apologies for my readers who have been disappointed by the slow news flow from this blog. However, given this three day weekend, I am finally pretty well settled in here in Falls Church, Virginia and ready to give you a brief rundown of the last couple weeks. Unfortunately, I don't have the camera, but I will give you my top 10 observations from the past two weeks:

10. Long distance driving is much better when you have a CD player in the car. Since I drove the Prism, I did not have a CD player, so I was limited in what I could listen to. I did find some pretty good books on tape (a dying breed) and you can read the reviews on the entertainment blog. On the plus side, I did find some old tapes in the car: Back to the Future soundtrack and Milli Vanilli.


"Blame it on the Rain" really popularized blaming your misfortunes on external events
9. It is much cooler here in Virginia than in Houston. I'm constantly surprised to go outside and find temperatures in the 50s and 60s. That is wintertime in Houston.

8. My commute time of 5-10 minutes on a shuttle bus is great. I look forward to actually coming home to a family at 5:20 everyday.

7. Wearing a suit all the time takes some getting used to. I will only have to do this through June - we are the only group at the Foreign Service Institute required to wear suits - everyone else dresses like they are in college.

6. I kind of miss having a blackberry. But it is bittersweet - I miss it in the sense of I really liked for the convenience of the ability to email anyone whenever I thought about it, but it is terrific to not have to check it and worry about it all the time.

5. I love being a foreign service officer and look forward to representing the United States abroad as a diplomat. The more I learn about it the more fascinating it seems.

4. The East Coast Broadbents went to a Nationals game the other day (me, Phil, Jen, Wade, Mark and Broadbent-to-be Amy). I have some sub-observations on this game:

4.5 They have a pretty fancy pants new ballpark. One wonders though if they couldn't have saved a few bucks on the ballpark and spent it on some quality players.

4.4 It was an interesting transportation adventure. I drove to Phil's place, then we drove to Crystal City and parked our cars, walked 10 minutes to get to the Metro, rode the Yellow line and then switched over to the Green line, then walked a couple blocks to the stadium from there.

4.3 The Nationals actually won the game. The home team rarely wins when I go so I was pretty happy about that.

4.2 For being named the "Nationals" the team has a lot of people not actually from the United States playing on the team.

4.1 Prince Fielder (270 pounds) and Dmitri Young (298 pounds and pictured below) were the heavyweight firstbasemen in this duel. Those are some big boys.



3. I have been trying to subsist here in Falls Church on oatmeal, hot dogs and protein bars. Cooking is definitely not one of the talents I have developed.

2. I will be finding out my first assignment on June 20, our flag day. Feel free to give me your predictions. We are hoping for the East Asia Pacific area (Manila, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.), but could wind up in India, Mexico, Central America or even Israel.

1. After being married with kids for over 6 years, it is very tough to go back to being artificially single. I miss Lucy, Laird, Jeffrey and especially Sheralie, who is shouldering a heavy load in my absence. I look forward to them flying up in a couple of weeks.