In 2023, I met my goal of writing fewer words more often. I published 40 posts, several on Foreign Service-related topics. I wrote a series on bidding for and receiving my fifth assignment. I expanded a popular post about FS Housing into a series. I also wrote two new installments of ‘Your Questions Answered.’ In what turned out to be a very road trip and family-oriented year, I made four trips to the west coast and back – three by car – and my mom and dad each visited us on the east coast. In 2022, I’d received a promotion, meaning I wouldn’t be eligible to be promoted again for two years; I enjoyed the professional sweet spot where I didn’t have to PCS, learn a new job, or compete for promotion. The year ended on a sad note: my family faced the death of my stepmother and learned the hard way about the limitations of the Medicare-funded hospice program in the United States.
Year in Review
As far as the blog is concerned, I spent the first three months of 2023 just catching up on what I’d done in 2022. It took a few months to get around to sharing how I’d spent January and February – exploring various new hiking opportunities in northern Virginia and generally enjoying the outdoors reconnecting with friends. But early in the year I began thinking about bidding for my fifth tour. Since I have a Class 2 medical clearance, I needed to both renew my clearance and review projected vacancies so MED could start pre-clearing potential bids early.
In March I hit the road again in my Volkswagen to drive round-trip from Virginia to the west coast for what would be cross-country trip #3. (Cross-country trip #1 had been in May-June 2022; cross-country trip #2 had been in November 2022.) My stepmom had learned of her pancreatic cancer diagnosis in summer 2022. By spring 2023, she had completed six months of chemo. She asked me to be present at the surgery she needed to remove her tumor. I told her I would drive her to the hospital, and I did. I had time the night before starting the trip to meet up with a good friend in DC who used to be our next-door neighbor in Tashkent; I still beat the winter weather to arrive at the hospital in Portland, OR a day early. Disappointingly, the morning of her surgery, my stepmom tested positive for COVID and the surgery was postponed until the following month when I could not attend.
In April and May, my husband and I enjoyed spring in northern Virginia, going to well-loved landmark Burnside Farms to see the annual tulip showing and visiting North Carolina for a beach vacation and to see my favorite band Incubus. I got Invisalign braces, 30 years to the month after originally getting my braces off! I also started to really focus in on fifth tour bidding efforts. Although the regular bid cycle would not start until autumn, I had resolved to throw my hat in the ring for Special Incentive Posts (SIPs) and Long-Term Training and Details (LTTDs). I needed to be fully ready to bid in the summer cycle. I was reaching out to incumbents, studying the projected vacancies, and generally deciding where I wanted to target. Throughout May, we also worked to overhaul our backyard and spent multiple days trimming trees and bushes. We carted away years of leaves and debris left by the prior tenants.
By June I’d marked nine years in the Foreign Service and had turned in my four bids – three overseas consular assignments and one domestic interagency detail. I was hoping for the best. The worst-case scenario would not have even been that bad: getting nothing and having to bid on the regular cycle. There were plenty of good jobs there too; I was just looking to stretch myself.
My mom flew out for a visit, and we lived it up across DC and northern Virginia. We visited Mt. Vernon Estate for Summerfest, checked out the National Museum of African American History and Culture, got our steps in at the Arthritis Foundation’s annual Walk to Cure Arthritis, paid way too much for beer and hot dogs at a Nats baseball game, saw blues great Buddy Guy at the Wolf Trap National Center Park for the Performing Arts, stood in the crowd at the national Pride parade until we almost collapsed, and enjoyed the best of the local culinary scene. My husband and I closed out the month by taking a beach trip to Delaware and enjoying a terrific evening of jazz as Pat Metheny performed at the Kennedy Center.
In July I received my handshake for my fifth assignment: the deputy consular chief position in Burma. I was elated. As an SIP assignment, Rangoon would pay well and offer valuable consular experience. I was very busy in my current position in the Office of Children’s Issues, though. And I was worried and distracted by my stepmother’s health declining precipitously the same week a large tree limb in our front yard fell on the hood of the Volkswagen. Despite the damage to my car, my husband and I soon hit the road for cross country trip #4 from Virginia to the west coast and back (although he had to return sooner than I did and later flew home on his own). That made the leg he traveled west with me, his first and my seventh, the only cross-country leg I didn’t drive solo.
While he and I were with my family in Washington state, my medical clearance for Burma came through, my handshake was registered, and I was paneled into my onward assignment. I breathed a giant sigh of relief. My family spent some memorable times together, but it was also hard to see my stepmom slow down and enter hospice care. We understood that meant no further medical treatment was indicated. Her surgery had failed, and the cancer had spread throughout her body despite chemo. She reckoned with this grim new reality calmly, gracefully. She was still up and about under her own steam. But by that point she tired easily, and was spending most of her days sitting in the living room watching television by herself.
In August I marked 18 years of federal service. I completed cross-country trip #4 by driving back to Virginia from the west coast on my own, purposefully hitting two states I’d never been to before (North Dakota and Kentucky). According to my calculations, that left only Maine, Alaska, and Michigan on my list of ‘U.S. States Not Yet Visited.’ When I came home, my husband and I went to the Arlington County Fair. We made our second trip of the summer to Wolf Trap to enjoy live outdoor music, this time seeing classic rock legends Jethro Tull.
In September we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. We also went to the Virginia State Fair (for the first time since 2011) and filled out our Housing Questionnaire for Rangoon. Thinking about where we might live in Burma someday was very exciting to contemplate but also a bit of an abstraction at nearly two years away. I also met up in DC with one of my longtime friends with whom I’d previously served in the Peace Corps as he visited from Indiana. Our dinner together prompted some angsty reflection on my part about U.S. tipping culture and some of my own financial hang-ups. At the end of the month, I was lucky enough to see Incubus for the second time in one year, this time in Ocean City, MD at the Oceans Calling music festival.
In October I hit the road alone for cross-country trip #5 (and my third of the calendar year) after a phone call from my stepmom’s hospice nurse asking my siblings and I to gather. I arrived to find my stepmom’s condition had deteriorated to the point where my dad and I needed a wheelchair to move her in the house. My birthday and the following several weeks passed in a crush of full-time telework, working graveyards remotely on a task force as the Israel/Gaza crisis intensified, and spending every spare non-working minute attending to my stepmother’s personal and medical needs. Hospice nurses and social workers provided some ballast to efforts my dad and I made. But it felt like a scramble. We were soon exhausted and emotionally overwrought with the lack of sleep and inability to consistently manage our own lives on top of everything else we needed to do. Nearly daily, my dad and I were making decisions we did not feel qualified to make.
During the six weeks between mid-November when she passed away and the end of December, I felt like I was in a constant state of nervous system dysregulation. Death notifications. Estate planning issues. Driving from Washington to California to see my mom for one day, because she was alive and I could. Then driving back to Virginia by myself, arriving around midnight on Thanksgiving after surreally standing in a travel plaza along the Pennsylvania toll road wondering how I have a family, but it had come down to Burger King in solitude for our nation’s greatest holiday meal.
Weeks of frantic holiday cleaning, decorating, shopping, wrapping, mailing gifts. Planning a trip back to Washington for the funeral, plane tickets, rental car. Many phone calls and emails about the funeral and celebration of life. So many details and purchases. Writing, editing, clearing, paying for, and publishing an obituary. Flying back to Washington, dealing with a house full of people for over a week and all the attendant confusion, cleaning, cooking, and people-managing. The never-ending “Let us know what we can do to help,” instead of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it (vice creating more work for the most beleaguered). Trying to protect my dad and anticipate things before they happened.
Finding out my stepdaughters’ maternal grandfather had died suddenly, causing my elder stepdaughter to pull out of walking at her graduate school graduation ceremony. Attendance at the graduation had been the reason my husband had stayed behind from attending L’s funeral with me, but at least he had been able to be there for his daughters in their own time of loss. Then finding out my husband had been hospitalized in Virginia with kidney stones. Dealing with the funeral and the aftermath. Setting up and taking down the celebration. My husband’s second hospitalization, and release. Boarding a flight with my dad back to Virginia after closing up his house and dealing with the pets. Going all-out at our home for days cooking and putting on a festive Christmas celebration in which no detail of food or comfort was overlooked. Walking in the woods, decorating gingerbread houses, spending hundreds of dollars on matching Christmas pajamas we were too tired to put on, because my stepmom would have liked them. And so much more. Listening to guided meditation podcasts for the first time and not being able to even comprehend that I couldn’t call my stepmom.
So, did I do anything fun for New Year’s Eve, two days after my dad had returned to Washington? Yes, in fact I did. It was very fun to be snuggled in my bed doing absolutely nothing except trying to calm my racing mind and absorb everything that had happened in the preceding two months.
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Earlier in the year, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time by turning my 2019 post, Foreign Service Housing into a series. The first post had focused on our housing in Tashkent and Canberra during our first and second tours, respectively, and had consistently been one of the blog’s most popular offerings. So, in 2023, I wrote two follow-ups: Foreign Service Housing, Part II was about our domestic Permanent Change of Station (PCS) Lodging during long-term Spanish language training in Arlington, and Foreign Service Housing, Part III told the tale of our housing during our third tour in Ciudad Juárez. I’m sure in the future, I will follow up with posts about the house we live in now (during our fourth tour in Washington) and where we will eventually live during our fifth tour in Burma, too.
In 2023, I wrote several other topical posts: about housing costs associated with serving a domestic FS tour; my top tips for solo road-tripping in the United States; the importance of being present and enjoying where you’re serving instead of thinking about the maybe-greener grass elsewhere; reflections on mental health and suicide; some of my most memorable stories from four tours of consular work; and of course, two more rounds of Your Questions Answered, here and here.
Blogging in 2023
In 2023, I’d set a goal to write less, more often. I’m happy to say I mostly managed to do that. Primarily for reasons of family and bandwidth, I concentrated the majority of my writing in the first half of the year. During the second half of the year, there were five months where I only wrote a single post. However, nearly 10 years into this blog, I’ve still never broken one of my most essential rules: post at least monthly.
- I wrote 40 new posts, more than in either of the prior two years (in 2021 and 2020 I wrote 28 and 38 new posts, respectively). But I tightened up my word average significantly over the prior two years for an average of 1,993 words per post.
- The most posts I wrote in any month was in January with a high of 10. That tied my previous all-time highest number of monthly posts (December 2021).
- Blog readership in 2023 was back up from the year before. Unique page and post views rose around 13% from 38,757 to 44,529. I sat amazed on New Year’s Eve as the blog missed beating its all-time record set in 2020 (44,568) by a mere 39 clicks!
- Unique visitors in 2023 rose a little over three percent to a new all-time high of 16,454.
- The blog neared – but didn’t quite reach – 300,000 all-time views.
- At no point in 2023 did the blog break its the highest-ever number of daily or monthly views. However, during all 12 months there were at least 3,000 page views per month, with nine months being above 3,400 page views per month, and three months also being above 4,000 page views per month.
- Blog readers in 2023 landed on the site from 152 different countries, just up from 151 in 2022. See below for a list of the top 20 countries from which visitors most frequently viewed the blog:
- United States
- Canada
- Australia
- Kyrgyzstan
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- South Africa
- Austria
- Philippines
- Mexico
- China
- India
- Japan
- Spain
- Denmark
- Italy
- Ireland
- Thailand
- South Korea
- Sweden
Below is a list of 2023’s top 20 posts and pages ranked by the number of the views they received and year of publication.
- Tips for Authenticating Louis Vuitton Multicolore (2020)
- Foreign Service Housing (2019)
- Foreign Service Promotions: 10 Things I’ve Learned (2022)
- My Foreign Service Timeline (2014)
- I Left My Heart at the Iberostar Grand Paraíso (2021)
- About the Author (2014)
- Becoming an FSO Part II: The QEP (2014)
- Foreign Service Housing, Part III (2023)
- Flag Day Announcement… V (2023)
- Becoming an FSO Part III: The FSOA (2014)
- Fifth Tour Bidding: A Preview (2023)
- FS Domestic Tours: New Neighborhood, New Equilibrium (2023)
- Fifth Tour Bidding: The Early Assignments Cycle (2023)
- Flag Day Recap (2014)
- I Love a Sunburnt Country (Wide Brown Land) (2019)
- Consular Officers Have the Best Stories, Part I (2023)
- Becoming an FSO Part IV: Clearances and the Register (2014)
- The Land of the Golden Pagodas (2023)
- Fifth Tour Bidding: Bids Are In (2023)
- Fifth Tour Bidding: Postscript, Paneling and Beyond (2023)
Conclusions:
- It was consistent to see about half-and-half evergreen posts/old favorites with new musings.
- The 2020 post about my Louis Vuitton rainbow purses continues to drive enormous traffic to the site, and oddly, more so than any of my Foreign Service-related posts. In the spirit of Y2K nostalgia, I still have my beloved Multicolore collection (and I note in 2023 it celebrated 20 years since its original launch). I am glad if I have helped some consumers make better purchases and avoid contributing their hard-earned money to the counterfeit luxury ‘industry.’
- In 2024 as we turn our attention towards training and our 2025 departure to Burma, I expect the number of more strictly FS-focused posts to ramp up.
Thank you as always to blog readers who enjoy coming here, especially to those who send me questions about the Foreign Service. It means a lot to me that after 10 years and the way social media has largely displaced longform blogs that people still find this platform an entertaining and informative place. I enjoy corresponding with you and I promise that I will return your email, even if it takes me a while. I’m sorry to those who have emailed me since last autumn and I haven’t gotten back to you. I’ve been trying to rest and reorder after the stress of the past few months in particular.
You can ask me anything you want, but please be aware that I’m not able to commit to interviews or on-camera conversations at this time, I’m generally not into public discussion of political intrigue, and I don’t always have a sophisticated take on every issue. I may also include your question – totally anonymously and without attribution – and my answer as part of my on-again, off-again “Your Questions Answered” blog series.
Contact me!
Email: askcollectingpostcards@gmail.com
Facebook: @collectingpostcardsblog
Twitter: @pennypostcard
Instagram: @life_in_multicolore (purse-related; just for fun!)
Collecting Postcards 