I have officially finished my tour in Ciudad Juarez and am on home leave.  I'm spending most of it at home in central Texas, but also have some side trips planned to visit friends and family.  It's nice to be home and see familiar faces and places.  It's also nice to enjoy my parents' extended cable and watch too much HGTV. ;) 

As I get closer to leaving, it's all getting a little bit more real.  Last week, a couple of strangers showed up and took all of my stuff.  I was thrilled!  The movers came and packed everything up and took it away so that it can meet me in Canada in August or September.  The house is now really empty and it seems so much more real that I'm leaving in just a few weeks.  The Diplocat was a bit confused for the first day or so and seemed to be wandering around, wondering where everything had gone.  She's settled in now and doesn't seem bothered by it any more.  We'll have to see how things go when we drive home.

I have some other things to check off of the departure checklist, a few more meetings and such, and there are the visas to adjudicate but the only big project I have left is to finish my part of my EER (employee evaluation report) before I leave.  So, I'm trying to convince the tenure and promotion boards that I have walked on water in the desert while saving all the puppies and kittens in the greater Borderland area. We'll see how it goes. ;)

That's about all that's new here.  Not much longer and I will be leaving Ciudad Juarez and heading to home leave, DC, and then Ottawa!

I know that I haven't updated for about 3 weeks now, but I have a good reason for once.  I just got back from a super-fun, 10-day trip to Belgium!  Once upon a time, I was an exchange student to the good country of Belgium, where I had an amazing year and met a lot of wonderful people.  I've gone back to Belgium several times to visit them and it had been a couple of years since I'd last been back, so I decided it was time for another trip. 

So, after work on Friday, I went over to El Paso and stayed at a hotel near the airport since I had a super early flight and didn't want to risk missing it or having any issues on my way from Juarez to El Paso.  Last time I had an early flight, I did not stay over in El Paso and met some lovely federal police officers at a checkpoint on a deserted street in the dark then finally made it to the border only to find no one at the booth and to have to wait awhile before someone realized I was there and finally came over. Since I didn't think I could handle so much fun again, it just made sense to stay in a hotel.

Saturday morning, I got up on time, checked out of the hotel, made my way to the airport and got checked in and through security with no problems.  I had a 5-hour layover on the way over, then got on the airplane, we started to taxi to takeoff only to find that one of the planes behind us saw that our plane had a flat tire! Of course, this had to be checked out, two tires had to be changed, and 3 hours later, we were finally on our way. 

Other than the delay, the flight to Brussels was fine and I finally arrived, exhausted but thrilled to be back in Belgium!  One of my host families met me at the airport and we proceeded to drive back to their home. After spending two years in the desert, and not getting out of the area in four months, I was dazzled by how absolutely green everything was!  Even though it was still winter and not everything had its leaves/flowers/etc, it was so much greener than life here in Ciudad Juarez that it was dazzling. 

While I was there, I saw my other set of host parents, all of my host siblings and their children, members of the organization that facilitated my exchange, and generally had a great time catching up with people, seeing people I hadn't seen for awhile, and trying to remember my Dutch.

I also went shopping several times and enjoyed just being able to walk around in (mostly) nice weather without worrying about my safety, shopping in a pedestrian-friendly area, and so on.  The first time I took the bus back to my host family's house from shopping, I accidentally got off the bus too early and I decided to enjoy just sitting outside in nice weather and waiting an hour for the next bus rather than trying to walk back or find another way to their house. 

It was also really nice to have a nice break from work and not worry about anything work-related or even have to talk about work that much.  In hardship postings, the line between work and personal life gets really blurry since you end up spending a lot of your free time with coworkers and while my coworkers are pretty awesome, it's nice to have a break from them, socialize with other people, and not spend the whole time talking about work.

The trip back went really smoothly.  I didn't have any delays on the way back, made it through customs in plenty of time to make my connecting flight, and had a smooth trip back to my house in Mexico. So, overall it was an amazing trip and I'm really glad that I got to go back to Belgium, see wonderful people that I've missed a lot, and really relax.

I now only have a little over a month left in Mexico.  My packout is in a couple of weeks and then I'll need to do some final cleaning, wrap up a few work projects, and then I'll be on my way to home leave!  Hard to believe it, but the end is almost in sight. :)

So, I have started working through the departure checklist to leave Juarez.  I've scheduled my packout so I now have the day that the movers will come and pack up all of my stuff, which is both exciting and terrifying because I feel like I have so much to do before they come and not nearly enough time to get it all done.

I've also started pulling together the things I need for my EER (employee evaluation report?) which needs to be done by the time I leave.  Mid-level officer EERs are always due in April, but entry-level EERs are due on their one year anniversary at post and then again as they leave post.  So, I have to get bullet points about what I've done this last year to my supervisor, who will draft an evaluation and then it goes to the reviewer, which is someone who outranks the supervisor, and then I write the last part.  Then, it goes to a review panel of a few other FS personnel who review it and make sure that nobody said anything that's not allowed and also do some general proof-reading of it.  Then it goes back to the person whose EER it is.  That person can then request any changes from comments from the review panel or other changes that they want.  It takes awhile to get it done, since it has to go through so many people and can go through a couple of people twice.  So, I have to get working on the bullet points for my supervisor so that she can start on her part in a week or two.

Other than that, not much news here.  Still adjudicating the visas, at least for a couple more months, and working on getting everything ready to leave here and to move to Ottawa.

One of the things that I'm working on this week is making/updating a home inventory for insurance and shipping info.  First, I need to know what I have so I can take out the right amount of insurance for the move and second, I need to know what I've got in case something happens during the move.  While I was fortunate that I just had very minor damage to a couple of things in my moves from Austin to DC and DC to Juarez and no major breakages or disappearances, I know that I might not be so lucky next time.

So, on the advice of a few other FS friends, I downloaded a home inventory program that also has an iPhone/iPad/iTouch app that you can use to scan barcodes, take pictures of the item, take pictures of the receipt, etc.  If it can find the info from the barcode, it will autopopulate the current price, name of the item, etc.  So, it makes it a lot less painful than having to look all of that stuff up yourself and enter it in and then take a bunch of pictures and then go match them to your items, etc.  

I don't think I did much of anything toward cataloguing my things before my move to DC and just took a bunch of pictures of the stuff I had in my apartment in the DC area before it all got packed to go to Mexico.  So, even if I don't get everything catalogued, I'm at least way ahead of where I was before I got here.  The program also makes it easy enough to do that it doesn't feel like a complete chore.  We'll see if I feel the same way when I start in on the upstairs!  I don't have to get it all done this week though, which means that I can work on it in bits and pieces so it doesn't get too overwhelming.

Anyhoo, hope all's well in the blogosphere.  Hasta luego!

I've taken this week off of work, but am staying in town to work on stuff that I don't usually get around to like sorting/shredding/scanning/tossing/saving paperwork, cleaning, running some errands I keep putting off, and of course the occasional nap. 

I have a lot of paperwork that I need to scan, shred, save, and/or toss.  Some of it is Dept of State stuff, some of it is other personal paperwork, and some of it is just odds and ends.  In this case, I'm not going to be separated from it for too long, but it's good to have electronic copies of stuff just in case and I also want to get rid of what I can so that it's not moved unnecessarily and so I don't have to deal with it again when I get to Canada.

It's also time to do some cleaning I've been putting off, like those rolls of Christmas wrapping paper that are still in the dining room, and some yardwork like raking the yard and getting rid of some of the weeds that are popping up. 

There are also administrative things that I need to do to get ready to leave post.  I still have time to do most of those things, but there are a few that I can get started on soon so I'm trying to form a plan of attack for that stuff.  

Of course, there will probably be things left undone when I finally leave post and some of the paperwork will have to wait until Canada (or later) to be dealt with, but at least I can get some of it done before I leave. 

So, we had another lovely dust storm today.  I managed to get a couple of pics of the dust in the air today, so without further ado, here they are. This is all dust, no clouds or other obstructions.

This new "Postmark" layout reminds me of this Barenaked Ladies song.  Enjoy!

With my triumphant return to consular work, I seem to have picked up a cold, too.  I'm sneezing a lot, my nose is runny, and I feel generally stuffy and achy.  Now, I'm actually going to blame this bug on a coworker that I spent 2.5 hours with in a small conference room yesterday, whether or not it's actually the same bug he had.  He may seem perfectly nice, but he was clearly out to get me with his coughing.  

However, I have found that I have gotten more cold/respiratory bugs here than I've ever had before.  I don't know the cause of each one, but I generally blame them on consular work, because when you're seeing 35 IV applicants and handling a ton of their documents or seeing 120 NIV applicants in a day and handling their passports and such, you're exposed to a LOT of germs.  It's kind of inevitable that, no matter how much hand sanitizer you use, you're going to pick up some bug from someone sooner or later.  I find that making bad jokes about how I'm "sick of consular work" or "allergic to visas" helps me feel better while sneezing.  Then again, I usually find it helpful to make bad jokes.  It's one of my specialties. 

It's that lovely time of year in the CDJ/ELP area when the winds mix with the sand and we have crazy dust storms.  The severity can vary, but they generally cause the sky to turn brownish and they affect visibility significantly.  Dust also seeps in all of the windows and doors no matter how well they're secured.  Tuesday, the dust storm completely hid the mountains that are usually clearly visible from the consulate. These storms can last until mid-May, depending on the year.  So, that's the fun news from CDJ.