21 Feb: Pretoria/Johannesburg

As the wheels touch down in Johannesburg I say a little prayer, and I am grateful to be home for a while. I am exhausted, the sinus I thought would explode on the descent into JFK is still not letting up. Customs line is a mile long. I am pulled out of it. I am mad, definitely didn’t have my A-game on when I smiled at the official. The pregnant inspector however, takes pity and only checks my one bag and lets me through the doors where my sister anxiously awaits my arrival. My shipment from Baghdad is stuck in customs. It takes ten agonizing days to secure a release. Ten days can be a long time, a very long time.

20 Feb: Dubai

In Dubai I fall in the transit line. Chris walks off, hat on head, headed in the direction of baggage claim. He looks over his shoulder at me. So many times we have said goodbye like this. I think I am fine, but one cannot help to get a little sad, afterall it would be at least two months before we meet again. I find a seat in the crowded coffee shop and ponder the lack of free wi-fi in the U.S. as I navigate through emails and send messages of “In Dubai” to friends and family.

18 Feb: Leaving the US..

How did it get to be the 18th of February already? We return our rental car, I argue with Delta over the upgrade they refuse to give us. Not surprisingly, at LAX Chris finally gets the full body-cavity search we knew was just of matter of time. Turns out a dark-haired guy with facial hair, traveling one-way back and forth between the US and the Middle East on tickets he buys on the Internet, is a big no-no. We board the flight headed to Dubai via New York. This time the North East is freezing, in the teens. The only reason I know this is because we erroneously ended up outside the terminal while looking for the airtrain. I was seriously not sure that I would make it the 300 meters to the airtrain, we run. My hands turn blue.

14-18 Feb: Los Angeles

We are back in Los Angeles. We spend every waking (and as Chris has proven some not so “awake”) moment with the dozens of friends and colleagues we acquired during our seven years in Tinsel town. We continue our "road show" of photos and stories as we share the experiences with what feels like hundreds of people. Out of necessity, we divide our days into “breakfast”, “morning”, “lunch”, “afternoon” and “dinner”. We have coffee, meet new babies, bring food to those recovering from illness, and dine out daily. We present at a forum at our church in Santa Monica, and host a slide show for our friends at Doug and Stacy's place in Marina del Rey. It is wonderful to see everyone! Chris accuses me of causing us “to have too many friends” since “before I met you I never had this many friends, and the ones I did have, I lost contact with as soon as I moved away”. I roll my eyes and look for parking. I also touch base with my professors at UCLA to map the strategy for my thesis to be completed in the next two months.

[Some of our friends who made it out for our slide show]

9-12 Feb: Yosemite, California

In an attempt to get everyone away from chores and the mundane, we reserved a cabin in Yosemite for the whole family to celebrate Chris's mom and dad's 60th birthdays. The extended family joined in, and in the end we were 14 in total. The cabin was wonderful. The weather was wet, but we are elated to be together. The fire roared, the food was hearty, the companionship necessary. Finally on Sunday it snowed, the little ones were ecstatic.

8 Feb: Coming home

Visalia, California - There is something very surreal about unsuspectingly crawling up a familiar driveway in the middle of the night. A homecoming. It has been over a year. Things look the same, they smell the same. We ring the doorbell - the elated family – somehow I feel like I am watching this on a movie screen, from afar, perhaps from the neighbor’s yard. Then it sucks you in, deep into the belly of the house, and it snaps you back in a heartbeat. The room is as it always is (save for the floor under repair), but the bathroom is new. The rest is eerily similar. It is comforting. The family looks good, I shower, we go out to dinner. I drift in and out of reality and remembrance.

3-8 Feb: Park City, Utah

Park City is fun. The snow is a little scarce, but the weather is great. We have a nice apartment. I shopped at Wild Oats with tears in my eyes as I ogled over the abundance of wonderfully fresh produce I missed so dearly in Baghdad. In an attempt to maximize our “experience on the mountain” we signed up for a few lessons with what has to be Australia’s own “carrot top”. Great guy, and we got to jump the lift line. We pretend to have an interest in timeshare and get free lift tickets from one of the newly constructed über-resorts. At night we cook, drink wine, catch up, talk about Baghdad and what the future hold. We also debate the Vietnam and Iraq wars with three grey beards in the hot tub who bring us plastic cups for our wine.

[Main Street. Pricey, but nice]

1-3 Feb: Los Angeles

A brief stop in Los Angeles in route to Park City for a five day snowboarding break awards us just enough time to satisfy our ravenous desire for Mexican food, shared aptly with 25 of our friends in our favorite, La Cabana, with pitchers of Margaritas and happy conversation flowing; for me to appear on an NPR affiliate radio station; visit our beloved Nelson; and to drop off our excess baggage at the Bratcher B&B.

[Nelson, as handsome as ever]

Listen to "Eating in a war zone", my interview with Evan Kleiman on KCRW.

With Evan and fabulous produces, Jennifer, at "Angeli Caffé", Evan's restaurant on Melrose Blvd.

27 Jan-1 Feb: New York, New Haven, Boston

27 Jan: Charles de Gaulle airport submits us to the first security screening we both believe was actually worthwhile. Quick and efficient, the security procedure leaves us both confident. We are on board an Air France (aptly known as Air Chance for their superior tendency to misplace luggage) flight to JFK. We are running late. At JFK we are offered the upgraded, much larger version of the short-wheel base mini van we reserved to move all of our stuff at the low-low price of $150. We decline. They are out of the short base, we get the upgrade for free.


[Our first forum at FPC New Haven, the next four weeks will prove to be somewhat like a "book tour" as we take our "Chris & Susan does Baghdad" story on the road]

28-1 Jan: New Haven is pleasant, fortunate for us we did not come a week earlier when temperatures hovered around 1 degree Farenheit. We visit with friends from Yale, the rugby team, and do our first forum at the First Presbyterian church the morning after our arrival. We try to extract ourselves from the basement of our good friends Ken and Judy, and consolidate our belongings in our heavily overburdened storage in Boston. The minivan turns out to be a blessing as we pile our earthlies in the back and shuttle then up to Boston for the big prioritization operation. Salvation Army makes out like a bandit. We are horrified at the consumerism we had forgotten about for a year as we pass box after box after box of oversized collection of useless stuff that someone somewhere somehow convinced the public that they must have.

[Consolidating]