Articles by mgedwards

Christmas Cards

Isn’t Christmas card writing fun?  Not!  I don’t know a soul who enjoys sitting down and writing a stack of cards and letters for the holidays.  Of course you enjoy getting in touch with people you know and love.  You also enjoy receiving Christmas cards and letters from them.  You might contact people you’ve been meaning to get a hold of all year long.  It’s a great excuse to reach out and get in touch with an old friend or acquaintance.

I have to admit though that the actual job of writing cards isn’t much fun.  It can be a lot of work.  I like writing our annual Christmas letter.  I usually write the first draft, and then my wife contributes and edits it.  It’s a joint effort.  We work well together.  I don’t really enjoy the Christmas card assembly process, though.  It’s operations management at its finest trying to maximize Christmas card throughput (corny sounding I know, but it’s true).  Buy cards, make a list of recipients, write something pithy in the card to show you care, print the Christmas letter, fold, add an occasional family photo, stick in the envelope, seal, recipient address, and stick on the stamp and return address label.  Batch processes so you don’t have to do each painstakingly one by one.  Drum-rope-buffer.  (Read “The Goal” sometime, an excellent story about operations management.)  Fun fun fun!  If it were only few perhaps, but the list seems to grow longer each year.  We had to trim it down a bit this year.  The elimination process is a tough one sometimes because you just can’t figure out who not to send a card to…you want to send one to everyone but you just don’t have the time or resolve to send a card to everyone.  It seems like every year we send out a lot more cards than we receive.  Maybe it’s a dying art.  Maybe everyone is resorting to e-cards.  Maybe they’re too busy.  Maybe we’ve been crossed off their Christmas list.  Who knows.  This year I have to admit that it isn’t too enjoyable for me with everything I have to do before we leave.  There’s a lot of people I want to get in touch with though so the show must go on.  We’ll get them out before the fast approaching deadline.  If you’re wondering, “If it’s such a chore, why do it?” it’s because we enjoy keeping in touch and letting people know how we’re doing.

Sharing a vehicle

This is my first day going solo since I started Korean in July.  My wife has been going with me to Korean class from the very beginning, but today I’m on my own now that she has finished her language course.  She finished early so that she can take care of our son.  Until now her parents had been taking care of our son, but now they’re returning home in anticipation of our departure.  My wife will stay home with our son full time until at least mid-February when we head to Seoul.  After we get to Korea she may work part-time or full-time if she can find a good job there that does not require fluent Korean.  In the meantime she’ll be a stay-at-home mom.

We only have one car now.  We got rid of our other vehicles before we moved to the D.C. area, and now we’re down to one vehicle.  That was fine when we both had the same schedule, but now that we’re on different schedules we will have to time-share the car.  It takes a bit of creativity.  The weather is cold now and it won’t be fun walking outside for extended periods of time or waiting at a bus stop.  The Metro isn’t as convenient as it could be.  She will drive me in and pick me up while her parents are here, but after that I’ll be on my own if she needs to keep the car.  Having a second vehicle is so convenient.  I wish mass transit were convenient, but unfortunately not.  Perhaps when we return to the D.C. area in the future mass transit will be a more viable option for us.  In the meantime we’ll have to do some fancy schedule coordinating, and I’ll have to spend more time getting to and from school on my own.  It’s just two months–that’s not too bad.  I just hope that I won’t get caught in a big snowstorm between now and when we leave for Seoul.  We won’t always have a car around the world, but in most parts of America it’s such a necessity.

The end of D.C. baseball?

My wife passed her Korean exam with flying colors!  She passed 2/2 in Korean in just 24 weeks (level 2 speaking, level 2 reading).  Congratulations!  She is a language learning star.  It’s extremely rare for someone to reach that level in such a short period of time.  Me, I’m stuck at the 1+ level with over 1 1/2 months left to go in training.  She definitely leveraged her mastery of Chinese and might not have been so lucky in a completely unrelated language like Pashto or Finnish, but it’s still an amazing accomplishment.  Hats off to her.  I can only hope to be at about 2/1 in Korean by February.  Maybe next time I can study German!

Is this the end of professional baseball in Washington, D.C.?  I even went out and bought my new Washington Nationals baseball cap to support bringing back to D.C. after the announcement was made in late November that the Montreal Expos were moving to the Nation’s Capitol.  Last night though the D.C. Council approved funding for a stadium with the condition that about half of it would be paid for by Major League Baseball.  Three months ago D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams had negotiated a deal with MLB to pay for a new stadium for the Nationals, but now MLB will re-open the deal and possibly cancel it unless the D.C. Council agrees to pay for funding.  I would really like to see baseball in D.C.  I love baseball and miss watching the Mariners at Safeco.  Rooting for the Nationals would let me jump on the bandwagon early while they’re still terrible.  I’m personally critical of public funding for ballparks, but in this case if Williams had been given the authority to make a deal to bring the Expos to D.C. the issue of funding should have been sounded out months ago.  If the Council was opposed to public funding then Williams could have changed the terms of the deal during negotiations.  A deal breaker after the team move has been announced is a lousy way of doing business and gives the city a huge black eye.  The 2004 election changed the Council’s composition, but the main instigator Linda Cropp is a holdover from the previous council and has been pulling strings behind the scenes to change the terms of the deal.  Now it looks as if the team will remain the Expos and could move elsewhere.  Oh well, I guess that Nationals’ hat will be a collector item.

I dropped off some food and clothing today for the marine guards and families of Foreign Service nationals at the Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Consulate.  A few of us worked together to put together a care package to send to them in the wake of the recent bombings.  It’s the least we can do sitting here thousands of miles away from the Consulate.  It should arrive before Christmas.