{"id":130,"date":"2007-07-27T11:35:29","date_gmt":"2007-07-27T09:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/?p=130"},"modified":"2007-07-27T11:35:29","modified_gmt":"2007-07-27T09:35:29","slug":"home-leave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/2007\/07\/27\/home-leave\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Home Leave&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We returned to Seattle for 10 days.<\/p>\n<p>I had to go to the corporate offices for face time (and a lot of lunches \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>It is a long way to go for just 10 days. I just have planned for a longer stay. We didn&#8217;t get a chance to accomplish everything we wanted to do. Neither all the work goals, nor all of the personal goals were attained. Amazing how 10 days can slip by.<\/p>\n<p>We did get to do the highlights:<\/p>\n<p>The pub:<\/p>\n<p>Our 2nd living room when we are in Seattle. This is the kind of place, for us, that is a real touchstone. It was our first stop, after checking in to our hotel. There are lots of ways that people that live in Seattle, &#8220;know&#8221; when they are &#8220;home&#8221;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>seeing The mountain<\/li>\n<li>seeing the needle<\/li>\n<li>seeing the sound<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>for us, it is seeing all the friendly faces at <a title=\"beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr\" href=\"http:\/\/wwww.beveridgeplacepub.com\">BPP<\/a>. The beer doesn&#8217;t hurt either.<\/p>\n<p>The Goat Roast:<\/p>\n<p>This was a lot of fun, though I did crash for a couple hours during the middle of the party. Jet lag is a terrible thing. We got to see people in &#8220;wholesale quantities&#8221; that enabled us to at least briefly chat with people we probably would not have been able to see otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>Didn&#8217;t get to spend enough time with the hosts unfortunately.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and Martin: thanks for all the &#8220;middle eastern&#8221; food. It was _sooo_ nice to see all that tabouleh and such. [bastidge]. The only reason you are still alive is that there was a big pot of pulled pork.<\/p>\n<p>We had lunch and dinner at some of our favorite restaurants, ate a lot of pork, and drank a bit of good beer.<\/p>\n<p>Kaddee was a shopping queen, getting all those silly little items that can&#8217;t be found here.<\/p>\n<p>We visited the house and picked up a bunch of items that we had shipped there, and some items from storage.<\/p>\n<p>It was great to reconnect with my cow-orkers as well. I do miss the day-to-day banter with them. They are a great group of people.<\/p>\n<p>Leaving Seattle this time was harder than I imagined it would be. Last year, when we left, we were off on &#8220;an adventure&#8221;. So that was a large distraction from &#8220;the leaving&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This time, while living in Egypt is still an adventure and a positive thing, there aren&#8217;t really any surprises.<\/p>\n<p>This meant that leaving this time caused more reflection on the leaving of Seattle and less on the arriving in Cairo. There was more of a sense of loss this time. For me anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Long term expats say that leaving home after home leave gets easier as time goes on.<\/p>\n<p>For me, I sincerely hope they are wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We returned to Seattle for 10 days. I had to go to the corporate offices for face time (and a lot of lunches \ud83d\ude42 It is a long way to go for just 10 days. I just have planned for a longer stay. We didn&#8217;t get a chance to accomplish everything we wanted to do. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}