Eating well

Well, food did seem to be important a few days this week – Friday night we went to a Rotary Club benefit in El Paso with some of our Consulate friends. It was sort of a celebrity chef thing – 16 restaurants prepared their best dishes. We found a couple of places we want to patronize after sampling their dishes (example: smoked pork tenderloin with gnocci and sauteed pears).

I also made my friend Joan’s smothered cabbage soup this week – quite tasty! And we’re still enjoying the fruits of John’s new meat smoker – today he is experimenting with salmon. Can’t wait to see how that turns out!

Last Sunday we went to a friend’s birthday party for her little boy. She’s  a smart woman, though – she had an “adults only” patio overlooking the party below. Nice touch! We also made a brief appearance at a neighborhood child’s birthday party yesterday.

Monday night was book club – we resumed hosting at our house (which we really enjoy doing). We had a good discussion of  Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.

The week at work for us was really busy. In addition to the hundreds of visas on my plate, I helped with a photo project for Washington and had our weekly Consular Leadership Day planning session. We stayed late several nights to help get through all of our cases. I also helped our admin team design a new work flow to try to speed up some back-office processes.

Between work and playing with our new netbook (love it!), we did have time to watch a couple of movies, including Burn after Reading (good) and Traitor (which I fell asleep in, not because it was bad, but because I was pooped!).

In the small world category, my manager went to a consular conference in Costa Rica last week, and met a girl at the conference who I went to high school with (Suzanne, sister of Steve). Her husband is a Foreign Service Officer and Suzanne is also working for State. Somehow the topic of Arkansas came up, and my manager mentioned my name. Also, this week on Facebook, I re-connected with a cousin who I haven’t talked to in years – turns out, we have a mutual friend in Little Rock and that’s how we made the connection. Gotta love it!

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Visa applicants in line before dawn.

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