My Second Time in the Ben Franklin Room
In October 2005, the 126th A-100 held its post-swearing in reception in the Department’s Benjamin Franklin Room. That was my first and until today only time there. The room felt huge. The occasion...
View ArticleMy Shoes Smell Terrible
My training for the 2008 Cherry Blossom 10-Miler was impeccable. My new wife was thousands of miles away and I had no social life to speak of. Why not throw everything I had into my first ever race?...
View ArticleDetermination, Dedication, Motivation
Breaking in new running shoes is always painful, but I wasn’t expecting my last try to be bloody. I recently decided to give the New Balance 00 Minimus Trails a whirl. I switched not because of...
View ArticleMy Sort-of Running Partner
This morning I rolled out of bed at 0515, to a preplanned alarm song (“Juicy,” Notorious B.I.G.) designed to get me up and moving. I puttered around for a bit before, in a pique of panic, I realized I...
View ArticleLiminal
A month ago, I finished my tour on the Desk and moved on towards my next assignment. Towards, not to, because I have a year at the Foreign Service Institute — FSI — in between. The move from an...
View ArticleAir like Soup
The oppressive humidity and extreme heat have my wife cursing the Eastern Seaboard relentlessly, and me fomenting plans to lobby the powers that be to relax the FSI dress code. It’s starting to go...
View ArticleTrade in Wardrobe
So as I mentioned a month or so ago, for the past nine plus weeks I’ve been in at FSI. Language training — which I am petrified of — begins after Labor Day. For the summer, I’ve been in what we call...
View ArticleWestern Park Days
Best of Glacier and Yellowstone 2012, a set on Flickr. The wife and I just returned from two weeks in two of our country’s greatest treasures — Yellowstone and Glacier National Park. We have been...
View ArticleTwo Years Later
Baltimore half medal, a photo by TheDiplodocus on Flickr. I blew out my back almost two years ago, to the day. What followed was a tough two weeks of doctor’s visits (all while effectively unable to...
View ArticleShumë gjera të thënë — apo jo?
Obligatory lazy blog entry. There are a ton of things I need to write about. Like diving deeper into the now-distant memory of running that half marathon. And my first two months of studying...
View ArticleCatsup
In the nearly 13 months since I have written a blog entry, I have, in ascending order of pride in accomplishment: Become, according to work, professionally proficient in Albanian Successfully moved to...
View ArticleYear in Review: Death and Life
Though many, many things happened to us in 2013, only two themes to the year really stick out for me: death and life. Everything else seems so utterly secondary as to be laughable. And that includes...
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