Quick! Clean up before the guests arrive!

Eeek! I've signed up to host the State Department Weekly Blog Round-Up here at my blog, and I have so much to do! It's the same feeling as when I invite tons of people over for a party and then realize I have to clean up the junk in my living room, sanitize the bathrooms, buy and prepare food, and maybe even throw together some hasty, cheap decorations.
I need to straighten up my blog, and thankfully this doesn't require rubber gloves or nasty chemicals. I need to update my header. I'm not living in Washington state, and I am now living in New Mexico. Therefore, a subtitle of "Wait, this isn't New Mexico!" is a little more misleading than appropriate these days. I should probably rearrange, add, and delete some of my gizmos to make my blog more reader-friendly (instead of a narcissistic to-do list). But we'll see how much of that actually happens.
I'm going to have to start proof-reading my my posts. Sometimes I just ramble and then post. That has got to stop. This is the part that's like cleaning and sanitizing my bathroom. Yes, I should do it all the time, but it really only happens when I know guests are coming.
Also, the readers of this State Department Round-Up are generally people tied somehow to the Foreign Service. I'm going to need to write about the Foreign Service once in a while (or several times this next week) to make people think I actually have a reason to be hosting this. As of right now, it seems a bit random; New Mexican restaurant reviews, Independence Day festivities in my home town, poetry recommendations by my little brother, and high school reunion recaps don't exactly say, "I blog about the cool and exotic things I do in the Foreign Service." I'll have to make a case for myself.
And what is this State Department Round-Up? It sounds really fancy and official, doesn't it?! Well, after Kevin passed his oral interview and the possibility of our living an adventurous life in the Foreign Service got that much closer, I started scouring the internet to find blogs written by people already living that life. I found many, and as you can imagine, there was so much information, it was a bit hard to process! Hundreds of people write blogs from all over the world, and it would be impossible (and crazy) to try and keep up with all of them-- or even all of the interesting ones!
Then I stumbled across this blog round-up, where a woman named Kolbi had scoured the internet herself and put together a "best of" highlight reel of that week's Foreign Service blogs. It was just what I wanted to read. If I wondered what it was like moving here and there, well, here are three families who just moved this week. If I wanted to read specifically about a certain part of the world, well, here is a blog by someone who lives there and loves to take pictures and/or write fantastic vignettes showing what life is like. I've become a true devotee.
Since it is so much work, however, and someone kind (alas, kinder than I) realized it was a ton of work for one woman, many people have been taking turns hosting it at their blogs. No one signed up for last week, and I missed it-- enough to make me sign up for hosting it myself.
Eeek!
So here we go. Please pardon my mess while we undergo a few renovations!