Things that are bringing me joy right now

After some of my recent blog posts, you might think that things here are all doom and gloom. But they aren’t! There are some bright spots.

I love nothing more than a good list. So here’s what’s making me happy these days, in no particular order:

• Cooking dinner. Really. Working from home gifts me an extra hour at least to make dinner. That means I can have a glass of wine, listen to a LP and leisurely spend some quality time in the kitchen by myself. And these days, my weekday dinner game is on fire.
  

  My favorite corner of our house

• Listening to audio books. Specifically Calypso, written/read by David Sedaris. Wow is this book hilarious. The essays “The Perfect Fit” and “I’m Still Standing” particularly were my favorites. It’s poignant, funny and just awesome, exactly what you’d expect from David Sedaris. Other good ones include Children of Blood and Bone, The Song of Achilles, Bad Blood, and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States.
• When Artie poops right by a house where a dog is barking at her. I don’t pick it up. One good turn deserves another. There’s this one house where there are three dogs that just go ape-shit every time we walk by. I wish she’d drop a big one there but she hasn’t yet.
• Emptying out the vacuum cleaner canister. There are few things that make me feel more accomplished than getting visual confirmation of all the cleaning I’ve just done. It’s an obsession.
• My “wine cellar.” I could call it our wine cellar, but I’m the one who, a) picked out all the wine, b) cares about it, and c) drinks most of it (Nate prefers beer). With our last lockdown, the sale of alcohol was prohibited. I wasn’t about to go through another lockdown rationing wine, hesitant to give it to friends in need lest I run out. So we currently have more than 150 bottles of wine in the garage. It’s glorious.
  

  Divided into boxes of red, white, rose, white bubbly and rose bubbly. I ran out of wine boxes so I used an empty camping gear box.

• Dinnertime. We light candles, set the table and spend at least 30 minutes together, chitchatting. We listen to an LP, M tells us about the monsters he’s trained (he genuinely believes he is a monster trainer, and we’ve learned the hard way not to joke about it) and we tell stories or have a dinnertime poetry slam. M is surprisingly good at putting together fairly long rhyming poems on the fly. We talk about the gods (yes, plural) and more monsters, and we negotiate how many more bites he has to take before he gets dessert. It might not sound like much, but I do enjoy it.
  

  When we can’t go to restaurants, we create one at home

• Care packages. A friend from Muscat recently sent us a box full of Trader Joes goodies and I almost cried. And the other day I was talking to my mom and I mentioned how much M has been drawing lately, and then two weeks later we got a care package full of sketchbooks and new markers.
• Scouting out all the strange/ostentatious houses in our neighborhood. We live in a fancy part of Windhoek. This was actually one of the strangest things about our first Foreign Service tour: our house was in the rich neighborhood. This was not something I was used to. We can’t afford that shit. But most embassy housing is in the nicest neighborhoods because they are generally the safest. So I enjoy wandering the neighborhood, looking at the ridiculous houses and wondering how people have enough money to build houses like that. Or why exactly they’d want a house like that.
  

  Where did they get the money to build this?!

  

  What the heck?

• Not wearing socks. Winter in Namibia is COLD. Surprisingly so. And despite being technically from Wisconsin, I am a child of the tropics. I grew up wearing flip-flops and my feet don’t like socks. They make my toenails, no matter how short they are, uncomfortable and they smell awful.  Hurray for summer (spring doesn’t exist here) and a happy sock-free existence.
• Playing Gloomhaven. The box is enormous and super-heavy and the game costs nearly $100. But we bought it with Amazon gift cards, anticipating a day when we wouldn’t be able to leave the house much and it’d would be just the two of us. Let me tell you, Gloomhaven is SO WORTH IT. It’s like a choose-your-own adventure game with each round being completely different from the last. We each play two characters and at this point I am emotionally attached to mine (I named them Samantha the Scoundrel and Isaspella the Orchid Spellweaver). We set the game up on Saturday afternoons and play as many rounds as we can before putting it all way on Sunday night. It takes up the entire dinner table.
• Planning future trips. We still have two R&Rs to take in the next 22 months, plus a lot of travel in Namibia that we want to do. Figuring out itineraries, the best places to stay, etc is my happy place.

Wow, that’s more than I expected, honestly.

The State of Emergency in Namibia has been lifted and things here are heading back towards “normal,” not because it’s epidemiologically warranted but because there’s no more public or political will for restrictions. Things were starting to improve but then they loosened all the restrictions at once and this past week kids went back to school. I hope there won’t be an increase in cases and that things were under control enough beforehand for it to not be a complete disaster, but we’ll see. In the meantime we wear our masks, take calculated risks and try to make the most of it. We are glad we can finally leave Windhoek again!

Highlights of our first year in Namibia

One of our first sunsets in Windhoek

It’s hard to believe that we have already spent a year here in Namibia. Even harder to believe is how much the world has changed since we first arrived. It’s so insane, it’s almost funny.

Despite all the heartache and uncertainty, there have been some really great moments. Here, in no particular order, are my favorite things from our last turn around the sun in Namibia:

• Our house: This is the first time in the Foreign Service that our house has truly felt like home. It’s not as big as our last house, and the space is much more usable and I love it. We’ve also reached “peak kitchen” with this house; I will never live in another house with a kitchen this big or with this much storage. Sure the range is electric rather than gas, but I honestly don’t even care because everything else is so great. This entire house has so much built-in storage it’s amazing. And it has a GARAGE!
  

  Once you accept the bars on the windows, it’s a delightful place to be. My favorite spot is the corner of windows on the left.

  

  The patio space off the living room. We spend a LOT of time out here!

• Oysters along the coast: Yes, you can also get oysters in Windhoek, but there’s something about the sea air and the sound of the waves when you’re eating oysters along the coast that just makes them that much more enjoyable. I had no idea that oysters were a thing in Namibia. It’s glorious.
  

  So delicious and so inexpensive.

• Visits to Etosha National Park: Whether it’s seeing lions out the car window, rhinos crossing the road in front of us, or elephants at the watering hole at sunset, Etosha never disappoints. I will never forget the first time we saw lions in Etosha. We were driving along a quiet dirt road and I said “Go slowly, this looks like the perfect spot for lions.” Then, I kid you not, one minute later I saw a lion snoozing under a tree. I literally screamed. It was so incredible.
  

  Just another day at Etosha.

• The sundowner game drive at Gocheganas: If there’s anything better than drinking gin and tonics with white rhinos, giraffes, and wildebeest, with the sun setting over the mountains in the background, I honestly don’t know what it could possibly be. We did our first Gocheganas sundowner game drive about a week after arriving. It was our first “holy shit wow” moment in Namibia. We did the same drive a few months later with our first visitor and it was just as incredible. More so, even, since we were sharing it with one of our best friends.
  

  Just some G&T with the rhinos and giraffes

• Sammy the giraffe at Omaruru Game Lodge: The style of conservation at this lodge is a little different from other places in Namibia and the wild animals are somewhat…. tame. You can feed apples to the elephants on game drives and you can pet Sammy the giraffe. Whether or not you agree with this strategy, I’m not going to lie, it’s a lot of fun and M absolutely loved it.
  

  Elephants mobbing the game drive truck at Omaruru Game Lodge

• The birds in Namibia: I’ve always enjoyed watching birds, but before moving to Namibia I’d never gone out of my way to take a picture of one. (Except for maybe a bald eagle here or there). The birds here are amazing. Colorful, interesting, noisy, enormous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s incredible. And I have some decent photos of them.
  

  A hornbill eating an armored bush cricket at Mt. Etjo

• Learning how to braai: I had no idea that grilling could be such a cultural phenomenon. But it is! And it’s awesome.  A traditional braai is done with wood; you get the fire going in a box-thing and then you rake the coals under the grate, the height of which is usually adjustable. Plus most braais have a hook for your potjie (pronounced “POY-key;” it’s essentially a spherical cast iron pot with legs). When we get our braai going we usually cook a lot of food because it’s more labor intensive than grilling in a Weber. We have several potjie pots of varying sizes and we’re always on the lookout for new recipes.
  

  We started out a small cast iron potjie pot, which worked well for camping when it was just the three of us

  

  Then as we started camping with friends we upgraded to a larger enameled cast iron potjie pot. It’s so pretty!

• Camping at Spitzkoppe: Spitzkoppe was the first place we camped in Namibia, and it’s the only place we’ve camped at more than once. It’s stunningly beautiful and so much fun to explore. The campsites are more minimalist than most other campsites, with no running water, electricity, tables or shade, but it’s just the best.
  

  Tents at the base of Spitzkoppe

  

  The arch at Spitzkoppe

I could keep going. But these are the things that are unique to Namibia or that I found surprising/unexpected. We’ve done a ton during our first year here, but it also feels like so much was cancelled, rescheduled or cut short. I’m just glad we have another two years to keep exploring!

A spotted hyena and a wary springbok at Etosha

How are you doing?

A Red Southern Bishop at Avis Dam. The wildlife in Namibia is interesting even though we can’t go anywhere, so here are some photos of some of the most commonly-seen animals around Windhoek!

No, really. How are you doing?

I hope you’re at least doing alright. The world is a crazy place right now, and this is a hard time.

We are okay / doing the best we can / muddling through / taking it day by day.

Some days are better than others. I’d say I’m better now than I was in the earlier days of our lockdown, mostly because I’ve figured out how to manage myself more effectively.*

I feel like I’m getting the hang of the whole working remotely thing. It’s all about accepting the imperfect/less-than-ideal and just going with the flow. We set up M’s art station next to my standing desk and sometimes he’ll sit down there and say he has work to do. Also I am totally at peace with his screen time amount. We both still have a lot of work to do and if watching Disney+ or playing a game on his kindle keeps him occupied while we’re both on calls, that’s just fine.

Lovebirds in the neighborhood

We spend most of the our weekends outside in our yard, watching movies, cooking more-time-consuming-than-normal food, or playing Gloomhaven.

I’ve enjoyed having time to dust off some cookbooks and try new dishes, or to finally cook the things in my NYT Cooking recipe box. Here are some of our favorite new recipes:

• These cookies are astonishingly good. I understand why they are called “The Cookies.”
• If you’re someplace with access to pork and sauerkraut, you have to make choucroute garnie.
• This is a refreshing take on tuna salad .
• These are the best roasted carrots I have ever eaten.

Gloomhaven is an awesome board game that we got last year when we had several Amazon gift cards lying around. We first tried to play it shortly after arriving in Windhoek when we were jet lagged and tired. It was such an extraordinarily confusing experience, we put it back in the cupboard and didn’t even think about playing it again until now. We figured that we’d have the time to finally sort through everything and we were right! It’s really fun, interesting, and it’s nice to currently have four days (we are at the end of a four-day holiday weekend) to work our way through it. There are like 95 different scenarios, and each scenario is its own game. They all build off each other, but you can just play one scenario and then put everything away; you don’t have to play the entire thing all at once.

Artie the Explorer!

I have never in my life been so grateful to have a dog. Artie has been a lifeline for all of us lately. Her persistent optimism, playfulness and happy demeanor give us all something to look forward to and she helps keep us busy. And she is M’s only non-adult companion right now. It’s hilarious watching them run around chasing each other. She is a saint.

So, yeah. That’s how we’re doing. Not great, not bad, basically fair-to-middling.

*This is basically through focusing on things that I can control and having “good” habits like reading books, walking Artie, making the bed, doing yoga, etc. Then I track it all. It helps me feel more intentional and productive.

Dassies, or rock hyraxes. The elephants’ closest relative!

Welcome home, Artie

Our newest family member!

Well, we are apparently 100% incapable of taking our own advice.

I don’t know how many people in the Foreign Service we’ve advised not to get a dog. There are a multitude of reasons. Transporting your dog is, by far, the most difficult part of changing posts. Not to mention finding a good vet, discovering what unique challenges that post will pose for your dog (Maybe your post will ban walking outside. Seriously. It could happen.), figuring out what to do when you’re used to a yard and now you have an apartment, finding someplace to board your dog or someone to watch him/her… the list goes on. And god help you if you get assigned a post that bans your dog’s breed. Or if you get assigned a post that you can’t take a dog to. Having a dog in the Foreign Service is NOT easy. In fact, this blog was partially born out of the difficulty of having a dog in this lifestyle: to show that it can be done and to hopefully provide some helpful info on how to make it work.

So, what did we do? 

We got another dog.

And it makes my heart so, so, so happy.

Surveying the greenery, which she was probably seeing for the first time ever

The thing is, and sadly it took losing Athena for me to realize this, when your dog is a member of your family, all that hardship and struggle is worth it. Our house doesn’t feel like home without a dog running around. It might be expensive, inconvenient, or a pain in the butt, but the tail wags, those snuggles, and all that unconditional love in return is just so darn worth it.

If those things don’t make it worth it for you? Then you shouldn’t get a dog.

We adopted Artemis, AKA Artie, from the Windhoek SPCA and she is such a sweetheart. She doesn’t freak out when M comes running towards her, she sleeps in her crate at night, she loves playing and fetching, and she comes running as soon as we call for her. She also forages in the garbage, pees on our nice rugs, has zero interest in sitting or heeling, and is picky about her treats. But these are things we can fix (mostly) so I’m not stressed about it.

Life is good again, my friends. We still miss Athena, but the pain isn’t as raw. My heart is buoyed by little Artie running around, eager to love us, knowing that we’ve given her the best thing yet: a family to call her own.

We love you, Artie!

At home, finally

Sunset from the back yard

We’ve been here in Windhoek for nearly four months, and it’s feels like home. We’re developing weekend routines, weekdays are starting to feel less insane, and I don’t need to use Google Maps to go everywhere.

Pandemonium in the living room on HHE delivery and unpacking day

Our sea freight shipment, or HHE, arrived just about a month ago, and it’s already 90% put away. Our house here has lots of built-in storage space and a huge kitchen, plus a garage (a garage!!!! We’ve never had a garage before!), so it was surprisingly easy to find places to put things. Although some stuff got shoved into closets, all of which I promised myself I’d deal with later.  Our photos and art are on the walls, our carpets are on the ground, we’re eating off our own plates with our own silverware, M has his books, I have all my kitchen gear and cookbooks, and Nate has his record players. Everyone is happy.

Life here has been relatively easy for us to adjust to. Most of the social culture is outdoors and it’s awesome. Plus you can easily buy just about everything you need, including pork products and alcohol. And things here are so darn inexpensive. It’s glorious. It’s just so nice to be someplace where it’s comfortable to be outside. I can’t stress that enough. Granted, we haven’t been here during the worst of the summer heat, but there’s no way it will ever be as bad as Oman. Nate and I were outside this morning at 11 am, hauling around bags of dirt and shoveling the soil, attempting to get a garden going. We never could have done that during an Omani summer without suffering from heat exhaustion.

One of many overwhelming aisles at Embassy Liquor. Yes the store is called Embassy Liquor. It’s almost like they knew who their best customers would be…

Speaking of Oman, we took some of the lessons we learned there and applied them to our life here. One of those lessons was to get our adventure car as soon as possible. We purchased a bakkie, or pick-up truck, and it is a big powerful vehicle. It’s the perfect 4×4 to explore Namibia with, and we’ve added a big metal top, or canopy, as they call it here, to the back. There’s so much storage space it’s amazing! We still need to get a roof rack and a steel rear bumper, but we are ready to go!

The workweek here took some serious getting used to. Monday through Thursday we work from 7:30ish to 5:15ish with a one-hour lunch break, and then on Fridays we work from 7:30ish to 12:30ish. We’re always running around like chickens with our heads chopped off trying to get to work on time (which never happens), and then in the evenings we scramble to get dinner on the table before M goes to take his bath around 7:45.  It makes me appreciate the Muscat workweek and commute, which had us leaving the house around 7:30 am and getting home by 4:45 pm each day. Thank heavens for our housekeeper; without her we’d be spending all our time doing laundry, tidying up or cleaning the kitchen.

Cloudy sky

One of my favorite things to do on Saturday mornings is to go to the farmer’s market. There are all kinds of vendors, and when you want to buy something, the vendor sets your stuff aside and gives you a receipt. Once you’re done visiting all the stalls, you take all your receipts to the payment area, pay your bill (you can even pay with a card!), and they mark all your receipts as “paid.” Then you go hand your paid receipts to the vendors and you collect your stuff. It’s ingenious. It’s nice to be able to stroll around without lugging heavy bags everywhere. Although it’s also kind of bad because you don’t realize exactly how much you purchased until you have to collect it all and you leave with far more than you actually needed.

Another cloudy sky, this time in the morning

We’re glad we’ll be here for three years. We are settling in, and M is happy at his “tall house in Africa.” Our time in the U.S. over the summer (about 7 weeks) was really hard for him and he kept asking to “go home.” We tried to explain to him that Muscat wasn’t our home anymore, that we were going to have a bunch of different homes over the summer, and that we’d finally arrive at our new home in Namibia, but what 3-year old really understands that? When we finally pulled up the driveway to our house in Windhoek, he said “Are we at my house in Africa?” We were very relieved to finally tell him we were home.

It’s like we can all finally exhale after a summer of holding our breath, now that we’re here. And that’s a nice feeling.

A stranger in a strange land

SAUSAGE!!! BACON!!!!!

We arrived in the DC area a few weeks ago. This is our first time back to the US in nearly two years, and it’s the longest I’ve been outside the US. I’m sitting here at Whole Foods eating sushi for lunch, and since coming back I’ve been struck by a number of things that are weird, crazy, or otherwise note-worthy.

Here you go, in no real order:

• Decision paralysis is real. Too many choices. I’ve spent a lot of time  wandering around grocery stores staring blankly because I can’t make a choice
• Amazon Prime at Whole Foods. WTH? How does this work? Must figure this out
• Motorized scooters everywhere. Jury is still out on where or not this is good. Definitely better than Segways, but is walking really so terrible?
• Luggage carts at Dulles cost $5. FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS. They are free in most of the rest of the world
• Your Maserati/Porsche/fancy car doesn’t impress me. Stop driving like an asshole because you think you deserve to. Unless you’ve got a McLaren you are just a normal person with an oversized ego going through a midlife crisis
• DC went through a heat wave. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA times infinity
• Things got surprisingly existential at the Smithsonian. Cashier: “where are you visiting from?” Me thinking: “Huh. Ummmm…… Oman? We used to live here? Wisconsin? We’re not visiting? Fuck I have no clue what I’m supposed to say” My response: “we are in transit.” Cashier: “oh so you’re on a long road trip?” My response: “yeah something like that.”
• The US is truly a glorious place. You can eat, drink, wear, be, believe, become and do what you want. That is a big deal. You don’t realize how incredible that is until you no longer have the freedom to make those choices. I walked down the street the other day in shorts and a tank top at 9 am, carrying a case of beer. You know who cared? NO ONE. On another note, sadly, not everyone uses these freedoms for good. And that’s fucked up. We’ve been back for less than three weeks and there have already been at least three mass shootings that I know about. I’m glad we’re going back overseas ASAP.
• Apparently you can wear a bra and no shirt in public and this is acceptable. Um whaaaaat. I don’t consider myself to be stodgy or old fashioned, but this is absolutely ludicrous.
• Alcoholic seltzer water is a new and glorious invention. I was at Whole Foods (see several bullet points prior) and the sparkling water was enticing, but ridiculously expensive. Upon further examination, it was 5% ABV. Oooooohhhhhh.

Yeah, it is good to be back. It was hard to leave Oman, but now that we’ve left I’m able to move on more easily. We are looking forward to our adventures ahead, and to our remaining time in the US before going on to Windhoek!

I almost bought one of everything.

Once again, one of everything, please.

The source of my decision paralysis. I went with sushi.

I’ll admit: I’m curious.

So. Many. Choices.

PCS tips from someone who may or may not know what they’re doing

Dhaka pack-out: Just a few of the boxes 

 PCS, or permanent change of station, time is upon us! We are leaving in Oman in less than three months. Yikes. We are preparing for our third PCS and, while I am by no means an expert, I have some helpful advice for folks that are PCSing, especially for the first time. This is mostly in chronological order, and I hope it’s helpful!

Make a bucket list and strategize to get it all done. For me this meant that in January I made a list of all our remaining weekends in Oman and started planning what we were doing when. I know it sounds crazy, but I wanted to make sure we could fit it all in! Or maybe you have several big purchases to make, like art, furniture, or carpets. Make a budget and start finding the best places to procure what you’re looking for.

We made sure to find time to go back to Wadi Damm

Start sorting through your stuff several months ahead of time. This way you can sell things of value that you don’t want any more rather than frantically giving them away a few days before your pack-out.

Order the essentials and ship them several weeks before you are scheduled to arrive. Do an Amazon or jet.com box full of Tupperware containers, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, parchment paper, fluffy toilet paper, and whatever else you think you might need. Along these lines, change the address for your Amazon subscribe-and-save well in advance and then your subscribe-and-save items are there waiting for you.

Don’t spend too much time prepping for your pack-out. Yes, you should carefully consider what you want to put in UAB, but that’s about it. Put your UAB in a separate, easy-to-identify location and then let the movers do their thing. In normal circumstances, there’s no need for colored post-its, a careful labeling system, or any of that. Ultimately, all your shit will get packed and it will arrive where it’s supposed to. Unless the boat sinks or something.

Pack your suitcases and then shove them away in a bathroom with a sign on the door telling the movers not to enter. This way you know how much will fit in your luggage and you have all the necessities (for us this means passports, VPN router, my favorite kitchen knife, AppleTV, expensive jewelry, clothes, etc.) all in one place and you know they won’t get packed).

Watching all our stuff get packed up during our very first pack-out in Alexandria

Ship your mattress. I am so glad we did this. Nothing is worse than sleeping on a bad mattress for two years or more.

When you arrive, say “yes” to everything. Even if you’re tired or it seems like something you might not enjoy, do it anyways. Take advantage of every opportunity to meet the community members and learn more about life in your new location. It’ll be exhausting and sometimes challenging, but you never know when you’ll meet your new best friends.

Let the movers unpack the boxes. Put all the leaves in that dining room table and be prepared ahead of time! When things are strewn all around your house and everything is covered in stuff, you are much more likely to put everything away than you would be if it all stayed in the boxes. Also, it is so much easier when the movers take away the boxes and packing materials versus having to do it yourself. Maybe the idea of strangers touching all your stuff makes you uncomfortable, but at least have them unpack anything breakable. Otherwise you can’t document what arrived broken and you won’t be able to submit a claim.

Our kitchen in Dhaka after our HHE was delivered. Believe it or not, we were able to make dinner in our kitchen that night

Our kitchen in Muscat following HHE delivery. This is a great way to make sure everything gets put away as quickly as possible. As someone who likes an organized kitchen, this is hell.

Hi, my name is Kathryn and I have a china/glassware problem.

I hope this was helpful, and it’s time for me to start following my own advice!

How to host a holiday meal and not go crazy

2018 Thanksgiving dinner!

In November, as in many previous years, we hosted Thanksgiving. It might be too late, with Christmas being next week, but I feel like at this point I’ve accumulated a quite a bit of knowledge (mostly by making a lot of mistakes) that might be helpful to other people. I’m also going to share my stand-by recipes that I make just about every year.

Without further ado, here are my tips for hosting a holiday meal:

• Make lots of lists. Make a guest list, a grocery list, a list of the serving dishes and place settings you’ll need, a list of who is bringing what, and a list for every day leading up to the holiday with amounts of time you’ll need for each component of each dish or facet of the meal. For example, set aside time to clean up or set the table. And set aside 15 minutes before the guests arrive to get ready yourself. Don’t forget to factor in time for keeping the kitchen under control, especially if you don’t have a dishwasher or a friend helping you with dishes.
  

  My to-do list. Things got crossed out and moved around, but mostly I stuck to it.

• Ask everyone to bring something. If you’re not in the US, your group of friends might have holiday traditions that differ from your own, and ask them to bring whatever their favorite dish for the holiday is. Or, if someone can’t/doesn’t cook, ask them to bring alcohol.
  

  Our Thanksgiving cohost is an amazing baker, and she offered to make nearly all of the desserts. We wound up with the Thanksgiving dessert selection of my dreams!

• Ask about dietary restrictions. You don’t want to find out that someone is lactose intolerant or a vegetarian after you’ve planned your menu.
• Do as much as you can in advance. Go grocery shopping the weekend before, recognizing that you’ll undoubtedly forget a few things and will also need to go to the store the day before. We make cranberry sauce and gravy ahead of time, and I’ll also prep the components for various dishes (i.e. make pie crust, boil the sweet potatoes, or chop the onions and celery for dressing) up to several days in advance. Set the table the day before, decide upon and clear off your serving space, and make labels if needed. This sounds really fiddly, but I’ve found that making a cute little sign to put by the punch bowl eliminates a lot of questions, especially when you have alcoholic and non-alcoholic options. This past Thanksgiving, I surprised even myself and I had several hours to snuggle on the couch with M and watch Netflix’s She-Rah revival on Thanksgiving Day. It was marvelous.
• Do not turn down help. If someone offers to bring something extra, come over and help set up, or stay and wash dishes, your response should always be, “That would be awesome!”
• Always serve appetizers and pre-meal drinks. People usually arrive hungry and it’s good to keep everyone busy (and sated) until the meal is served. Usually appetizers are one of the first things that I ask someone else to bring. If you need suggestions, baked brie, antipasta platters, veggie platters and buffalo chicken dip are always popular. This past year we made ginger liquor and served cranberry-ginger punch. It was very popular and tasty.
• Spatchcock and grill your turkey. This frees up the oven for other things, in addition to giving the turkey amazing flavor, and by spatchcocking your turkey, you drastically reduce the cooking time. If you don’t have access to a grill, at least spatchcock your bird. Remember that the turkey needs to rest for at least 30 minutes and you shouldn’t serve it immediately after it’s done cooking.
• If you know something is going to stress you out, don’t do it! The goal is to share a meal with people you love (or at least like) and to have fun. There’s no reason to do anything you don’t want to do!
• Not related to hosting, but still important: If you’re not living in the US and you see an ingredient you know you’ll need for a holiday meal, buy it. I spent $15 on a huge bag of frozen cranberries in August and I stock-piled plain canned pumpkin when I saw it in May. The canned pumpkin came in especially handy when it was nowhere to be found in November and I was giving away cans to friends.
  

  This dressing/stuffing will change your life. I’m not joking. The recipe is below!

Here are our favorite recipes, including some new favorites and others that I’ve been making for nearly a decade:

Appetizers and cocktails

Cranberry ginger punch (made with ginger liqueur): This is our new favorite holiday cocktail. Easy and a good crowd-pleaser
Sweet potato bites with feta: roast the sweet potatoes ahead of time and make the feta filling separately. Then assemble day-of
Baked brie: There are many schools of thought on baked brie, but I think this one is the best. A good friend who is the ultimate host introduced me to it and it’s awesome. Roll the puff pastry very thinly so it bakes evenly and quickly. Make sure the slits don’t go too far down the sides or your cheese will leak out
Bacon-wrapped dates: Lightly cook bacon in the pan, so it’s about half-cooked. Slice the dates, remove the pits, and stuff them with blue cheese. Wrap each date with half a slice of bacon, securing it with a toothpick. Bake at 400 degrees F for 10-15 minutes, or until the bacon is crispy and the cheese is warm.
Buffalo chicken dip: An easy crowd-pleaser; serve with celery and sliced baguette

Dinner

Bacon-shallot gravy: I’m not a gravy person and I could literally drink this
The best stuffing ever: DO NOT skip the sausage
Brined turkey: I’ve tried a number of brine recipes and this is by far the best. You can actually taste the flavor of the brine in the turkey. If I’m spatchcocking the turkey, I leave it in the brine for 24 hours. If I break down the turkey, then I do 12-15 hours. I’ve never done the whole herbed butter thing
Goat cheese mashed potatoes: I don’t know who actually has time to use a food mill.  Not me. Regardless, this goes well with turkey and also beef and lamb

Dessert

Black-bottom oatmeal pie: Like pecan pie, but better, frankly
Pumpkin pie: This recipe is my favorite for pumpkin pie, hands-down

There are other tips/tricks and recipes that I’m probably forgetting, so please consider this to be a “living” blog post, and feel free to share your own suggestions!

At home, finally

We moved into our permanent residence, and we love it here.  In our temporary apartment I never really let myself get 100% comfortable because I knew we’d be leaving, but here we can arrange the furniture how we want, re-organize the kitchen, and actually spend some time making this place feel like ours.

Our apartment is really long. Like a “huh, that’s interesting” kind of long.  We are trying to decide how to rearrange it and partition out the space because you could literally have a banquet for 25 people, at least, in the dining room.  Luckily the flooring is these huge square tiles, so I could easily map out the dimensions of the rooms and furniture.  And this is what I’ve been playing around with:

Some people (Nate, most likely) would say I have too much time on my hands

We are going to request some additional furniture, and hopefully things will be set up the way we would like in no time!

My favorite things about this apartment are the living area, which gets loads of natural light, especially in the morning, and the roof-top garden. We are lucky to have houses next to us rather than apartment buildings, so they don’t block out all the sunlight.

We might not have a yard, but this is almost as good!

The roof has a nice, high wall (at least five feet tall) and tons of grass.  In our last apartment, the people that lived above us actually lost one of their dogs because he jumped over the roof wall chasing a bird.  So, we were always very careful whenever we took Athena on the roof there, because she could definitely put her paws up on the ledge.  Thankfully, here there is no risk of that happening, and there are these glass areas where she can look out, so she has no desire to see over the wall anyways.

Athena explores new spaces and new species of shrubbery

We also have loads of storage in the kitchen, which is something I’m very excited about.  This is the first time in my adult life that I’ve had a kitchen to call my own that I don’t feel totally cramped in.  I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I seriously can’t wait for our HHE to get here.  All our bakeware, kitchen appliances, and weird gadgets/dishes won’t need to be stashed in random places around the house and will finally have a place to go!

Our first week in Dhaka

So far, we really like it here.  Our social sponsors are awesome, the community is really friendly, there’s lots to do, the food is great, and our apartment has air conditioning!

We did a grand tour of the major grocery stores over the weekend, and I was surprised by all the things you can find here.  The commissary (when stocked, anyways) has bacon, pesto, guacamole, puff pastry, and all kinds of things you’d usually see on the shelves in a U.S. grocery store.  Some of it might be expired, but, hey, then it’s 25-50% off.  At some of the local grocery stores we saw Jif peanut butter, Smuckers jam, freshly baked challah, hard taco shells, and loads of other things.  One of the stores we went to, Lavender, had 11 different kinds of lentils!  And the spice selection is amazing.

There’s a nice bakery called Holey, which has wonderful pastries and coffee.  I had a piece of cake from there and it wasn’t as good as the croissant I’d had the day before, so I’ll be sticking to the pastries. There’s another good coffee shop called North End where we were able to buy some freshly ground beans.

In our apartment, we’ve noticed that sometimes there is no cold water.  I didn’t understand why the clothes that came out of the washing machine that were supposed to be washed at the temperature of “snow flake” (rather than 30, 40, 60, 80, or 100 degrees celsius) were warm.  Well, apparently wherever the washing water is stored isn’t immune to the Dhaka heat.  So, no cold water.  We take showers with the knob mostly on “cold” and the water that comes out of the faucet is always lukewarm.

But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal.  We have running water!

I don’t think I’ve been industrious enough in washing our fruits and vegetables… we’ve only been eating peel-able fruits raw, and apparently I’m supposed to wash them with detergent before I even peel them.  Oops.  I’d only been rinsing them.  We’re also supposed to wash vegetables, even if we’re going to cook them, with detergent too. Luckily we haven’t gotten sick yet.

Also, I vacuum every day.  EVERY DAY.  I don’t know how so much dust and dirt makes it’s way into our apartment.  Having a dog probably doesn’t help.  Plus, the tile floors are white, and Athena has black hair, so every single hair that she sheds is visible.

Before we left the US we ordered a VPN configured router, and it has been awesome.  It took us a little while to figure out exactly how to link all the computers, phones, and AppleTV to it, but it’s one of the best things we put in our luggage at the last minute.  No regrets there.

Let’s see… yesterday Athena got her first BarkBox in Dhaka!  They ship to DPO addresses (like a PO box with an American address, so we can still receive mail sent at domestic rates), but I was wary of whether or not it would actually work since sometimes we had problems with BarkBox shipments when we lived in Virginia.  And then Nate came home yesterday with Athena’s BarkBox!  Her tail was wagging non-stop.

In other Athena news, a few days ago she went running with Nate, one of his colleagues, and his colleague’s dog.  Usually she hates running, but they went over a mile before Nate dropped Athena off at home!  Apparently she went on strike while they were walking to the meeting point and Nate had to pick her up and carry her.  For some reason, the minute you put the running harness on her she won’t budge.  But as soon as she saw their running buddies, she changed her mind and had a great time.

Things are good here.  We’re all still adjusting in some ways, but we’re looking forward to experiencing more of what life in Bangladesh has to offer!