I’m sorry I haven’t updated things of late (like a month or so). It’s been a busy time with one of the outcomes of that busyness being that… we’re in Ukraine. Despite the State Department currently classifying Ukraine as “Level 4 – Do Not Travel,” we came anyway. Viktoria needed some paperwork updated, and since she’s not a great planner, it was going to be quicker to come here to do it rather than trying to get it done through the Ukrainian consulate in San Francisco. Weird, huh?

We’ve been here just shy of two weeks and things have been going well. We’re staying with family friends a few kilometers outside of Lviv (on the western side of the county, not that far from the Polish border). In addition to paperwork, Viktoria has been visiting assorted doctors and such — things she hates to do in the American medical system, because the process is very different. I’m doing my job as normal, except with some odd hours, so I partially overlap with my colleagues’ hours back home. Our host has been most gracious and has been helping Viktoria get around (there’s a larger town just a kilometer or so away, so many things she’s been able to do there); plus, he’s lived in the area most of his life and has connections that have helped speed things along. With a bit of luck, we’ll be heading home in a couple weeks.

Despite being away from the main areas of fighting, the war is not forgotten here and is very much on the forefront of people’s minds. Last weekend (appropriately, Memorial Day weekend) we visited a cemetery in Lviv which now has a section for local residents killed in the war. Most every city, town and village has their own war cemetery; we passed several during an outing. It was starting to rain, so I didn’t even make it half-way through the rows in Lviv. Based on the graves per row, there are probably at least 1500 soldiers buried here alone. We saw some people standing or sitting near a loved one’s grave, but there were also a lot of visitors who would just walk the central lane, looking at the soldiers buried there. It’s the high cost of freedom, and I think they just need to see it up close.

We’ve listened to some sirens too, warning of missiles. There was actually a siren test happening at the little border train station when our host picked us up. Welcome to Ukraine indeed. There have been a couple other, including one last night. I don’t think there have been any actual missiles in the area, but my access to the news has a language barrier. It is possible that we heard a missile over-flight last week. It sounded very much like a jet to me, but there’s not really any air traffic these days and Viktoria says it was way too fast to have been a jet. (She was in Mariupol during Russia’s initial incursions back in 2014-2015, so it’s likely she learned the difference.) Despite this, we’re still in a reasonably safe part of the country.

So, we’ve been here for about two weeks, and it actually took us about three weeks to get here. (Kind of a vacation, but a much longer travel story for another time.) And hopefully we’ll be leaving in another two weeks. That’s a full seven weeks of travel, making it the longest trip I’ve ever been on and the longest amount of time I’ve been away from our house. I’m definitely looking forward to getting back. But that’s largely why I haven’t been able to update things of late. I’ll have to do some catch-up posts when I get home.

Technically, there’s also something with the site that I haven’t been able to address. The certificate that secures the site — necessary for the HTTPS in the address bar, as well as the little lock that shows you that your communication with the site is secure — will be expiring soon, and unfortunately I don’t have the right information to get it renewed from here. The stuff I need is either on my home computer or, because I’m trying to make security-type requests from a foreign country, I’m just not able to provide the appropriate verification needed. As a result, future visits to the site might get a warning from your browser that my site is not secure. It should still be accessible, but there might be some hoops you’d have to jump through. Don’t worry about doing that if you don’t want to; once I get home, I’ll get everything back to normal. And I promise I won’t post any urgent, breaking-news articles until then, so you won’t be missing out. Just pop your head in now and then; you’ll know when things are a-OK again.

Update: With a bit of persistence and patience (things take longer to arrive here it seems), I was able to update my site certificate. So, there shouldn’t be any warning messages or issues with HTTPS.