The anticipation...

Is killing me!

Our life is fabulous, but also so incredibly bizarre. I am sure that over the years it must get easier, but still being new to this FS adventure, I have still have yet to come even remotely close to wrapping my head around the system or given in to the fact that we have very little control over our lives and the future path we may be on....which I am sure is supposed to be the fun part, but right now sort of feels just scary!

On Friday we submitted our bid list for 2011. (Which is funny to me too, we plan way in advance, but for something we can't really plan at all. So weird.) Anyway, we compiled our list, sent it off into the ether, and now we wait...but for how long, nobody knows! A few days? A few weeks? Until tomorrow? I have NO idea! And it is impossible to stop thinking about, to stop obsessing over, to relax and carry on....honestly, to do anything!

But with all that said, the second time around is actually a bit easier to swallow. The first go at it, you can be sent anywhere, and I mean anywhere....Niger, Sudan, border Mexico, ugh! Our only say was a few "preferences" and high, medium, low ranking, all the while reminding ourselves that we promised to be "world-wide" available! Which sounds so romantic in my head...you can be sent anywhere, anywhere in the world! I would love to live in Italy, go on safari in Africa, shop in the spice markets of Turkey...but then you see the list and realize that you have no idea where half these cities are or ever even thought about Malta before in your life....makes you a little nervous! (Or maybe I need to just work on my geography! But seriously, have you ever heard of Tallinn or Skopje before?!?!?)

And obviously the first go at things worked extremely well for us....we LOVE the Guate, Craig's job is ridiculously great, and of course everything is what you make of it....so I remain hopeful and optimistic that we will be so lucky again!

Anyway, I digress so easily....this time around we started with about 300 choices. (I have no idea how many other people are looking at this thing besides over half of Craig's class, all the other entry level folks at post here, and all of their A100 buddies....so probably about 300, meaning someone is going to each and every one of these places....good or bad!) But the exciting part this time was that we could narrow it down to our own personal top 20...fabulous, actually some say! Well, easier said than done. The only hurdle between us and our most perfect post was the puzzle of figuring out which posts actually fit with our personal locked in timing, Craig's training needs and mandatory obligations....turns out finding 20, that you actually want to go to is sort of tough.

I of course do not want to jinx anything, so we will have to wait and see what we get before I say too much more....but we definitely found a few absolutely fantastic places and a few fun surprises (after looking up a few unknown places, ahh my geography skills!)....so fingers crossed for something grand!

And of course, there are also a few places on there that are not ideal (again fingers crossed, no whammies!), but still interesting and at least we got to decide if they should be on there...but again reminding us of our world-wide available pledge!

So my great words of wisdom from going through this process, having had the weekend to absorb what we just did, to second guess a few things, to come back around to a happy place...we are mostly just super excited to see where we are headed and what new adventure we get to start next! And even though the wait is unbelievably unbearable, hopefully we will know sooner rather than later and we can check this box and continue loving Guatemala and take full advantage of the year we have left in this gorgeous country. Okay, so no words of wisdom, just throw in the towel and go with it...

Will of course keep you posted and will try not to bite off all of my fingernails in the meantime....