After emerging, with some difficulty, from nearly a year of extreme overwork, I find myself in nearly the same place as a year ago. Nearly agreed to a work assignment that will eat up the winter (but comes with travel), nearly agreed to joining a committee that nearly killed me last year, and have rejoined the magazine as well. Plus all the usual other bits of work.
The weather has improved here in Istanbul, though no sign of rain and the water shortage is moving from the distressing to the dire. Also, there are more power cuts than there used to be. Granted, my only way of finding out is that the clock on the oven starts blinking, but these days it blinks one of every two mornings whereas last year it wasn’t so frequent.
We’ve received our visas thank heavens. Not actually received them but they have been approved, so I felt like quite the master of the application system and gave lots of unsolicited advice to someone else who was applying but they did not pay any attention whatsoever.