The Foreign Service Institute in spring. (photo courtesy of State.gov)
I first wrote about Take Your Child to Work Day in the Foreign Service back in 2013. I never would’ve imagined then that my child wouldn’t be able to participate for another 11 years…especially having joined the FS when he was nine months old.
Our first two posts, he was two young. Our third post didn’t have a program. When we were in London, the minimum age was seven. When we got to FSI, the minimum age was nine. The year that he turned nine…the pandemic hit, and the in-person program was cancelled for the next FOUR YEARS.
When I asked the organizers about it last year and found out they weren’t hosting anything, I basically gave up. So I was completely surprised when a co-worker asked me a few weeks ago if I was bringing my son this year. They were actually holding it again?? Great!! Clearly the advertising had been a bit low key…aka hidden at the bottom of a daily bureau newsletter that I barely read anymore. But I’m glad someone was paying attention!
Three other colleagues in my office brought their kids as well…a couple of which turned out to be A’s same age…so we all connected during the kids’ break, pulled a couple tables together in our downstairs café, and had a lovely family lunch together. And the kids had a great time!
Over 100 kiddos participated. They were grouped according to school age: elementary, middle, and high school, and started the day by being sworn in as honorary Foreign Service Officers. I haven’t seen the official details, but from A’s description, I believe it was the Director of the Foreign Service Institute who swore them in, which is awesome.
Then they spent the rest of the day roleplaying in the consular training windows, visiting the consular jail, broadcasting news in the Audio/Visual studio (complete with teleprompter, camera, and greenscreen), researching countries and writing their names in different languages, and admiring the bomb sniffing dog from Diplomatic Security.
I think it’s a very special program, and I’m so happy that A was finally able to participate. I was probably more excited about it than he was. But he made some new friends and got to meet some of the co-workers that I often talk about (and a few he’d met several years ago that commented on how much he’d grown!). Plus he got to get out of school for a day. So it was a win-win for him all around. 😊
This is my first time being a homeowner. Although I don’t really feel like a homeowner. I pay a mortgage that is about the same as what I paid for rent, except now I can’t call anyone to come fix my stuff if it breaks. So I have tentatively entered the world of DIY…but I didn’t start out that way.
I do plan on selling our condo when we go back overseas, so I am trying to take good care of it. When someone put a largish hole in the drywall, I decided it would be best to let the professionals handle it. But for some reason, I didn’t shop around. I didn’t look at online reviews. I didn’t ask for references. I basically did zero research, which is so unlike me! Instead, I used one of those stupid Valpak coupons that clog up our mailbox.
To make a long story short: With the “discounted” rate, it was about $100/hour with a two-hour minimum callout time. The drywall repair guy filled the hole with miscellaneous junk and covered it with plaster in about an hour but had to let it dry. If I wanted him to come back the next day to sand it down so it was level with the wall…it would be another $200 minimum call out. No, thanks! I was pretty confident that I could sand it down myself.
So lesson learned. Even the professionals can do a crap job for a lot of money. I thought, maybe I’ll give DIY a try after all. This is also why I’ve been cutting my own hair for the last 20 years. At least if I screw it up, it was free.
The next opportunity that presented itself was when one of the headlight bulbs went out in my car. I’ve never messed with vehicles outside of topping off fluids, changing wiper blades, and adding air to the tires. I’ve spent thousands of dollars over the years taking my car to the dealership whenever it had any issues. But this time, I Googled it…just in case.
And sure enough, there was a seemingly easy fix in the great DIY training video repository that is YouTube. Many of the happy comments were from middle-aged women like myself. And the “instructor” even included a link to which bulb to buy on Amazon. I followed the steps…and successfully replaced my headlight bulb for a whopping $7.
Last weekend, I tackled our toilet tank. A few days earlier, the little POS had just stopped flushing. So for those few days, I used one of my son’s old tub toys to scoop water from the shower faucet and fill the tank so we could flush the toilet.
In the meantime, I browsed around on YouTube until I found a relevant video, identified the issue, bought a new fill valve on Amazon for $15, and swapped that sucker out.
I did lose some street cred though when I realized that I didn’t own a wrench and promptly forgot what they were called when I knocked on my neighbor’s door and asked to borrow theirs. But I still accomplished my mission at minimal expense and without the help of a professional!
And yet I still can’t wait until we go back overseas again, so that I can call someone to come fix everything that breaks in our leased government housing. 😊
I’ve been wanting to go to Roosevelt Island for years but have never made a point of doing so. Last weekend A had some random academic testing at Langley High School in McLean, so I found myself with a couple of hours to kill.
I looked on Google Maps to see what was in the area…and, ooo! Roosevelt Island was only 15 minutes away. So I drove down to Arlington Cemetery and made a U-turn around their massive roundabout, because it’s a divided highway and there’s no way to get to the island from the right lanes going from McLean toward DC, and scored one of the last few spaces in the parking lot.
Apparently lots of people want to go to Roosevelt Island on a spring Saturday morning. They even have a running club that meets every week, and there are ranger-led tours from May through October
One of many informational signs around the island.A little plaza in the center with a statue of Roosevelt and fountains that are probably quite nice in the summer.
The island itself sits in the middle of the Potomac between Rosslyn and Georgetown and is a national monument (like Mt. Rushmore) to Theodore Roosevelt, which is run by the National Park Service. Happily there are no parking or entry fees and the only way to get to it is over a footbridge from the parking lot.
A view of the Kennedy Center from Roosevelt Island.
The island has a colorful history just like everything else in the area that includes Nacotchtank Indians, the Colonial families of George Mason, Thomas Carter, and William Bradley, through the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, and up until 1931 when the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association purchased the island from the Washington Gas Light Company to build a memorial.
Like many Virginia parks, there are lots of lovely tree-covered hills, well-maintained paths, wetlands, and poison ivy. This park is also home to a family of deer, which I actually managed to see standing about 10 feet away from me off the side of the trail. Bonus!
The beginning of the Swamp Trail boardwalk.Beautiful White-Tailed Deer off the side of the path.
So that’s one more box checked off the DC bucket list before it gets too hot to do anything outdoors in the summer!
As you can see by the title, today’s park was my fifth state park in the Trail Quest program! When I entered it on the website, I got a little “Congratulations” email with text animation that exploded with confetti. Super cute.
And I say “my” park and not “our” park because A chose not to come. Apparently, he didn’t really enjoy our last park because he felt like I’d forced him to go. And he told me that he didn’t want to go today. I’m so used to him willingly joining me on our adventures that I didn’t really know what to do with that information at first.
I thought…well, I guess we’ll just stay home then. But then I got annoyed about it. I wanted to go to the park. I’d been looking forward to going to this park all week. I go back to work on Monday, and today was supposed to be the last day of good weather.
So I decided to take the dog instead. At least he was excited about it!
Dog selfie!
Now that A is 13 years old, the State of Virginia is fine with him being home alone all day as long as it’s not overnight. The park’s a little over an hour away, so I figured if I left at 11:30, I’d be back by 3:00. But I still hoped he’d change his mind.
I tried to tempt him with material goods and foody rewards. “This will be our fifth park. We’ll get our pins! And we can stop for pie afterward.” He asked me to pick him up a piece of apple pie.
So I made sure his cell phone was charging and left him to his video games. I didn’t realize until I got out there that there was no cell service or internet in the park. But we all survived. And Thorfinn and I had a splendid time.
The entrance/parking fee is $10. Once inside, I drove to Culler’s Overlook. The view from their sizeable deck reminds me of something that would be in The Hobbit. It’s a stunning yet serene image of one of the many bends in the South Fork of the Shenandoah River with the Massanutten Mountain ridge in the background. And it was crazy windy!
The gorgeous view from Culler’s Overlook.Airborne ponytail.
From there I did a bit of backtracking until I found my way down to the bottom of the valley. I had underestimated some of the distances when looking at Google Maps and realized that it would take too long to hike down and then back up again. So I consulted the park map I’d been given at the entrance and drove around until I found the RV campground that was right by the river.
My goal from there was the Bluebell Trail. I’d first realized they had a bluebell trail when I was researching the parks and noticed an advertisement for their Bluebell Festival on April 13. I didn’t want to join the crowds at the festival but did see some current photos of bluebells on the AllTrails site, so I figured it was worth a shot. And I wasn’t disappointed!
Behold, my bluebell photos!
Bluebells along the Bluebell Trail.Close up…Doggo in the background…Portrait of a doggo…My final photo…
Thorfinn was thrilled just to be outside and sniffing stuff. But I’m sure his favorite part was the little path down the bank where he got to splash around in the Shenandoah River.
Shake, shake, shake!
And I did stop for pie. I’d scouted out a lovely little shop in Gainesville on the route home called A la Mode that had a nice thick slice of apple pie for A and a piece of strawberry rhubarb for me…complete with a Turkish coffee.
Strawberry rhubarb pie and Turkish coffee at A la Mode.
Today is the first day of A’s spring break. Unlike the last two years, we opted to give the budget a rest and have a staycation. I thought of spending a couple days in Richmond and knocking out half a dozen state parks for our Trail Quest program. But a week or so before break started, I still hadn’t decided on a hotel or mustered much enthusiasm.
Plus A decided at the last minute that he’d like to register for soccer again this season, and they always schedule soccer practice during spring break for some crazy reason. So he wanted to stay and play, and I was more than happy to accommodate. The idea of sleeping in for a week was enough cause for celebration.
But I didn’t want him to be bored, so I scoped out a couple parks to hit in our area. Today’s park was Sweet Run State Park, which is in the top left corner of Virginia a few miles from Harper’s Ferry. Unlike the state parks that we visited previously, this one was completely free with two small parking areas.
The park itself is a new park, dedicated by the governor back in October of last year and covers about 884 acres. I’ve been using AllTrails.com to check out the park trails before we arrive, so I know how long and how difficult they are ahead of time.
There were three main trails listed on AllTrails that were accessible from the main entrance. The free map we picked up showed that there were also two other parking locations and a total of 11 trails.
I chose the Farmstead Loop, which was 1.4 miles with moderate difficulty. There was a bit of a hill to climb over at the beginning that got me breathing quite heavily. But the rest was pretty easy. It rained a couple days ago, so there were a few muddy spots, but nothing that our sneakers couldn’t handle.
We passed three abandoned buildings along the way that were the namesake farmsteads. The Virginia State Parks website said, “Beginning in the late 1700s, a collection of settlers comprised what became known as the ‘Waters’ community centered around the confluence of Piney and Sweet Runs.
Historic farmstead.
“These settlers farmed the land for subsistence until more significant roadways, canals and railroads along the nearby Potomac River provided opportunities for the production, transport, and sale of cash crops such as wheat and corn. In addition to farming, local residents forested the Blue Ridge for lumber and charcoal. This was to supply the forges and factories comprising the federal armory in nearby Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).”
It was pretty quiet starting out. We’d arrived around 1:00pm and there were three or four other cars in the parking lot. We passed one woman with a dog and that was about it for the first half hour. With winter ending, I hoped we wouldn’t run into any black bears emerging from hibernation as I’m not really in running condition these days. But the only wildlife we came across were birds and a couple butterflies.
About three quarters of the way around the loop there was a new wooden bridge that crossed a lovely section of Piney Run, which is a tributary of the Potomac River. After that we were in the home stretch. We ran into a few more people starting the trail and then we were back at the car.
Checking out the creek.The bridge over Piney Run.
I thought it was a lovely park, and I was happy that it was starting to pick up a bit of spring green. A wasn’t particularly impressed though. I asked him what he thought afterward, and he said it wasn’t very pretty…that it was “mostly sticks”. I actually like a bit of visibility compared to hacking your way through the undergrowth in the summer. But each to their own.
Our other mission on this trip had been to find pie. The first time we’d driven out this way on our visit to Harper’s Ferry in 2021, we’d passed a cute little pie shop. And I told myself…ooo! We’ll have to stop there on the way home. But Google Maps took us home a different way and we never saw it.
I kept an eye out for it this time but missed it again. When we got to the tiny town of Hillsboro Gap, we stopped at the Stoneybrook Farm and Market, but they were out of pie. Hillsboro Gap is super cute by the way with little shops and stone houses that straddle Virginia State Route 9, which itself leads through a beautiful valley full of vineyards and wineries. But I digress…
Stoneybrook Farm and Market in Hillsboro Gap.
Since we didn’t get pie before the park, I made a point of searching on the phone before we picked our route home…and decided on Mom’s Apple Pie Company in Leesburg…where we hit the jackpot.
It was a tiny little one-room shop. But it had two full racks with over a dozen different kinds of pies available whole or sliced. I chose a piece of Key Lime Meringue and a piece of Strawberry Rhubarb. And A chose two pieces of Lemon Meringue.
Mom’s Apple Pie shop in Leesburg.Two yummy pieces of Lemon Meringue.
I was hoping for a bit of a cafe atmosphere where we could sit and enjoy the pies…maybe with a scoop of ice cream and a cappuccino. But there were no tables and certainly not enough room to stand and eat them. But there was a low brick wall next to where we’d parked the car. So we sat in the sun near a tree planted in the median and happily ate our pies with plastic forks. 🙂
It’s starting to feel like bidding for our next post is right around the corner. Even though it’s the “summer” bidding season, it doesn’t usually start for me and my colleagues until September, so we still have the whole summer to get through.
As I’d mentioned in December, A’s medical clearance usually takes a bit longer. Mine took two weeks. Here we are now in the middle of March, and he still doesn’t have a clearance. I’m not too worried about it at this point as technically he doesn’t really need one absolutely finalized until we start asking for travel orders next year.
But it is the tiniest bit annoying that they’re waiting until he gets his updated IEP and psycho-educational evaluation from the school in April to make a final determination. Which again, is kind of pointless as the results of the clearance will likely be the same with or without it. But I’m trying not to let it bother me.
The fact that his psych-ed eval isn’t until April is another small source of irritation. His last one was in 2018. The school system is supposed to update them every three years. And I started asking them to update it back in 2021. At the time, they told me that they didn’t need to update it since he was already getting services. Since we weren’t going anywhere right away, I didn’t push it.
Then I started asking for it again this last summer. His Special Education case manager said she’d look into it. I brought it up again a few months later, she didn’t respond. So this time I went to the school admin assistant who forwarded my email directly to the Special Education Department Chair. She said they’d be happy to reassess him, but they have a heavy case load and won’t be able to assess him until May.
The one thing I do need for bidding is an approval letter from an overseas school saying that they’ll be able to accept and support him…and they usually want current materials like grades, IEPs…and a recent psych-ed eval…to make that decision. And overseas schools usually shut down in June for summer break. So I pushed back on this one and pointed out the fact that I’ve been asking for an updated evaluation for three years and May is too late. So they were able to push it up to April.
Other than that, I’ve reached out to a few of the OMSs currently in the jobs that I’m interested in. We’re generally discouraged from bugging them so early, but I don’t want to jump through all the hoops with a school if the job isn’t going to be right for me. So it’s nice to know what I’d be getting into first.
As for locations, I’m looking at Europe again. Mostly because it’s easier logistically, and I understand how things work…and I do love living in Europe in general. I did look at a few more exotic posts, but something always seemed to come up.
I was very excited about Kazakhstan at one point and then realized that it required a year of language training first, which I wouldn’t mind! But A wants more time to make friends at his new school and doesn’t want to move his junior year, which makes sense to me.
Another time, I was looking at Kenya, but they’ve decided they no longer want large dogs in their housing as they’ve had a lot of evacuations recently and large dogs were harder to deal with than smaller ones. So we wouldn’t be able to bring Thorfinn. Cross that one off. China also doesn’t allow big dogs.
Japan would’ve been interesting, but the international schools all have long waiting lists and don’t give any preference to US Embassy kids, even though some of them get a lot of funding from the US Embassy. So we could conceivably arrive at post and then find out A doesn’t have a school. Nope. Too risky.
Any school in the Southern Hemisphere is also off the list as their summers and winters are reversed, so we would have to leave post in the middle of his senior year, which would totally screw him up for graduating from high school. Again, not an option. So Europe!
I also plan to sell our house when we leave. As lucky as we were to get a low interest rate before things went crazy, paying a mortgage would still take half my salary, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of living in free government housing overseas. And we’d have no money to travel and really experience life abroad.
I thought about renting it out…but there’re no guarantee that we’d get a good tenant that wouldn’t destroy the place and cost me thousands of dollars in repairs (if our noisy, pot-smoking neighbors with an off-leash pit bull are anything to compare with)…or that it would remain continually occupied. When I bought it, it had been an empty rental for six months before they decided to sell.
So there you have it. Just a few things on my mind as we edge toward summer bid season!
After managing to remain COVID-free for the duration of the pandemic, A and I both got COVID last week. Other than the one weekend outing to the state parks, we’ve basically been sick on and off for the entire month of February.
The first week, A brought home a nice upper respiratory tract infection, which he gave to me about two days later. This is actually unusual, as most of the times he brings little colds home, I don’t actually get them…or if I do, it’s not for another week. So these things have been wicked contagious.
The cough from the original cold lasted for a solid three weeks and seemed to be minimally improving, until one day A’s cough started getting worse and changed to something dry and raspy. He got a headache, which isn’t unusual as he’s been getting migraines since he was little. He went to bed at 7pm, and around 5am woke up with a low-grade fever and general malaise.
I took him to the doctor. She said it appeared to be another cold but was going to test him for strep, as both it and COVID were going around. And she suggested we do a rapid COVID test when we got home since theirs were slower. Imagine my surprise when we did the home test and that red COVID line flared up within a matter of minutes.
We’re both fully vaccinated and boostered and hadn’t shown a hint of COVID in the last four years. But both of our immune systems were already compromised from the earlier chest cold. And a bit of Googling suggested that a new variant called COVID-23 was making the rounds.
I started showing the same symptoms a few days later…rasping cough, low-grade fever, chills, muscle aches, fatigue. One night I coughed so hard that I threw up. Luckily I was in the shower, so it made for easy cleanup. I did a COVID test…and it came up negative, which made no sense. I clearly had the same thing my son did.
A little more research into COVID-23 noted that initial tests often came up with a false negative. So I waited a couple of days and took another. And my bright red COVID line showed up as quickly as my son’s had.
Happily I was already teleworking while A quarantined, and the worst does seem to be over. I guess one perk of being vaccinated is that if you do get sick, it’s supposed to be a milder case. So with a few more days of quarantine ahead, we should both be right as rain.
[Note: the worst wasn’t over. The wheezing and sleeplessness kicked in a few days later.]
A view of the fishing pier at Leesylvania State Park.
The State of Virginia has 42 state parks, and they also have a cool visitor program called Trail Quest. If you visit five parks, they send you a cute pin. You also get one for visiting 10, 20, and 30 parks.
We’ve been to Sky Meadows a couple of times, and they’re quite lenient about how long ago you’ve visited said parks. So I started two accounts, one for each of us, and submitted our visit details.
Last weekend, we were motivated to track down a couple more parks. Happily there are several that are within an hour of us…and some right next to each other. So on Saturday, we drove to our second park: Mason Neck, had a nice wander around, then drove over to our third park: Leesylvania.
Mason Neck is right on Belmont Bay and has a combination of beaches, wetlands, forest, open water, ponds, and fields with well manicured trails and boardwalks throughout. It’s also fairly flat and makes for easy hiking. When we were there, we came across a gentleman with a huge camera trained on half a dozen turtles all sunning themselves on a log.
Lovely boardwalk through the wetlands.Awesome stump left by three trees that once grew together.
After Mason Neck, we drove over to Leesylvania. This park is more historic and hilly and listed on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. It has a nice picnic area and fishing pier that extends into the Potomac River. If you hike up into the hills you can check out the Civil War cannon, the archeological remains (a large restored chimney) of the Henry Fairfax house from 1825, and a cemetery.
Historic iron pulley wheel at Leesylvania State Park.Pretending to light the cannon.The restored chimney at the Fairfax house.
We had a great time walking around and communing with nature. So if you get a chance, I highly recommend an outing to a Virginia State Park!
Post-birthday January was pretty quiet, but for the first time in two years, we actually got some decent snowfall! Even though they are equipped for virtual learning, A’s school still gives them five regular snow days before shifting to online.
So the week of January 15, the kids had a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Then we got about four inches of beautiful snow overnight, so Tuesday was a snow day. Mother, child, and Nordic dog were thrilled! Wednesday was a two-hour delayed opening. Then we got another three inches of snow on Friday, so the kids got a second snow day. Basically Thursday was the only full day of school all week, so I was teleworking most days. We also got some fabulously cold weather where low temperatures dropped down into the single digits.
Time to bury your face in the snow!
Another exciting event we had in January was Rising 9th Grade Curriculum Night at our local high school. A and I walked over together and sat down toward the front of the auditorium. He (and every other 8th grader in the front rows) spent the next 15 minutes with his neck craned around looking for faces that he knew. Once he spotted some friends, he asked if he could go sit with them, which was fine. It’s been so long since I was a teenager, it really is amazing to see how focused they are on their friends.
I read a book many years ago called Wild Things: The Art of Nurturing Boys by Stephen James and David Thomas. It broke down the stages of development by age, and I often refer back to it. Right now, A is in the 13-17 Wanderer stage, and “Peers are now the primary influence is a boy’s life at this stage while parents begin to take on a supporting role.”
The book also mentions that competitive sports might not bring out the best in your young man, and our experience so far definitely confirms that. A has always been interested in martial arts and did a couple of years of taekwondo in elementary school. He didn’t want to do soccer this year, so I signed him at a place over in Fairfax that has all kinds of fun martial arts from Muay Thai to boxing to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And he’s been going three or four times per week so far.
This last weekend we popped up to Annapolis for a birthday party and to spend some time with friends. So it might have been a quiet January, but it was still pretty great!
This week was my birthday, and I forwent my usual afternoon tea and gave myself something a little edgier that I’ve been considering for about 35 years…a tattoo!
I first contemplated getting one when I was a sophomore in college and had just read the book Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi. Tania had sailed around the world by herself when she was 18 and written about her grand adventures. While in Samoa, she got a Polynesian tribal band tattooed around her ankle.
This sounded very exotic to me, and I imagined that someday I would travel and have adventures and collect similar souvenirs. But I could never decide on an image that I wanted permanently placed on my body.
When I was in the Antarctic program, we spent a lot of time in New Zealand. And they have some fabulous Maori designs. I thought perhaps a fern. But I’m not from New Zealand, and I wasn’t sure that I would connect to the image in the long term.
Maori leg band from Tattoodo.com.
When we were in London in 2012, I came across an article about a Scythian princess whose body had been discovered in the Altai mountains in Siberia in 1993 and was covered in stunning tattoos. I actually liked the colors of the recreated art better than the original body work. But again, not really my people.
Scythian warrior tattoos. Image from Siberian Times article.
I thought of my own ancestors. I’m mostly Norwegian, German, and English, and I love history. When we were in Iceland I considered getting a runic tattoo…but couldn’t decide on what the letters should say.
Runic arm band from westend-tattoo.hu.
Time continued to pass, and when I hit 50, I found myself thinking about it again. I couldn’t afford a Ferrari for my midlife crisis, so a tattoo would be an excellent and affordable alternative. But what image to use? Something a little more feminine perhaps.
Cherry blossoms? Medieval art from an illuminated manuscript? How could one ever choose?? And then I saw this and finally knew what I wanted…
Snowflakes from Tattoobloq.com.
I reached out to a couple of local tattoo parlors, but none of them replied to my emails, or their “books were closed”, which I guess means they’re not taking on new clients?
More time passed. Then one day I was randomly looking at some more tattoos online inspired by the Sycthian princess and noticed that a particularly lovely one had been done by an artist at a nearby shop in Fairfax. I checked out their website and found that most of their artists were ladies and that they had walk-in hours from 11-4.
So I printed out a picture of my snowflakes, took my birthday off, and walked in. I told myself that if they had no availability that it was a sign and that it wasn’t the right time. I also wanted to keep it under $200.
I was met at the door by a friendly artist who perused my pictures. She told me that the regular artists charged a minimum of $200 but that she had just finished her apprenticeship and offered to do my snowflake for $150.
I thought briefly about whether or not I should wait for an “expert” but also felt that all of my mental conditions had been met, and I was happy to support this lovely person in her quest to gain experience.
Knowing this was my first tattoo, she whipped up a stencil then invited me back to her room to see how she set things up. We discussed colors, placement, and pain thresholds…and then she set to work.
Less than an hour later, I was the proud owner of my own personal snowflake…that will never melt…and I love it. I also like the fact that it looks a bit like a compass rose and the old Icelandic symbol for protection, Ægishjálmur.
Me and my snowflake.
Compass rose and Icelandic Ægishjálmur.
It’s hard to tell the exact location from the image above, but I had it done above my left ankle on the inside…so I could see it with my socks on. 🙂
In-Flight Movie - DC Edition 