{"id":323,"date":"2009-02-01T12:03:34","date_gmt":"2009-02-01T18:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/?p=323"},"modified":"2014-12-29T20:37:06","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T02:37:06","slug":"eating-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":"Eating well"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0a 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).<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

Last Sunday we went to a friend’s birthday party for her little boy. She’s\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Monday night was book club – we resumed hosting at our house (which we really enjoy doing). We had a good discussion of\u00a0 Thomas Friedman’s\u00a0The World is Flat<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Between work and playing with our new netbook (love it!), we did have time to watch a couple of movies, including “Burn after Reading<\/a>“<\/em>\u00a0(good) and “Traitor<\/a>“<\/em> (which I fell asleep in, not because it was bad, but because I was pooped!).<\/p>\n

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\u00a0I 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!<\/p>\n

\"0011\"<\/p>\n

Visa applicants in line before dawn.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0a celebrity chef thing – 16 restaurants prepared their best dishes. We found a couple of places we want to patronize […]<\/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":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3670,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions\/3670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}