Back to the Future

I've fallen seriously behind in my posts. My most recent post was nearly two months ago, and even that ancient update was itself narrating events that had happened over a month before. I still enjoy updating this thing, I think I just hate the idea of working through my backlog of scribbles and notes. It's difficult to write with any sort of regularity about things that happened months ago. So, I've decided to resolve the issue as elegantly (and effortlessly) as possible - by skipping the past three or four months and jumping back to the future.

So here we are, again in now.

We're back in Brooklyn. I can finally say "we" because Ms. Chadha has left London to stay with me in New York for good. The long slog to the Foreign Service continues. My security clearance is still pending. My case manager from Diplomatic Security submitted my file sometime in mid-April, and shortly after that, I entered a special hell called "adjudications," where I've burned ever since. Operating under the logic that only a difficult decision could possibly take this long, I've started to believe that this is probably a bad sign.

Oh well, nothing really to do about it. I can't imagine what fatal information Diplomatic Security could have uncovered, so I'm hoping it's just a function of checking up on my frequent globe-trekking (Ms. C has dragged me to some 35 countries over the last five years). There's also always the possibility that Ms. C's nationality is the concern - she's not American, she's a Kiwi, and my country in understandably suspicious of a nation that would field a soccer team that neither won nor lost a single game in the World Cup. How un-American is that?