Intermission - Pictures!

I know I promised the rest of the President Post , but I am SO behind in showing pictures, I figured we could have an intermission from the President Post for some picutres.

These pictures are of our house the day after we showed up. Only our things that were on the plane with us are there, so everything else you see is from the Embassy. They give us a "welcome kit", which includes kitchen stuff and linens to tide us over until our things show up.

So, I will give you a tour of our house, and then I will take some more pictures when we are done unpacking and you can see the difference.

Of course, since I am an enginerd, and a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought a little floor plan would be easier then me explaining the layout of the house. So here is the layout - of course, it is not to scale (Power Point) but you can get the idea.


This is the front of our house. We have a yard that goes the whole way around the house. That tree in the right of the picture was dead when we got here and is now gone. Actually, our whole yard had been negelcted for about three months since no one was living there, so it was really sad when we showed up. Now it is really nice, but only becuase the gardner we hired ir great - we didn't do a thing.

Below is the Living Room, which is really big. You can see our lovely embassy furniture, which is the same furniture everyone else has that works here. it is pretty funny when you go to a party and see your couch at someone else's house.

There is this big open room in the house, and when we got here, the embassy staff had set it up as a family room, but it is really big and has no windows, so we copied our neighbors and made it the dining room - it seems to work better.

This is our dining room, that is now the family room. It gets good light in the afternoon, and is a nice place to hang out.

This is our kitchen, which is an unbelievably ugly brown, with dark green blinds. It has gotten better now that most of our stuff is put away.

We have a little utility room off the kitchen and a door to the side yard from here. Woohoo! A washer and dryer - no more apartment living and dragging your stuff to the laundry room.

This is the Master Bedroom. We were so excited when we got our linens, because the pink comforter the embassy provided was not the best. We have these built-in closets, that are great. Not every house has them, so we are pretty lucky - tons of storage.

Here is one of our guest rooms - also with nice closets.

Okay, so we are almost done putting away all of our things, so as soon as we do, there will be another post of the "after", where our house actually looks like home!

Who is coming here? Part 1

Okay, so, Steve and I swore that we would get better then posting once a month. . . and then the POTUS storm hit.



We got word in mid-December that the President and the Secretary of State would be coming to our little island for part of their visit to the Middle East. The party would show up on January 12th and stay the night.



What we saw next was pretty amazing - the embassy was whipped up and organized and everyone took on some sort of responsibility (along with their daily jobs they have in the embassy). The people who had experienced a presidential visit warned us of long hours, vacations being re-scheduled and weekends spent working.



The embassy staff spent the first couple weeks of planning in an extremely busy, but relatively quiet state. The teams were planning and working with Washington on locations and events.



Right around New Year's though, the storm really started. Advance people from all of the different agencies started coming in and everyone in the embassy had a group in town that they were working with.



Steve ended up with a bunch of different responsibilities. The first was that he was the Control Officer for the Advance Staff. So basically, he was the point of contact for the White House advance team. This was one of many positions Steve was assigned to. He was also in charge of the gifts and the Control Officer for some of the other people coming in on the 12th.



The embassy had Site Officer for the different locations the president would be who would make sure all of the logistics were taken care of, we had a point of contact for all of the security team's questions, the communication's team's question. There were people in charge of different areas of logistics - transportation, customs and immigration, the hotels, etc.



I ended up working with the person from the State Department office that is in charge of international Presidential travel. I ended up making and updating the spreadsheets for all the hotels and who was in which one. It actually became pretty challenging - mostly because there is no hotel in Bahrain large enough to house the President and the 700+ of his closest friends who would be in town on the 12th, so we had four different hotels we were using.

And here is where the dorky Architectural Engineer comes into play - one of the things we needed to do when assigning rooms to people was see where the rooms were on the floor layout. Of course we don't have CAD (which would have made life easy, because the hotel did have an electronic copy of their drawings) so I ended up making a floor plan out of text boxes so we could layout where people were and type their names in each room. It made life a lot easier and everything was easy to update and check against out master list - I know - I am a dork....


For the two weeks before the visit Steve and I both were logging in 80 hours a week for work. We didn't have a day we weren't working from December 29th until January 17th. It was a little bit nuts.

Stay tuned for the next post about the actual visit.