Week 27

More big news to share from last week. First, Thomas again competed in the US Chess Center Elementary League chess tournament. He won both games, which interestingly were both the longest and shortest games played that day. We are super proud of his efforts.

Andrew managed to sneak in during the long game and captured a few pictures.  Here is the round up article from the US Chess Center: https://chessctr.org/2022/03/06/elementary-team-league-2021-22-round-8-results/

The other big news is that the Army finally released the Lieutenant Colonel promotion board results.  We are all very happy to announce that Andrew will soon (hopefully by the end of the year) no longer be MAJ Giesey but LTC Giesey.

Big News

Finally, after four months of waiting, we have finally learned where we will be heading once our time here in Fiji is over. I am not sure if I have positive things to say about the Army's new assignment process. It seemed to take a lot longer than previous years. Or maybe the PCS (permanent change of station) bug has hit me rather early.

Drum roll, please....

By Touch Of Light, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Back to the good ole US of A. Now we have a few short months to figure out all of the important stuff - downsizing stuff, packing, flights, where to live. Oh, joy!

2020 Recap

 I understand it has been quite a while since I utilized my blog. My intention is to get back to writing and documenting what is going on with our lives with a bit more control that is found in social media these days.

What better way to begin this new chapter, then recap 2020.

We started out the year in Suva, Fiji. John and Thomas began the school year, which runs from Jan to Dec because we are in the Southern Hemisphere, in years 3 and 1, respectively. They attend a wonderful school and we couldn't be happier with the International Baccalaureate education they have received this far. 

Covid-19 dominated much of the year as one no doubt knows. For us, that meant a split second decision on March 25. I had hurriedly packed bags in the event of an emergency a day or two earlier. Fiji had cases in Lautoka and had seemed to have it under control. But it hit Suva. That was the tipping point for us. Myself, John, and Thomas made the quick decision within 2 hours of a plane departure to return to the US and leave Andrew in Fiji to do his job. We damn near didn't make it out of Nadi due to some changes with NZ customs and immigration. Thankfully our friends in the embassy worked a miracle and got us clearance. We flew from Suva to Nadi to Auckland to Los Angeles and finally to Newark. It was a whirlwind. We thankfully had N95 masks and wore them for nearly 36 hours straight before we got to a hotel. I decided mid flights to quarantine in a hotel for 14 days before we went to my parents house. We did all that we could given there were almost no guidelines and precautions in place. 

The boys continued the next two terms of schooling via distance learning. I learned how tough it was to manage expectations for the two of them. I had been enrolled in an M.Ed program but I withdrew given the uncertainty and the difficulty of managing my own kids learning.

We spent the next 5 months with Grandma Dee and Grandpa Nick when our two weeks were up. We bought masks, kept inside, and washed hands frequently. We tried to enjoy simple things while we worked through distance learning - walks in the park, pork cutlet night, McDonald's night, running through the sprinklers, walking Walter, drawing, reading, etc.

Our return trip was just as harrowing. We had to find just the right Covid-19 test and get the rest results turned around in a super short window of time. Thanks to my cousin, we had the magic happen. We headed on our return trip, literally back the way we came on August 18. We had to quarantine again, but this time we did so with Andrew in our new house. While we were away, Andrew managed to move us from our old residence to a new one. So, we got two weeks of getting used to our new home together. Thankfully we cleared another PCR test on the twelfth day of quarantine and thus, on the 14th day received the freedom to move about within the country.

The boys were able to return to school and we got to return to a relatively normal existence - no masks and almost not social distancing. It has been a blessing.

But what about me, you ask? Without my own learning to do, I have been focusing on me and my health. I've committed to only one group - the school board - instead of lots of committee work. I am trying to return to the activities I enjoy and should work on - piano, music, cooking, running, etc.

Glad to close the chapter on 2020.

License and Registration Please!

Life in the military means moving...a lot!  One aspect that we have luckily avoided is relocating vehicles.  This past move - no such luck.  Since we will be here in Cali for quite an extended period of time, we recently replaced our Kansas plates with shiny white California ones.

The DMV process was a little bit of over kill.  We had to fill out registration paperwork containing all of the pertinent information about the cars.  Then 20 minutes later a dmv worker "verified" our vehicles using another form that contained essentially the same information.   Seems redundant, does it not?

But after an hour and fifteen minutes, we walked out of the DMV to our vehicles and attached the new license plates.  The final vestiges of Kansas are now stored away and it seems like we may not see them for a very long time.

Foreign Cultures and Languages

As you may recall, the reasoning behind our big move is for the hubby to attend language school.  In particular, he will be immersing himself in one of the harder languages - Hindi.

When we learned this, I decided that my gateway to India would be through food.  But low and behold Baby 2.0 made it impossible for me to handle any really strong spice smells.  So the hubby took over cooking the Indian food.  With all the moving, packing, and unpacking, I hope to get back into testing out some new Indian recipes in the near future.

So I have been trying to acclimate myself to Indian culture and Hindi through other means - history and learning the language.

We all know that history is not exactly my strong suit.  I have never really been able to make that sort of information stick in my head.  In support of this new job, I have taken the plunge into India After Ghandi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy.  It is a tome - weighing in at over 800 pages.  I began reading it nearly 6 months ago and I am still not done yet.  It discusses Indian history from Independence (1947, and a little earlier) onward.  While I have a difficult time with it (historical writing in general), I am making progress - I reading about the 1960's and am about halfway complete with the book.  I also purchased In Spite of the Gods at the same time - I am hoping that all this in depth reading will make this shorter book fly.

If we all thought my issues with history were rough, learning a language pales in comparison.  Sometimes I have a hard enough time with english (partially because I know these babies are taking all of my good-hardworking braincells).  I stayed away from spoken languages in high school and college, opting for the very dead Latin.  It served me well in avoiding having to provide conversational proficiency.  But here I am stuck.  I definitely need to obtain a working knowledge of Hindi.

So, we got Rosetta Stone.  Pregnancy and Rosetta Stone do not mix well.  After sitting through the first couple of lessons, I had an emotional breakdown.  My brain couldn't seem to keep straight the differences for boy, girl, man, woman, eat, and drink.  I was beyond frustrated and left a trail of tissues all around my computer.  So I have taken a break from Rosetta Stone for the time being.

In the meantime, I know I work well independently - just me and a textbook.  So I have picked up Elementary Hindi along with it's corresponding workbook.  I plan on cracking this open (yeah right - like I have time to crack any book open once Rampage arrives) on I complete my history reading (shouldn't take more than...6 more months right?).  I also picked up several workbooks geared towards children (cause that is my working level right now) on the alphabet, writing, vocabulary, and grammar.

For JT and Rampage, I picked up some children's books of which there do not seem to be many.  Bindi Baby covers numbers and animals in Hindi, as well as, several other linguistic states in India.  I also picked out Aamoo the Mango, which has stories with simple sentences that introduce colors, counting, food, shapes, etc.

But I am making the most progress with, of all things, Dino Lingo.  Oddly enough, my brain really seems to have taken to this language learning system for children.  After just a couple of viewings, I have my numbers through 10, colors, a bunch of animals, and some foods in my vocabulary. (As a mathematician, or well I used to be, it irks me that they do not provide the word for zero as it happens to be a construct attributed to the Indian number system.)  I also understand the short conversations and am starting to pick up on the grammar and genders of words (gender not being something I think they intend children to consciously pick up on).  There are 5 episodes - the last seeming to contain most of the information that Rosetta Stone throws at you in the first 10 lessons.  I did not walk away from the final episode teary-eyed, which made me feel a lot better.

Calling Cards

The Hubby's move to a functional area - Foreign Area Officer (FAO, pronounced "fay-o") - has brought along a load a new learning experiences for the both of us.  It has put a new spin on the Army experience.

For me, it means a couple of things (learning a language(s), upping my game in conversation settings, etc.) but I really only want to focus on one aspect of courtesy and protocol - the Calling Card.

In this day and age, literally everyone has a cellular device.  I find it easiest to just add a person/business contact right to my phone as I meet them.  I know I won't forget it if it is on my phone already.

Thus far in our army experience, I have had very few encounters with people using calling cards.  The spouses club at Fort Riley had cards made up for the board members. I rarely used mine but I did hand a few out or use them to jot other useful information down for people (webaddresses, etc since I was the webmistress for two years).

We attended a mock embassy reception as part of the introduction course.  This was the first event that I have gone to where the calling card really got put to use.  For nearly two hours, I did not see a cellular device out at all (okay, I snuck mine out of my purse to check a text from our babysitter).  There was a lot of mingling and I noticed a lot of exchanging of cards, well more so than I usually do at a military event.  I even received a few cards from spouses and I felt rather behind the times because I had no cards.

I feel the need to rectify this situation but I am somewhat at a loss.  What exactly do I put on my personal calling card?  Clearly, my name but what about other information?  I do not have a home business (which I think would make this much easier to deal with), I am not volunteering, and I am no longer actively working as a licensed teacher (although my license is still valid for a few more years).  I work hard at home with my son, well soon to be, sons.  Having a relatively blank card with just my name is somewhat ridiculous and I don't feel adding "Stay-at-home mom" or "Homemaker" really makes the situation any better.  I feel I should put some method of contact - be it phone or email - on the card but I am uncomfortable just giving that information out unless I have had some in depth conversation with a person.  Maybe I should create a separate email address just for my calling card to keep my FAO acquaintances in area that won't overlap with my personal/family correspondence.  If you have any tips, I would appreciate them. Or I might just have to go with the blank, name-only style calling card.