I had considered (at one time) naming this post “I’ve fallen behind and I can’t catch up,” but became one of those phrases that sounds good the first time you hear it, but that you grow to dislike with repetition.  So this is “A year” — kind of a recap, kind of a summary, kind of a recollection.

I haven’t had a lot of time to post lately — “lately” being October until now.  But I’ve been kept busy by some good things — Christmas prep and celebration, updates and progress in my wife’s visa quest, and the ongoing “refurbishment” of my home for the anticipated arrival of my bride.

Let me start with the good news.  In November, my wife’s application package finally arrived in Kiev and she was given the go-ahead to set up her interview.  T’were it me, I would have been on the phone (or website) the moment I got the email, and while I don’t think my wife was dawdling, it did take a couple of weeks for her to work out the logistics (going to Kiev, leaving her job, moving to America, etc.).  Nevertheless, she got it all figured out, got things arranged, and in just over two weeks, she will be off to Kiev to go through her visa interview.  I have no doubt that she will pass, which means that she will have visa in hand before January is over.  She plans to leave her job at the end of the month, and after packing things up, I believe that she’ll probably set foot in Portland by the end of February.  (Don’t let the lack of exclamation points fool you; I couldn’t be more excited by all this.)

What this means for me is that I’m now in panic mode, or something close to it.  My heretofore casual house and home cleaning and preparation — because “someday” my wife would be coming — must now give way to a “she’ll be here in two months” cleaning mentality.  That’s where the panic comes from: I have a lifetime of bachelor clutter to clean, organize, dispose, hide or whatever I can do to make my house a presentable home for a married couple.  I do have to (or, really, want to) buy a couple items, but I don’t plan to make many furnishing changes at this point.  I want this to be a nice house, but I also want it to be plain enough so that my wife has a canvas to make this a home where she is comfortable.  Most of the work I need to do involves just going through tons of stuff — sorting, discarding, shifting around to different places in the house (e.g., I should probably take the main computer out of the bedroom and put it in my office now) — and that just takes a lot of time.  It’s crunch time.

A note I was going to make about November was that in addition to it being my 1 year wedding anniversary, it was also the 1 year anniversary of the start of the Maidan protests in Kiev.  My wife and I were in Kiev at that time (attending to some paperwork so that we could get married), and we walked through the square repeatedly.  Although there had been a massive gathering a couple days before (these were the images that were shown on TV), that first weekend was when it became an ongoing movement.  There weren’t that many people around at that point — just a couple dozen people standing around in the cold, making music or speeches to empty space.  It is difficult to imagine everything that has happened since sprang from something like that.  (Well, Russian deciding to invade Ukraine had a good deal to do with it as well.)

This post is getting long, so let me just a couple bullets of things that I had read and was going to mention:

• The plan to invade Crimea had been in the works for a decade.  I’m not sure how accurate this report was — I didn’t have the chance to read the whole thing — but the author was pointing to statements and actions that showed the plan to take over Crimea was something Russia had already been planning for a while.  If true, this would mean that Putin is a rank opportunist who took advantage of a period of civil uncertainty in order to violate international law and invade a sovereign country.
• I can’t spell “schadenfreude” without looking it up, but that’s definitely what I felt about the continuing collapse of the ruble.  Before the year was over, it surpassed the hryvnia to become the world’s least stable currency.
• The head of the Red Cross in Moscow states that the “humanitarian conveys” sent by Russia — using the Red Cross symbol without authorization — “quite probably” contained arms and ammunition.
• Russia steals the coal from Ukraine, then sells it back them.  The OSCE monitoring mission definitely stated (because they actually saw it) that coal was being taken from the Donbas region of Ukraine (where all the fighting is) into Russia.  Less than a week after I read that, there was a story about Russia being willing to sell coal to Ukraine — for very reasonable prices — in order to stabilize the electricity situation across the country.  (Ukraine had to take one of their nuclear plants offline for repairs, which had led to rolling blackouts in parts of the country.)
• And in December, Putin gave yet another speech rationalizing the invasion of Crimea — he compared Crimea to the Temple Mount.  Since that time, I think there’s even been another reason given.  With as frequently as the reason for the invasion have changed, it is hard to keep track of the current one.  I can’t help but make a comparison to a guilty child trying to offer any possible explanation as to how those cookies could have possibly disappeared from the cookie jar.

I can’t say what changes we might see in 2015, but I am happy that my wife will be leaving that uncertain situation and joining me here in the relatively stress-free Pacific Northwest.  I’ll definitely have to step up my Russian language lessons, but at least I’ll have someone around that I can practice with.