{"id":1009,"date":"2010-08-29T07:04:03","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T13:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2014-12-29T20:36:42","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T02:36:42","slug":"final-stretch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/?p=1009","title":{"rendered":"Final stretch"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John with Daphne at Meghan's BBQ<\/p><\/div>\n

We are starting to feel like we are in the final stretch here. John’s Hebrew test is next Friday; we changed teachers this week and our new veteran teacher is focusing on the test, which is good. I’ll still have another three weeks of Hebrew while John is in political\/economic tradecraft training to prepare for his job working for the Ambassador.<\/p>\n

We spent a lovely Sunday afternoon on Meghan’s back deck in Maryland, at her father’s house. It was wonderful to sit outside and we had a great BBQ lunch. I really enjoyed visiting with her dad, a Navy doctor who specialized in maladies associated with diving. (It’s funny to me that I guess I’ve reached the age where I have more in common with our young friends’ parents!) \u00a0They have a wonderful house, filled with art from his travels around the world. And, I ate a delicious tomato from his garden…yum…nothing better (although not as good as Aunt Gusta’s!).<\/p>\n

We’ve started our rounds of consultations, where we meet with various people who work on Israeli issues. That means wearing a dress or suit instead of capri pants, and going downtown to the main offices for the morning or afternoon.<\/p>\n

Friday afternoon after work, we made a trip to the mall to buy shoes for John, then came home and watched an excellent Israeli movie, Ajami. (Slow, but the ending was worth it).<\/p>\n

Saturday morning I drove up to Maryland for a hair appointment and stocked up on a few things from the nearby Sam’s. That night, John treated me to an excellent steak dinner in downtown DC – we’re making a point to have some good dinners before we leave, because steak is so expensive in Israel! We went to Smith & Wollensky’s – really good, and it was a beautiful night to be out and about.<\/p>\n

I wanted to share this great link – John’s cousin Jeff works at an animal park in Arizona and got some recent news coverage<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are starting to feel like we are in the final stretch here. John’s Hebrew test is next Friday; we changed teachers this week and our new veteran teacher is focusing on the test, which is good. I’ll still have another three weeks of Hebrew while John is in political\/economic tradecraft training to prepare for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3608,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions\/3608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}