We loved our Japanese Christmas card from 3 years ago so much that we decided to reuse it this year for our e-cards. So a little photoshop and…voila!

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whoa, 3 justin posts in a row?! it’s a christmas miracle!

so, i haven’t had a professional haircut since last august (yes, as in august of 2008) and i haven’t had any kind of haircut since i had justin trim my hair in march so obviously i’m waaaay overdue. mostly i’ve been putting it off and putting it off because i dread finding a salon and a hairstylist. this drives my husband crazy and even though i insist that he’ll miss this (and all my other) little idiosyncracy when i’m dead and gone someday he insists that he will not. anyway, the long and the short of it is that my husband is sick of talking about my hair, so i turn to you, friends. i had decided whole-heartedly 100% on copying the hair of my favorite t.v. lesbian, devin from friday night lights:

pros: not too long, not too short. can still pull my hair into a ponytail. seems fairly low maintenance.

cons: not too sure about the bangs. i have yet to be able to pull off straight bangs, but then again it’s probably because i’ve never had professionally cut straight bangs.

so like i said, i was all decided, but then in my internet window shopping i came across the etsy shop thrush and the owner of the shop or the model that she uses has some pretty cute hair:

it reminds me of my favorite haircut – my short, black 2002 hair.

pros: cute cut, a length that has worked well for me, would be fun to style, my husband likes shorter hair.

cons: higher maintenance – hair is cute for a couple of weeks and then it turns into weird, wonky grow-out hair. no ponytails.

so i turn to you, my faithful readers, for your input. which one do you like better?

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I love playing fantasy sports. It’s the best way to pull off a combination of loving sports and being a geek. My favorite fantasy sports are football and baseball. That’s strange because my favorite sport is basketball. For some reason I can never get into fantasy basketball no matter how hard I try. I guess it’s because it takes away from my enjoyment of the game in some way.

But back to the purpose of this post.

Here is my fantasy Christmas wishlist. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an under-handed way of asking for things. I have absolutely no expectations of receiving any of these items (Although if you are super rich and bored, I’d be more than happy to help you spend your money!). This is mostly for my own amusement and I also suppose it’s a glimpse into the things I covet. I’ll repent someday, I promise.

I’ll start cheap and work my way up to the more expensive.

Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote

Cost: $19.99 retail
Why?: Better way to control Netflix streaming on the Xbox.

Disco Cufflinks

Cost: $49.20 per pair
Why?: I’ve just bought my first French-cuffed shirt and I hope to own a few more in the future. These cufflinks have just the right amount of personality to peek out from under my suit coat.

Nike Oregon Waffle Shoes

Cost: ~$50 on eBay.
Why?: I bought a pair of these reissued shoes while were in Japan and fell in love with them. I wore them out and I still wear them. I want to replace them. But Nike in their infinite wisdom discontinued them. I currently have a brown/orange pair that is the bee’s knees but I like a lot of the color schemes.

Ray Ban Wayfarer/New Wayfarer Eyeglasses

Cost: $100-$120
Why?: I’ve been wanting an eyewear upgrade for a while now and nothing tops the original Ray Bans in terms of awesomeness. I’d like a pair of the original Wayfarers and a pair of the New Wayfarers. Still not sure on the color, though. Maybe a pair of prescription sunglasses, too?

Void Gold V02 Retrograde

Cost: $199.00 retail
Why?: It’s an awesome, stylish, yet classy watch. There’s like a million watches I want to get from Watchismo but this one has really caught my eye.

Denon DP-300F Turntable

Cost: $329.00
Why?: I would really like an upgraded turntable for our music system. Denon is world-reknown for their high-end turntables and this mid-range model has all of the features I like, including an integrated phono amplifier.

Apple Mac Mini Server

Cost: $999.00
Why?: This is for connecting to the TV as a media server. Maybe install Boxee or something cool like that. I definitely don’t need this, but what on this list do I really need?

Apple MacBook Pro 13″

Cost: $1499.00
Why?: I’d like a computer upgrade. Simple. And Apple makes the computers I like.

Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman

Cost: just over $3000.00 for a new model retail, varying prices for older models
Why?: It’s an icon of mid-century modern design, but is also one of the most comfortable chairs you can sit in. I’ve wanted one of these for a long time and someday I will buy myself one.

1964 Porsche 356C

Cost: NADA average value $24,100-$37,500.
Why?: I also love 60s Porsche 911s, but these late 356s make my heart go pitter-patter. Sure, they don’t have much under the hood compared to modern sports cars, but it’s the combination of styling and vroom that makes me love this car so very very much. I doubt I’ll ever own one, but everyone can have a dream, right?

Well I guess that wraps it up. Please don’t think I’m being greedy, this is just a fantasy list! As usual, we’ll end up spending more money on others this Christmas season than on ourselves. And the things we will enjoy the most will be the time spent with friends and family rather than with stuff.

And please don’t think I only have expensive taste. I can slum it up with the best. Just ask my wife how many Hot Pockets I can eat.

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On Saturday we got our first snowfall of the season here in Virginia. It didn’t ever get super cold, but throughout the day we ended up accumulating 3-4 inches of the white stuff.

We had spent the afternoon eating and hanging out with some friends from church and we joked that they might just cancel church the next day.

Well later that night the first email message came in: they were canceling regular church meetings. I lol’d. The Fredericksburg and White Oak Wards were meeting together for a joint sacrament meeting and Sunday School/RS-Priesthood were cancelled.

The funny thing is that the weather on Sunday was beautiful – warm, sunny, bone-dry roads. Just like the forecasters had been predicting all week.

So I guess we ended up with a short Sunday. I think the folks here might be scared of snow.

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For Thanksgiving weekend we have been doing some deep cleaning and also have been selling some of our excess belongings on eBay/Craigslist. I think that humans tend to hold onto things that don’t have a lot of value anymore just for sentimental reasons.

That sentence sounds kind of cold. Truly I have nothing against sentimentality. I do not advocate that we all abdicate emotion and become Vulcan/Borg hybrids. (Star Trek references, yay!) I just think that sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself why you are continuing to lug all of this stuff around from place to place when you don’t ever use it.

You take some item out of a dusty box, look at it, remember some event, and then refuse to get rid of it. The memory is what keeps us from getting rid of things we don’t need anymore. Sometimes the things are just garbage and sometimes they are valuable…for someone else.

So I have put up some music equipment – 3 amplifiers and a guitar. I already sold one amp for $400. Nice! We also catalogued all of our CDs and found out that we can trade them in for over $500. That’s amazing. But each CD comes with a memory attached – usually how hard it was to find that album in the pre-internet era. And the music equipment evokes great memories of playing music with friends.

But we move on. I still have those memories, whether or not a bulky piece of electronics that I never turn on is sitting in my home office or not. We are now the leaner, meaner, richer Bytheways.

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so the other day we were in wal-mart late one night when elliott looked up at the ceiling and said very clearly “oh geez…sh*t.” now, he did not learn that unfortunate combination from us, or from anything we let him watch (unless i need to start watching the wiggles more closely to find the subliminal swears), so i’m just going to chalk it up to an unfortunate combination put together while babbling. at the same time though – baby’s first swear! in wal-mart! too perfect.

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As many of our friends and family already know, it has long been a dream of Sarah’s and mine to work for the U.S. State Department in the Foreign Service. From the moment we first learned about the line of work, it seemed like a perfect fit. It would allow me to use my interests and talents for a unique job where we could both travel the world and represent the country that we love.

But the process to becoming a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) is a long and winding one. We’ve started and stalled down that road before, and when we look online for advice, one piece of advice gets repeated constantly ad nauseam: “don’t plan your life around becoming an FSO”.

So luckily we have been blessed with a great job with the Boy Scouts here in the D.C. area, it’s a job where I enjoy (most of) the work I am doing and I have had the opportunity to grow and stretch myself into a more capable person than I was right after I graduated. In today’s economy, the last thing I would want to do is risk a good, stable job just for the possible remote chance of something else.

So I worry that my making it to the next step in the FSO selection process might send the wrong message to my current employer. It’s not that I am disgruntled and looking for a way out – that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just that I want to be an FSO so badly that I will always be trying to achieve that goal, even if it is remote.

Last year, I passed the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) which is a written exam that covers a very broad base of subjects. I also passed the Qualifications Evaluation Panel (QEP), which looked at my experiences and qualifications to determine whether I was the type of candidate they were looking for. The next step after that is the Foreign Service Oral Assessment (FSOA), which is basically a day-long interview/evaluation session where current employees of the State Department test you to see if you are what they are looking for.

When I flew to D.C. last may to take the FSOA, I had high hopes but I had no idea what I was in for. It was perhaps the most stressful, nerve-wracking experience I had ever been through. The FSOA is graded on a scale from 1 to 7, and any score above a 5.25 is considered a passing score. I walked away with a 5.2. Ouch.

You are only allowed to take the initial written exam (FSOT) once a calendar year, so I had to wait and start the process over again. In the meantime we had a child, I graduated from BYU, we accepted a position in the D.C. area, and we moved across the country. Things were going pretty good for us, but even a new, exciting place to live and a new job could not put the dream of becoming an FSO on hold.

So I retook the FSOT in June and found out I passed in July. I submitted my QEP information in July and found out I passed in September. I scheduled my FSOA for November. The process was going smoothly, and I was excited but forcing myself not to think about it much. I still had the baggage of my last failed FSOA attempt and I wanted to avoid that feeling again.

But the day came, and I looked good in a fresh white shirt and clean suit (no thanks to Mr. Mac!) and felt confident. And I tore it up. I passed all three sections of the test and my total score came out to a 5.6. Jubilation!

I felt so great as they brought us into a room and congratulated us on passing. Out of 12 people that took the FSOA that day, 6 of us passed. There were some really amazing, impressive people that did not make it that day. Then the realization that I was still a long way from my dream set in.

You see, even though passing the FSOA garners you a “immediate conditional offer” of employment, those “conditions” are pretty large. First of all, everyone in your family has to pass a comprehensive medical examination in order to be cleared for “worldwide availability. We have already taken Elliott in for his exams with his pediatrician, and Sarah and I are scheduled for our exams next week. But once the paperwork is done, it can still take months to receive medical clearance. And there’s always the possibility that something health-related could turn up that would shut down my candidacy immediately.

Secondly, I have to receive a security clearance from the U.S. Government. Specifically, a Top Secret clearance (sounds so clandestine!). On the day of the FSOA I had to bring with me security forms that basically lists every person that I ever knew, along with every place I ever lived, every job I ever had, and every place I’ve ever traveled to. The Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) then use that information, along with fingerprints and a credit report, to make sure that I am not a security risk to the sensitive information of the United States. For some people this process is fast (~2-3 months), for others it can take over a year.

Part of what the DSS officers assigned to my case will do is conduct interviews with people from my past. That includes family/friends/co-workers and also my current employer. So I had to break the news to Stan that this was a possibility and I worry about losing my current job just because this process is moving forwards. If anyone else out there gets contacted by DSS about me, don’t worry! Be polite and honest and everything will be fine. But I would appreciate if you would let me know you had been contacted so that I can keep tabs on how my investigation is proceeding!

Once medical and security clearances have been granted, there is a “Final Suitability Review”, which is where they look at your total file and have a last chance at refusing you.

So, you’d think that after all of this time and expense, a job would be waiting after passing clearances, right? WRONG. Instead, you get put on a list of everyone that has their clearances completed called the “register”. The register is a ranked list based on the score you received at your FSOA. Then, when the State Department has time and funding for an entry-level diplomat training class (called A-100) they start calling at the top of the list and stop when the class is full. Keep in mind that the register is constantly changing as people pass clearances and are added to it. So one’s rank on the register can actually go down over time as more people are added with higher scores. If your name is on the register for 18 months and your name never gets called, you get dropped. Completely. Meaning, you have to start over the entire process at the FSOT.

What I’m trying to illustrate is that even though I have come a long ways in the FSO hiring process (less than 3% make it this far), it is not even close to being a slam dunk. There are many ways my candidacy could be terminated, and there is the possibility that everything could go well and I would not make it. There is also the possibility that I eventually get a job as an FSO but that it takes 9-12 months for clearances and an additional 15 months on the register before it becomes a reality. That’s a long time.

So that’s why I want to temper expectations. That’s why I want to convince my boss that this is nothing to worry about for the moment. Also, I have to learn patience for myself because at this point there is nothing I can do to speed things along.

Thanks to everyone for their congratulations. But let’s save the celebration for when I have a confirmed A-100 date! But trust me, we are so happy and excited and feel so blessed that we have made it this far. When I examine the competition I feel humbled and wonder how I could do so well. The only answer I can come up with is that God wants this for us as part of a bigger plan. That feels good.

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word play!

so justin recently decided that with the price of tvs dropping like the current administration’s approval numbers (oh snap! i kid.) it was time for us to upgrade. we started researching which brands we like, looking around on amazon, craigslist, and making many trips to costco and wal-mart to check out their selection. we never really thought about going to best buy because everyone knows they were given their business model and taught customer service by satan himself.

not seeing anything that we liked anywhere else or online at a price we were willing to pay and recognizing that consumer reports (long may they reign) named the best buy in-store brand tvs as a good buy we decided to go down and check them out.

we went to the closest best buy and went straight back to the tvs. after looking around a bit we found a panasonic plasma that was on sale, looked good, and was in our price range. we decided to buy it. and proceeded to wait for an hour for any kind of a salesperson to come near the tv section so that we could do just that. after about 45 minutes an employee in a yellow shirt walked past us at which point we grabbed him and asked him to help us buy the tv. that’s right, we told him that we had money and we didn’t want to talk we just wanted to buy. he told us to wait and talk to someone in a blue shirt. no offer to go get us a mythical blue-shirted employee, no, no.  so we left and you all should be proud of how mature we are because we didn’t even give them rude hand gestures as we walked out. maturity.

well, justin really really wanted a tv and we deluded ourselves into thinking it was a fluke. so we went to another best buy, 10 miles further south. we walked in and there was an even better tv, for cheaper, staring us in the face. we decided that we were in luck and decided to purchase that tv. so again we started standing around looking for someone with a blue shirt. we found one who was helping someone else and so we just stood behind them, as if in line, to make sure that we got help this time. in the meantime we observed an employee in a black shirt (best buy and your shirts!) getting yelled at by an extremely irate customer (bad sign #1) and when he was done getting his butt handed to him mr. black shirt came up to us and asked if we needed help to which we replied “yes, let us buy this tv.” “sure thing, let me just go check to see if we have one in stock, and if not we’ll be able to get you one in 2-3 days.” ah the relief we felt at that moment. guess what, though, that relief was a lie because satan is the father of all lies and he runs best buy.

15 minutes later we see mr. black shirt helping another customer and has obviously completely forgotten about our existence. do best buy salespeople get commission because if so they must have to steal bread to feed their families because they are so terrible at their jobs. also they probably steal bread anyway because they’re horrible people. I DIGRESS.

mr. black shirt is passing us just as a blue shirt comes by and he dismissively passes us off to blue shirt. “LET US BUY THIS TV” we almost scream at this guy. blue shirt takes us to the registers. he stands there for 5 minutes trying to get someone come and help him because he has no idea how to use the computer register system. finally someone comes over. and then we wait, and wait, and wait some more. elliott is crying. we watch the police reunion concert on mute while a ricky martin concert is playing on a tv we can’t see and amuse ourselves by trying to match up sting’s mouth with ricky’s singing. 4. 5. more minutes pass. finally blue shirt comes up and tells us that the tv is out of stock and the soonest they can get one is DECEMBER 12TH.

at this point i start to see the best buy interview process in my mind: “well, you seem like you’re really inept and completely uninterested in helping people so i think you’ll be a great fit with us here at best buy. i just have one more question: are you the worst?” “yes, yes i am.” “HIRED!”

i have to admire justin’s persistence. we get home and he goes onto the best buy website and finds 8 of the tvs in stock at a store 25 miles north of us. he calls them and they tell him that the price at the other store is an old sale price that has expired but since they forgot to take it down they’ll have to honor it (finally, best buy employees’ ineptness can be used to our advantage), do a store-to-store sale, and we can pick up the tv from them that day. which is what we do. HALLELUJAH.

so, happy ending, we now have a 42 inch lcd tv sitting our living room being all huge and awesome. and we’ll never have to go to best buy again. EVER.

***footnote: just so you all know we left the house to go to the first best buy at 11:30 am and justin came home with the tv at 6:30 pm. best buy owes us a day of our life back.

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so i’ve got christmas on the mind. we’re having our first christmas back here and really our first christmas, with tree, decor, cookies. traditions! family! exciting!

i’ve been wanting to get one big gift for elliott and i was thinking of getting him either a rocking horse, a tricycle, or a toy piano. when i brought this up to justin he laughed at me and said “well, if wes anderson was designing a kid’s room for one of his quirky hipster families i’m sure it would feature a vintage rocking horse, a vintage trike, and a vintage toy piano.” so harsh! (but so true.) he claims that kids don’t actually enjoy or play with any of those items. in fact i fondly remember playing with all of those items as a child, but maybe it’s true?

so everyone, would an 18-month old to a 2 year old enjoy and play with any of those items? and if not any good ideas? thanks!

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i promised you all photographic evidence that we are alive and well, so voila!

justin had to go up to bethesda last week to get some work done at the scout office and brought us along for the hov lane privileges and so we could all go to the zoo. the zoo was no san diego (take that, east coast!), but it still was way fun. we saw lots of animals, but since i was only able to get a picture of the panda’s butt, and the toucan picture turned out blurry, and also that’s what national geographic photographers are for, here’s a picture of the tiger:

and here’s some more tigers

such fierce, majestic beasts…

elliott’s favorite part about the zoo was the bronze sculptures that they had of each of the animals outside their enclosures and the fact that we would let him out to climb on them. he was especially enamored of the otters, probably because Otter is his nickname (elli-ott-er) and he sleeps with a stuffed otter every night.

how cute has this kid gotten?! answer: very. at least, until the end of the day when he looked like this.

yikes, can someone direct me to the nearest garbage can? i have some spawn of satan i need to dispose of.

all in all it was a fun day, until the end, and the fact that it’s free means that we’ll probably make many trips to the zoo while we’re in this area. plus we missed the cheetahs.

i’ll leave you on this note (which we saw in the metro elevator on our way back from the zoo)

stay classy, d.c.!

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