A Blog by any other name would smell as sweet???

When I first decided to begin my blog, the first decision I had to make was what to name it. I don’t know about other bloggers, but I actually put considerable thought into this issue. I wanted a name that was relatively short, possibly catchy, and mostly one that projected an image that I liked.

I considered a number of different possibilities, including:

• Diplomatic En-Corps…
• The Dipnomad…
• The World is my Oyster… 
• Worldwide Assailable… 

I liked “Diplomatic En-Corps” since this is indeed my encore career, but it ultimately did not make the cut. “The Dipnomad” I think might already be in use somewhere. “The World is my Oyster” might have been okay, if not very original – but a large number of people suffer from shellfish allergies, so nixed. I thought “Worldwide Assailable” was really pretty funny, but just a bit too negative for how I wanted to present myself. Thus, these names and some others did not survive the evaluation process. (Anyone out there in search of a blog name, feel free to claim any of these.)

I finally settled on New L’Attitudes because I liked the images associated with a new adventure, visiting and living in new places, and bringing a positive outlook to the entire adventure. I also enjoyed the homage to both Jimmy Buffet, one of my favorite singers, and to the book, “Blue Latitudes” by Tony Horwitz, that recounted and retraced the 18th century adventures of Captain Cook around the world. These twin themes seemed to be very well suited to my own new career and adventures. And of course, the corrupted spelling and flippant use of a vaguely French apostrophe appeals to my slightly mischievous side, while surely giving the L'Académie française apoplexy!

So sometimes the answer to “What’s in a name?” is bit more involved than some might think. My apologies to Mr. Shakespeare.

It's these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes  

Nothing remains quite the same  

With all of our running and all of our cunning 

If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane 

Jimmy Buffet, 1977

Moving and Being Moved

I’m obviously not quite up to snuff in keeping this blog current. I will try much harder to post on a more regular basis. (As an aside, no one should believe any blog-promises I make as I completely reserve the right to post or be lazy, as the spirit moves me! My blog assurances are only worth the paper they are written on!)

Wow, so now only 8 days left until the beginning of my new, awesome and ultimate career! Preparations have been proceeding apace, and it looks like we will show up in Washington, DC in good shape next Friday. (By which I mean barely coherent, a blubbering mass of protoplasm, and feeling like the little boy going to his first day of school!) By the way, in this blog I expect to mention from time to time my emotions, my state of mind or even my physical condition. There are notions in some corners of the foreign-service blogosphere that one must always present a super-human, perfect persona – never admitting publicly any doubts, apprehensions or weak moments of any kind. I do not subscribe to this view. I am human… I have human emotions, human anxieties and even the occasional human weakness. My loving wife can attest to this! While I feel that I manage these attributes reasonably most of the time, I see no reason to apologize, or even hide, these feelings. So hopefully my wonderful wife will see me off at the bus shuttle stop with smiles and encouragement as I depart next Monday for my first day of school A-100!

Since this blog serves an extremely wide audience (all two persons so far), with wildly different backgrounds and appreciation for the FSO life-style, I will try to provide some level of detail that is frankly boring for the well-informed FSO readers. To those readers, please ignore the boring parts.

Our beach house of 20 years... sigh!

A little background: my wife and I currently live at our beach house at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. With the advent of our foreign-service adventure, we have decided to sell our house if we can. Because it is a vacation type property, we will be selling it completely furnished. This has definitely helped our process of separating our stuff, as there is much that we will be leaving in the house. We have also moved three times in the last 5 years, and that has also helped in the paring down process since we have done this successively at each move.

Even has a pool! Does anyone want to buy it? It's Nice!

So our pack-out is this Tuesday and Wednesday, and everything being packed out will actually be coming out of two storage units. We purposely separated our pack-out things into long-term storage – things that will most likely stay in storage for our career unless we get assigned to a place with no government provided housing and furnishing, and so-called HHE – Household Effects (‘Household’ is a single word isn’t it? Why not ‘HE’?) The HHE, also known as ground/ship/surface/slow shipment will eventually rejoin us at our first post, but will not be with us while in training in Washington. (There is a 3rd category of things called UAB – Unaccompanied Air Baggage I think – that is the fast-ish shipment, that will be with us both in training and then also to post. For now, we are packing all of this in our mini-van and driving to DC with it.)

HHE - Household Effects - Stuff going with us to post eventually.

Permanent Storage... can you tell the difference?? Yeah, the packers probably can't either!

We think we have done a great job of dividing everything up, but my concern of course is that the movers will not be so diligent. They basically see all of the items as going into some huge storage facility in Hagerstown, Maryland, and may not keep everything as separate as we might like. So our plan is for my wife and I to keep a very good inventory of every numbered item they pack, especially as to whether it is long-term storage bound, or HHE bound. Our goal is to be able to provide a comprehensive list of every numbered item that is designated HHE when it comes time to pack-out to our first post. We’ll see how that goes.

So pack-out should be finished by Wednesday. Then we will spend Thursday cleaning and tidying up the beach house so that it looks nice and uncluttered for the thousands of people parading through to see if they want to buy it. Thursday evening, we have a special dinner together at our favorite Duck, NC restaurant (shout out to the Blue Point). Friday we drive the 5 hours or so to Arlington, VA, and spend one night with my daughter’s family, and then hopefully move into our Oakwood – Courthouse apartment on Saturday. The hope of course is to be settled, rested and raring to go bright and early on Monday morning for Day 1 of A-100!

Our fave Blue Point restaurant in Duck, NC.

I feel as if we have everything pretty much under control, and this really scares me! I must be missing something! (I haven’t even mentioned all of the various projects, fixing things, hiring various contractors, etc that we have been engaged in over the last 2 months. And even though some of projects remain to be completed by a couple of contractors, these items also seem to be mostly under control. I KNOW I am missing something!)

So this week is going to be busy, emotional and wonderfully exciting all at the same time. If all goes according to plan, we are golden. If one or more monkey-wrenches pop up, I hope I don’t pull my hair out. After all – I’m only human.

Today My Life Changed Forever... Again

Earlier today I received an email that began like this:

The Registrar's Office is pleased to extend an appointment offer for the September 13, 2010 - Junior Officer Class.

This is the notification that I have been waiting for, longing for, and working towards in a process that has extended to 4+ years. I have finally been offered a real, honest-to-goodness position as a plebian diplomat in an upcoming orientation class starting this fall! Yeah! Whoop-whoop! Yee-haw! And other assorted sounds of delight and pleasure.

Given today's stellar news, I have also embarked on the adventure of starting this blog. I have been wanting to do this for some time, but have not until now because some of Gammy's (my fabulous wife of 25+ years) superstitious ways had rubbed off on me. I did not want to jinx this effort. Nor was I crazy about putting myself out there in public through all of the obsessing, and calculating, and worrying, and speculating, and doubting, and second-guessing, and what-all-else that some of us - or at least I - have been going through during this crazy, harrowing process.

So now I have made it to "The Call" as it is generally known (though really it is an email - how non-romantic). So yet another turning point in my life that has been up until now, well, pretty darned good. This will simply be the start of the next great chapter. Over the course of this blog, I will try to provide some context of who I am, and to also provide some info on how this next stage unfolds. If I am lucky, it will be informative and useful for others. If I am really lucky, it might even be entertaining on occasion... we shall see.