For years, my dream was to live overseas. I was obsessed, it was all I wanted to do. Live outside the US. "I don't care where. Anywhere!" When we were in Portland and Peter got in with the State Department or should I say, when they snatched him up, we were told we would get a direct assignment. That means, we would be assigned a place they couldn't coerce anyone currently employed to go to, some garden spot. I was pleasantly surprised when we were given a short list to choose from rather than just handed an assignment. That list: Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, some Ickystan I honestly can't remember the name of now and Niger. "I don't want to go to any of those places!" I moaned.
Our bid list last time was pretty darn sweet. It was easy to come up with six places we wanted to go after Niger. The list this time is ten times longer than our first-ever list–although not really if you take Baghdad, Islamabad and Kabul off the list–and I'm having the same reaction I had back in Portland. There is no Sofia, Bulgaria, no Budapest, no Romania, no Poland, let alone London or Vienna or even Prague. No Tokyo or Bangkok. No Tunisia or Morocco. And now I have to consider that this is where Camille will go high school in the fall of 2011. So a potentially sweet little post like Moldova isn't an option. As usual, there are tons of African posts, I mean, Ghana! Harare! Madagascar. I love Africa but it is so. far. away.
Peter is trying to talk me down out of my tree, "You loved Niger!" My head is swimming. Okay. Breathe. Kyiv is good. How about Kathmandu?
Oy. Suddenly I love Moscow so much, I'm hugging it hard.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 
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