Ex Patria

Mental glitch

What the headline said:

Bush Speech Focuses on War and Taxes

What I read:

Bush Speech Focuses on War and Texas

Understandable, I suppose.

Real Life Unlimited

So you thought I'd died and gone to heaven?

Well, not quite.  Life has been very up in the air lately and that's very stressful and distracting. This has multiple reasons:

First, there is no new job.  Oh, there could have been one - a rather handsomely paid job in Afghanistan for Doug and a cushy stay in a First World country for the boys and I, for a year or so.  Doug loved the idea - it was a great job, very interesting, with the potential to really make a change in the world.  I was about to let him go.  We were assured that security for foreigners was good and tight and that there was but little risk for Doug's wellbeing. 

Then came the attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul  where one of Doug's colleagues-to-be got shot while running on a treadmill, and I pulled out the veto card.

Stuck

We're stuck.

The car won't start - or, if it does, after minutes and minutes of trying to start it - it won't get out of the driveway since we have bad snow, the soapy, slippery kind, the temps are around -20 Celsius every night (that's -4 F for you other guys), the driveway is actually an incline and angled at 90 degrees, and we still have summer tires on the car.  All of which means that the car won't budge. Much.

Yes, I know.  But see, we're sending the car out to Germany at the end of this month. In, like, two weeks or so.  We had truck tires put on the car last year because we kept flatting our skinny cool not-Armenia proof aluminum-rimmed tires we brought from Europe. Those tires need to be replaced with regular car tires to pass German technical inspection. It seemed like such a waste of money to put winter tires on the car and before Christmas, even with snow, it was all right.

And then the temperatures dropped 20 degrees, and the snow kept falling, and here we are.

The bad news is that we need to get the car to the customs house for clearance and then to the moving agent to drive it into the container.  For that, the car will have to move, preferably by itself.

It's just one of those darn things we don't need right now.

But otherwise we are fine.  Back from a whirlwind holiday trip, back to packing and getting things ready for the move.  And how are you?