Foreign Service promotion lists came out this week, and John and I were happy to see many names of friends on the list! Congrats to them! I was especially glad to see that my boss was promoted – we had a non-alcoholic toast and pastries to celebrate the next morning. Also, many other friends from around the world. (John and I weren’t eligible to be promoted since we’ve been promoted within the last three years.)
The nice thing this year it that the promotion panels made their decisions pretty early, so now everyone knows what level of jobs they need to bid on later this month. For example, my boss knows he can bid on higher level jobs, now that he was promoted to FS-01.
Speaking of bidding, we’re still planning to bid on DC jobs. We’ve started the process of asking co-workers to send in references for us. Next week, I’ll start sending letters of interest to my top choices. Then you start trying to read tea leaves to see if you’re getting any bites. This is really our first time in the regular bidding pool, since we went to Pakistan in 2012 and then used that equity to get the jobs in Guadalajara, so it’s all a bit new (and scary!) to us!
We had a nice dinner out on Friday night with our friends Chris and Monica – we went to our favorite restaurant for a delicious steak.
I hate to admit that we’ve been watching a lot of TV, but darn there are some good shows out. We finished the wonderful series, “The Night Of,” with John Tuturro. We watched a campy, wonderful old Nicole Kidman movie, “To Die For.” Yesterday we watched a very entertaining Norwegian movie (billed as the Norwegian “Fargo”), “In Order of Disappearance.”