Ask not for whom the duty phone rings…

This week I’m duty officer; I was supposed to take my turn over Labor Day weekend, but had to switch because Ginny was only a month old then and I was still on sick leave. Basically, if you’ve been assigned the duty phone over a holiday, the only people that are going to switch with you are the ones with a bigger holiday. Not only was this week Thanksgiving, but Monday is Bonifacio Day, so the Embassy doesn’t reopen till Tuesday. The duty officer is the person the embassy operator rings if an American citizen calls with an emergency after hours. Under most circumstances, it’s an exercise in saying “no” to people nicely. Can I get a passport tonight so I don’t miss my flight tomorrow morning? No, there aren’t any after hours passport services here. Can the embassy represent me legally? No, sorry, but I have a list of lawyers I can send you. If someone gets arrested locally, I’ll need to go visit them and there are a few other kinds of cases that would require action, but hopefully none of those will happen (knock wood, etc.)

Sometimes American Citizen Services work reminds me of doing tech support for my old employer; most customers understood that we were really trying to fix their problems as best as we could, but others seemed to think there was a switch somewhere that was labeled “Static on John Smith’s Phone Lines” and it was malice or incompetence that was keeping me from turning it off. There isn’t really a cavalry of humanitarian miracle workers behind the embassy gates ready to swoop down and solve problems overseas, and I’m not withholding their services from you just to be contrary. Really, I promise! Yes, the U.S. military can have an injured soldier airlifted from Baghdad to Germany in 8 hours and perform miraculous lifesaving surgery when the soldier arrives, but if a tourist gets sick or injured while overseas, he has to pay his own doctor bills and medevac charges. And unless you are well enough to sit up in an economy class seat on a regular flight, that medevac is going to be EXPENSIVE. Like, at least new car expensive, nice new car expensive, maybe even house expensive depending on where you are and what services you need in flight. And if you are in a foreign country and think if things get really bad, you can always call the embassy and a team of well-trained professionals will come to your location in an air-conditioned helicopter to bring a layer of American-style justice complete with the Bill of Rights, or maybe airlift you out? No, sorry, you’ll just get me on the phone telling you I have a list of lawyers I can fax you.

A little less complaining

Well, I swore to myself I wouldn’t update until I had something other than complaints to share, but then I realized it might be a really long time before I made another post if I stuck to that resolution.  The scary part is that I’m not even to the really difficult part of the pregnancy according to folks that have gone this way before.

I’m sufficiently swollen that I had to upsize my wedding band; by the end of the day, my feet look like ham hocks stuck on the ends of my legs.  Thankfully, I don’t have any signs of high blood pressure, so at this point the swelling and water retention are just annoyances, although carpal-tunnel inducing annoyances; the tip of my right ring finger is numb, and I’m hoping a trip to the chiropractor and a massage will help it.

This weekend was supposed to be an extra-busy one, with new arrivals at post to meet at the airport on Saturday, and a cabinet-level visitor arriving on Sunday, but the VIP wasn’t able to make it, so my shift in the control room got canceled.   I managed to work in 12 lengths of the pool between rain showers today, though, so I consider today a success!

Tiny XJ-6’s…

What lives in Steve and Lisa’s new townhouse, is about 3/4 of an inch long and is shaped like an early 80’s Jaguar?  If you guessed “German cockroach”, give yourself a pat on the back!  But a firm pat, not a little brushing pat that might make you think something with six legs had fallen on you from the ceiling.

I hadn’t seen German cockroaches since I lived at Euclid Court Apartments near Little 5 Points in Atlanta in 1997.  At the time, the only cockroaches I was familiar with were the big brown things that look like prune pits, so when I saw bugs in the kitchen on move-in day I thought they were silverfish.  The good folks at the Poison Store sold me their first line of defense for silverfish, which was some powder to mix with water and spray all over the place.  I remember that I had decided to spray the hell out of the kitchen on a Sunday night and had turned on the X-Files for background noise while I moved all the pots and pans out of the cupboards.

When the cupboards were empty, I started spraying under the sink and in the cabinets under the counter.  All of a sudden, about two dozen “silverfish” headed for higher ground and started climbing up the walls, emerging from behind the stove, behind the backsplash of the countertop, just everywhere.   The mix I was spraying on them didn’t seem to kill them, just make them mad, so I think I sprayed the ones that came out with hair spray or bathroom cleaner or some other unorthodox thing to finish them off.  I put a couple of the dead ones in a baggie and returned to the do your own pest control place where they informed me the stuff they had sold me didn’t work because what I had in the bag were German cockroaches, not silverfish.  The guy went on to tell me that populations of German cockroaches develop resistance to chemicals quickly, so they drive innovation in the pest control industry.  Awesome news!  Cutting-edge bugs in my apartment!  They sold me some stuff that looked like caramel that I had to put in the corners of the cabinets that did the trick pretty well.

Thankfully we’ve only seen a couple here since moving in a week ago, so I don’t think we’ll have to deal with any horror movie scenes of roaches climbing the walls en masse.  (I think if I had known the bugs were roaches and not silverfish, I’d have run screaming and never gone back to the apartment; I mean, what if one had lost its grip on the wall and FALLEN ON ME in its death throes?  shiver)  It does mean part of today’s errands will include a trip to the hardware store to get some of those Combat things, though.

In other news, I visited several incarcerated American citizens earlier this week, taking them their loan checks so they can buy food for the next quarter (Philippine jails expect inmates’ families to provide food and other essentials, so if an American doesn’t have family here to do that, they can get small loans from the federal government to cover their subsistence) as well as a few toiletries.   The prisoners were mostly in good spirits and a couple of them were even hoping to have their cases dismissed by the next time we were scheduled to visit them.

Still no high speed internet access at home; hoping it will come soon.

Long Time No Update

Sorry for the 2+ weeks hiatus there.  It’s hard to update over dialup, and there’s no time when I’m at work to post even a quick update; the next time I hear someone say government employees are lazy, I’m going to punch that person in the mouth since I’ve never worked this hard in my life.  I get to work by 7:30 every weekday morning and hit the ground running.  Admittedly, I usually leave no later than 5, but the days are very full of U.S. citizens needing services from the embassy.  Wikipedia says there are more than 250,000 U.S. citizens living in the Philippines and at any given time, some percentage of them are on drugs they shouldn’t be, not taking the drugs they should, in jail, getting arrested, or wanting to vote, and they visit or call the embassy for help with their situation.   No two days have been the same so far, and the section is short staffed at the moment, so it’s been a roller coaster of a learning curve but I’m enjoying myself so far.

In other news, Steve and I went to the beach last weekend!  It was good to get out of the smog and hang out on the beach, and the Columbus Day holiday meant we could spend two nights in the resort’s little thatched huts.  There wasn’t any air conditioning, but fans and mosquito nets made for a surprisingly comfortable setup.

Also, our air baggage arrived, all 450 pounds of it!  We now have nonstick pans for our egg-scrambling, which is a big improvement, as well as the additional toiletries I’ve been missing.  The 3700 pounds of stuff we last saw in Atlanta has arrived also, but won’t be delivered until we are in our permanent housing, probably at the end of October.    The rest of the stuff we had in Virginia will be longer than that, which is sad because the hand mixer is in there, and it’s hard making cookies without one, to say nothing of the cake I’d like to try to bake.

I feel the earth move under my feet…

Yesterday (that would be Saturday morning) we were puttering around the apartment getting ready to go to the Cash and Carry mall to grocery shop when I felt the building shimmy.  I asked Steve, “Did you feel that?” and right as he said “What?” it happened again.   By the time we got back from the grocery store, this site had information about a 6.1 magnitude earthquake centered a hundred or so miles south of Manila, followed by a weaker one about five minutes later.  Looking at the site today, it looks like there were some aftershocks later on, but all we felt was the one double shake.   My first earthquake!

Working at the embassy has been intense; the section is very busy and several of the other officers are rotating out soon, so I need to get up to speed quickly.  I’m not as lost as I was at the beginning of the week, but I still have a long way to go.

Coming back to the housing compound and our apartment at the end of the day is starting to feel like coming home, though!  Getting our unaccompanied air baggage will help a lot, I hope.  I’m getting tired of the minimal clothes and toiletries I brought in my suitcases.  All my earrings ended up in the UAB, as well as all my perfume and most of my shampoo, so I feel like I’m roughing it without those things.  Plus, Steve has a cold, and all our Sudafed and other over the counter remedies are in the UAB.

Gracie and Ginger arrived two days after we did, none the worse for wear.  We try to wash their feet every day, especially the cat’s so she doesn’t ingest the fine black dust that gets on her paws from the pollution that gets in and settles on the floor and every other horizontal surface.   We also packed an air purifier with HEPA filter in the UAB, so that should help.

The weather is hot and humid, but hot and humid no worse than Miami, with some days more like Orlando.    It’s the end of the rainy season, headed towards the cool season, so I’m sure we’ll experience the fierce heat and humidity next year during the hot season.

So far, we’re all doing well, all things considered!  Once we’re in our permanent housing hopefully in a month or two, we’ll have two guest rooms, so start making your plans to come visit!

And we’re off!

One last post before putting the laptop in its bag and calling a taxi!  Next update will be from MANILA!

Last few days in DC

Well, today was our last full day in DC and Earl came with his flatbed tow truck to pick up the car to ship it to Manila.  The movers who did the same for our other stuff were here yesterday, and we took Ginger and Gracie to the pet shipper this afternoon using Zipcar.

Today was pretty easy like that, but yesterday everything seemed overwhelming.  I had scheduled an exam with the French language testing folks, just to see if I had retained anything from the years of French I took in high school and the couple of trips to France and one Alliance Française class I’d had since then.  Initially, I tried to schedule the thing during consular training, but I couldn’t miss any of that, so when I had to push it back to the 11th of September, I figured it was a good thing, I’d have LOTS of time to study and gain vocabulary, etc.  Of course that’s not how it happened.  I didn’t watch a single subtitled movie, read a single magazine in French or even do more than glance at a list of verbs.  At the end of the test, I had a 1+ in speaking and a 2 in reading, which means I qualify for what they call a topoff course, which is basically an administrative way of saying I wouldn’t need the full starting from zero course.   This link explains a little more about the speaking scoring.  I did better than I thought I would and am glad I took the exam, but it was very nerve-wracking.

Speaking of nerve-wracking, I had a dream last night that was the anxiety dream to end all anxiety dreams.  I’d always heard that dreaming about your teeth falling out is a sign of stress; well, last night, I not only dreamed I bit into a cough lozenge that caused two of my teeth to crumble so I had to spit them out into my hand, I also dreamed that my gums came out in little square chunks kind of like Legos.  At the end of the dream, when I wondered how it was all going to get fixed before I left for post, I had a mouth that looked very even and empty, like a movie theater with the seats taken out.  Oh, and at some point in there, I pulled out several pairs of decorative scissors(!) that were lodged between my teeth.   Crazy stuff!

SOLVED!

Well, the mystery of the missing mattresses was solved the day after I wrote the previous post although I was too slack to update; there’s apparently a “no-number list” on the inventory they did at the warehouse of all the things that either never had a number in the first place or whose number fell off in transit.  And it’s perfectly OK to request items number 1, 5, 202 and 316, plus no-number king size mattress, no-number king size box spring, etc.  Some of the numberless items are a little random, though, like the rake and the lamp.  Which lamp?  Which rake?  Should we have it shipped just to find out?  As a U.S. taxpayer, how do you feel about me spending your money in this fashion?

Mystery of the Missing Mattresses

Today I thought I’d start figuring out what out of storage we’d have shipped to Manila.  All but what we had in our cars plus 450 pounds of stuff shipped by air to our apartment here has been in a warehouse in Maryland all summer.  When the movers packed it all in Atlanta, the lead guy put a numbered sticker on each box or piece of furniture, then kept a list that crossreferenced each sticker with what was in the box, so theoretically I go down the list of furniture and boxes and pick out what we want to get sent to the Philippines.  Winter coats stay in storage, scuba gear goes to Manila, easy peasy!

Except I can’t find any of the mattresses or box springs on the list.  The front page that says how many boxes the movers provided includes 4 mattress cartons, but none of the sticker numbers say “mattress” or “box spring” next to them.  The bed rails are all listed separately, as are the head and foot boards.   There are three lines on the page with the king size bed rails that aren’t labeled, but all three are listed as having damage like chips and scratches, which doesn’t sound very mattressy.   And there’s nothing that might be the queen size ones.  I’ll call the warehouse tomorrow and see if we can come visit our stuff, or maybe the folks there can run put stickers on the mattress boxes themselves.

Quick drive-by

Well, we have arrived in the DC area! Starting A-100 has been intense, but all my colleagues are great and the folks shepherding us through the process are getting us started on the right foot. Steve got the chance to see his beloved Orioles beat the Red Sox tonight at Camden Yards while hanging out with a friend in town on business, so I had some time to myself.

Our furnished apartment is still a mess with all the stuff we drove up with lying around, and the delivery of our air freight will only make it worse, whenever that happens. Gracie and Ginger are coping better than they were when we first arrived, thankfully. Gracie hates the elevator a little less each time we take her outside, and Ginger is less peevish about the collar we make her wear now. So far, the item I most regret leaving behind is the Brita pitcher I threw away with the rest of the contents of the fridge; the movers had already come and gone (and a big shout out to our movers, who were AWESOME) and I just couldn’t deal with putting another thing in the car. Oh, well, I suppose it was time for a new one anyway.