Saturday, October 31, 2009

Catching up

I just checked, and it looks like it's been a month since I last posted anything.  Oops.  I guess that means my life has gotten into a routine.  Work is going well - I've had some interesting training, and my supervisor seems to be warming up to me.  This week I'm going to Richmond, VA for the best training of all - Security Driving, which I think means we'll be learning stuff like how to get away from an ambush.  And we get to learn how to ram other cars.  So if I don't get myself killed, it should be a lot of fun.

Just about everyone else who started at USAID at the same time as me is starting language training next week, so I'm going to have a possibly lonely month working at the Ronald Reagan Building.  But I chose to put off my language training because there's some interesting stuff going on in November (Annual Program Reviews - doesn't that sound exciting? No? Well I guess that proves I am a dorky bureaucrat.), so hopefully it will be worth it.  And then in December I'll start learning to speak French properly, inshallah.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Working hard

Yesterday, after spending eight hours straight staring at my computer, researching climate change, I came home, ate dinner, and promptly fell asleep on my couch... at 6 pm.  I guess I must have been a little tired.

And then I woke up this morning and heard on NPR that there was an earthquake off Indonesia, which caused a tsunami on Samoa.  Which motivated me to get back to work, so that someday, hopefully soon, I will get to be one of the people on the relief team responding to disasters like that.

And then I spent another eight hours staring at the computer, researching climate change.