Collecting Postcards
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U.S. Diplomat/Foreign Service Officer in Mexico. RPCV Macedonia '02-'04. World traveler. All views my own. Follow the Collecting Postcards blog on here!
Collecting Postcards
1w ago
Ten years ago today, on Sunday, April 13, 2014, I sat down at my laptop in the guest room of our former northern Virginia apartment and typed out a post called Something Blog-Worthy…Maybe. I had been a candidate for the Foreign Service on and off since 2011 and had decided to start sharing publicly about…
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Collecting Postcards
3w ago
In January, I wrote about having eye surgery during the first week of the new year to free myself from glasses and contact lenses. The procedure was called refractive lens exchange, or custom lens replacement (CLR, pronounced like the word “clear”). In CLR, an ophthalmologist removes the natural lens behind the eye and replaces it…
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Collecting Postcards
1M ago
In my previous blog post, I began to tell the March 2023 story of how a hacker took over my Facebook account. If you missed it, I recommend reading Part I at the link before reading Part II. At the end of Part I, I’d left my tale of woe on a cliffhanger after reaching…
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Collecting Postcards
1M ago
Recently I was talking with some colleagues at a happy hour about ‘pig butchering,’ one of the more nefarious financial scams to emerge from Asia in recent years. In the high-tech long con, a stranger grooms an unsuspecting target through social media or text messages to invest in cryptocurrency. Like fattening a pig for slaughter,…
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Collecting Postcards
2M ago
I noticed the day after Valentine’s Day that Collecting Postcards had just marked 300,000 lifetime views! Just two months shy of its tenth anniversary, the blog’s 346 posts and five pages have now been visited over 300,000 times by almost 105,000 visitors. How incredible to see the sustained dedication and effort I’ve invested in writing…
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Collecting Postcards
2M ago
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…
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Collecting Postcards
3M ago
A couple of days into the new year, I had eye surgery in northern Virginia to permanently lessen my dependence on glasses and contacts. Refractive lens exchange – – sometimes called custom lens replacement, clear lens replacement, or CLR (pronounced like “clear”) – – is an outpatient surgery that replaces the natural lens of your…
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Collecting Postcards
4M ago
There’s something about the coming of another new year that makes me want to create a resolution in the same way it makes other people want to opt out of participating. Tying goal-setting to an arbitrary date on the calendar may feel just that, like another push in the endless striving for us to be…
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Collecting Postcards
5M ago
[This is a companion piece to a post I wrote in August 2023.] The second week of October, I arrived in Washington state to help my dad take care of my stepmom L in what I now know was her final six weeks of hospice. She was battling pancreatic cancer – one of the scariest…
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Collecting Postcards
8M ago
Last week I was surprised by a housing questionnaire from my next post, Rangoon, welcoming us to “the land of the golden pagodas.” I think my surprise was because our arrival to said land is a year and 10 months away! I’ve never known a post to send a housing questionnaire so far in advance.…
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