Last night was our third wedding anniversary.  We celebrated with dinner at a darling little restaurant just around the corner from our house, Corduroy.  Though the name implies a warm, cozy surrounding, aside from the corduroy-backed menus, the restaurant was far more chic than comfortable, but somehow still managed to be intimate.  We sat in a corner booth set for two and had a fabulous dinner of goat cheese and beet salad, followed by grilled pork and raspberry tart for me, and crab blintzes, grilled lamb, and finished with a chocolate sabayon for Joey.  When I made the reservations through OpenTable.com I mentioned it was our anniversary and the chef even wrote “Happy Anniversary” in chocolate on the dessert plates.   According to one of Joey’s classmates, Corduroy is something of a DC establishment; after our romantic dinner there last night I can see why.  Joey also brought home some beautiful flowers to make for a wonderful evening.  Its hard to believe its been three years already – time goes by so fast and things have changed so much – its hard to imagine what the future will bring!

Speaking of the future, we received a glimpse into it today with our receipt of the hallowed bid list.  The 300 or so possible posts worldwide were narrowed down today to 94, and from that 94 we could narrow down even further based on wanting to leave DC (about 15 posts there) and not speaking the language for those posts with immediate needs (another 10 or so).  According to State Department security regulations, I can’t tell you specifically what countries are on the list.   Not a single one of them.  Apparently it is considered sensitive information not for public dissemination.  I’m not sure why my little blog directed toward my family and friends constitutes a security risk, but those are the rules and like them or not, I signed up for this crap.  I can say that the countries are very heavily concentrated in a continent south of Europe and west of Asia.  There are a few other posts available, one of which is my dream post, which I wish wasn’t even on the list because knowing its an option, though not really a viable option, just makes it that much harder to seriously consider the other posts because all I can think about is that dream post.   There are a few posts available in South America, actually more like Latin America, but it really looks like unless we get that s-f-Joey luck to come through, we are going to Africa.  Therefore I am in a really bad mood.  I know I shouldn’t be and I guess I’m not in a bad mood, just more sour and broody.  Its not that I wasn’t expecting that we’d be going there, but I guess I just hoped we wouldn’t be going there so soon.  Like maybe we could get broken into living internationally (aka away from Target) by moving to South America before we moved to the bushwood.  But nothing is for sure yet and we still have a lot of research to do to prepare our list (gotta make sure the dogs can get in and live there safely).   So the priority for the next week or so is research to rank our list and then we wait.  But every day it gets a little closer.

I had an orientation today for Foreign Service Spouses.  The morning session was really informative but the afternoon session got a little redundant.  It was nice to learn about all the different people around the Foreign Service whose job is to make our lives easier as we make these huge changes.  The Foreign Service Institute is a really pretty campus and I’m glad I got the chance to see where Joey will be spending much of his time in DC.  

After making our way home this evening from Arlington, we had a really hard time finding a parking space.  There were tons of police cars, secret service agents and other security around the convention center right by our house.  We stepped into the wine shop  around the corner and asked what was going on and he said the First Lady had just been in tasting wine!  You can still hear a helicopter circling the block and according to Joey, when he just took Moe out, all of the streets are now totally blocked off.  Cool!  I just looked up online what's going on over there and its the Congressional Black Caucus.  LOL.