To end the suspense, Cindy did get a proper hot meal last night. Not terribly innovative, a potato and onion omelet with cheese, but it was hot and tasty so not to worry.
I got home about five minutes before the Russian tutor and slogged my way through conjugations of verbs, not what I consider useful. One of the other people who lives here joined us and when the tutor left, we had a drink and by the time he left it was eight and I hadn’t even had a minute with Cindy. I quickly prepped the dinner and we finally sat down to eat and talk at 8:30. Not the most relaxed evening we have ever had, especially in light of the fact that Cindy leaves at 6:30am and doesn’t get back until 5:30pm and that is on a good day.
My work at the embassy was backbreaking, mostly due to the fact that I was the only volunteer during the off loading time. Once a month the commissary gets a big 18-wheeler filled with everything you can imagine. The truck comes from Ramstein Air Base in Germany and takes three days to get here. Yesterday there were 18 palettes of foodstuff and we had to haul it all by hand from the loading dock to the warehouse. I’m an expert now in using those little palette pushers.
Once we had all the frozen stuff in the freezers and the cold products in the coolers, we had to start the inventory to match what the invoice said was there and what was actually there. This involved opening each box, say a box of salad dressing, bringing one bottle to a desk where there was an ancient computer and scanner. There that item would be scanned, and it would say how many there should be and if the counts where ok, I would transfer the box to a smaller pushcart for storage. Very time consuming, very inefficient and I know that the person in charge wants to make it more efficient but I’m not sure she would be encouraged to do so. I’m sure you have all seen people in grocery stores with little hand held scanners checking on inventory. Something like that would make the job go ever so much faster.
I was there from 10 until 5:30 and I must say I’ve become unaccustomed to manual labor. By 4:30 I was actually tired from lifting boxes and pushing palettes. However, I met the nicest people while working there and enjoyed myself immensely. So much so, that I’m leaving again in thirty minutes for another full day, which is why this is being written at 9am. I don’t expect to get home until after 7pm tonight so I thought I would get this out and then fill in the details tomorrow when I have much more time.
Until then, Cindy and Wm
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