Shaha Shenanigans: Conference, exchange students, and sleeping

Every now and then, I get a little homesick. Doesn't happen at an unhealthy frequency, but now and again it happens. This weekend's General Conference was one of those times... I have fond memories of conference weekend with my family, eating my dad's homemade baking powder biscuits (which Ben duplicates fabulously, btw) going on long walks, playing games in the backyard, chowing down on pot roast and mashed potatoes, and of course, watching conference.

Yesterday when conference ended and I was staring drearily at the leftovers in the fridge for our Sunday dinner, I was happy to have my fun friend from church call, "I know this is short notice, but we have a foreign exchange student coming over from Moldova, actually he's a lieutenant colonel in the Moldovan Army so it's weird to call him a "student" but he's coming over for dinner and we thought it would be fun to have some other military families over to meet him. Do you guys already have plans?" Unless you count last week's chicken and rice "plans" then no, we don't.

So, we happily accepted the invitation. And that's what's nice about being in a military community... since everyone else if far from home too, we lean on each other and stand in for each other's families.

So, this is the point I was trying to get to: Another aspect of being in the military is you never are hard up for interesting conversation.

The man holding the plane, Dustin, is an Air Force pilot, he's explaning to Sergei on the right from Moldova that he used to fly C-17s and C-21s and was basically a chauffeur for all the hoitey-toitey generals. Now he studies Russian full time and is preparing to be the assistant attache for the Air Force in Moscow. Ben speaks Polish, and the Moldovan speaks Romanian. There was another military dinner guest there who also speaks Russian. I was trying to make light conversation with him by asking what he does in the Air Force. He casually told me he lives in DC, but travels to Russia on a regular basis to inspect their nuclear weapons. He put it in much more technical terms, but that was the gist of it. I'm like, "You've seen the Russians' nuclear weapons?!" "Yeah" he said all casually like he inspects hotdogs for a living. I mean, how many people can say they've seen Russian nuclear weapons?! And really, that's what I love about this lifestyle. So many interesting people. A lot more interesting than me anyway.