This is painful for me to write. I went to Maine for my cousin’s wedding. I took my daughter and my friend and we spent a week in Maine. First Acadia National Park & the cute town of Bar Harbor. Then two nights in foodie heaven in Portland. And finally, to the beach, Wells/Kennebunkport. I have no photos to share! I am pretty terrible at this travel blogging thing. We actually did lots of things that were blog worthy and worth capturing. We drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain and took in the breathtaking views of Frenchman Bay. We ate fried doughnuts at Duckfat. I ate goat cheese Chambord ice cream in Kennebunkport. Ok so I could go on but the whole trip revolved around food with the exception of the wedding in Wells, which was also beautiful.

So after being gone a week, as soon as I got home and put my daughter to bed, I rushed downstairs to see my cats. Now, my husband hates my cats. He did feed them while I was gone but by no means did he cuddle them or hang out with them. So imagine my horror when I pet my cat and she feels a little scabby. And then later on I saw a black bug but then it was gone. And then I saw another. And then I’m freaking out because my poor cats are suffering a flea infestation that I just spread around our house. The only thing worse I can imagine is bed bugs. I can’t even begin to tell you how stressful the last week has been but I think the fleas are finally under control and I can try to start putting the house back together. But suffice it to say, I am itchy, ALL THE TIME ITCHY. My cats were indoor only for 8 years and I never treated them for fleas, honestly never knew I had to. And when we moved to this house, cat #3 took to darting outside whenever he could. So I won’t make that mistake again. Frontline for all 3 of them now.

The Dollhouse

Back before my daughter was even conceived, we put an offer on a house. It was the cutest little house, no lie it was a dollhouse. It was a short sale and unoccupied. I used to visit it and sit in the backyard and dream of the renovations I would do. The patio we would install and the vegetables we would plant. I’d draw floor plans and try to figure out how to arrange my furniture in the tiny rooms. I even took my parents there to see it. I dragged another friend there with promises that we would stop for ice cream on the way back.

A photo posted by Julie Sal (@saltyjules) on Feb 13, 2015 at 1:37pm PST

The realtor told me it could take a while. 3 months even. Months passed and I became pregnant with my daughter. I imagined walking her around the neighborhood in the stroller and to the grocery store or down by the river. I saw her older, riding her bike to the neighborhood pool or to the library. I would say after 6 months of waiting, I started getting a little antsy. We were keeping an eye out and looking at other properties but none that we liked as much as this one.

We were living in a small one bedroom efficiency that I loved too but we were ready to move. Besides just wanting more space, we really wanted to be able to grill outside. We spent every weekend that summer at parks grilling and fishing and lazing around, reading books in the hamaca.

We were under contract on this house for 10 months when I threw in the towel. I desperately wanted to move before the baby was born. My pregnancy nesting instinct was in overdrive and I was practically hyperventilating that we hadn’t moved yet. I started looking at houses at the top of our budget and dragged my husband to see this perfectly boring, ranch house in your typical suburban neighborhood where all the houses are one of three similar styles. It was outdated, original 1960s kitchen and baths, but move in ready—everything worked and it was clean. “Let’s just get it,” I said.  It was in a nice neighborhood, with a great elementary school, walkable to absolutely nothing. My husband was not convinced. “There’s no place to put my lancha,” he said. You do realize, I told him, we don’t own a boat. And when we get your lancha we can figure out where to put it then. Besides we did have a canoe that was hanging out at some random person’s house that we never used cause it was not readily accessible.

I am fairly sure that he reluctantly agreed to moving to this house but for the first couple of months he did complain a ton. In any event, we moved just weeks before our baby was born and the only room that we managed to renovate was the nursery.

The whole point of this story was, buying this house made me feel like my dreams of being a traveler and travel blogger were pretty much dead. Eight months later, it seems ridiculous now because there is nothing holding me back from writing and owning a home does not mean you cannot travel. We closed on this house on a Friday and promptly began moving our things over. Monday morning I got an email from our realtor that the bank had approved our offer on the dollhouse. 

Access Denied

“Every great trip should begin with a series of minor catastrophes.”

            --Christine Gilbert, AlmostFearless.com

Well if that ain’t the truth. Last night my baby projectile vomited all over me, not once but twice.  This morning I was making breakfast, put my bagel in the toaster and ran to the living room for something and came back and heard water boiling. Did I hit the switch on the kettle? No, that’s the sound of my bagel in flames. On a whim I decided that I must take a trip abroad before baby #2 is born. I have a streak of leaving the country at least once every year since 2002 and I didn’t want to break it. That’s a completely logical reason for taking a 10 month old to Italy when you’re 7 months pregnant. I saw a sale fare to Milan back in May and impulse purchased a trip to Italy.

Tickets booked, I dragged my husband down to the post office the following Saturday morning to apply for my daughter’s passport. Waited 4 hours but finally we submitted her application, showed our IDs, and paid the fees. I listed our expected date of travel as August because we are traveling to Maine this month and if I had her passport then perhaps we could swing into Canada? Who knows. But clearly that is not happening as I received a letter back from the State Department, not quite denying her passport but close.

Her father is not a US citizen and basically his ID was not sufficient to apply for a passport. So now they want 5 forms of ID from this list they sent us. I sent in 5 things and hopefully they are sufficient. In the meantime, I am applying for other passports for her but imagine if we didn’t have that option? Without a passport you are essentially on house arrest in your own country. And if you’re wondering what ID we used that wasn’t sufficient, we both showed our driver’s licenses. 

Goals

Write, Travel, Relax, Laugh

1.    Pay off student loan

2.    Save money

3.    Finish house projects

4.    Get fired spectacularly

5.    Live abroad

a.   Study languages

b.   Take pictures

c.    Build a house

For years now, I have been telling my friends that I want to build myself a tiny house. I have a shed in the backyard of my house that has electricity and I wanted to renovate it into a tiny house I could live in and rent out the main house. My friends thought I was nuts and then, tiny houses became a thing.

For me it was always about security, that I would always have someplace to go, someplace to land. That I could go off and travel and if I ran out of money then I could always come back to my tiny house. Even better, would be if I could have one tiny house in Mexico and one in Spain. And Maybe another in Canada. Dreams. 

Family History

This weekend started with me researching baby name spellings online. I'm not pregnant or anything but I can't be the only one with boy and girl names picked out since forever. I've had this girl name in mind for a long time and it's of Russian origin and therefore originally written in Cyrillic. So transliteration  can often result different spelling variations of names from language to language. I have been given a somewhat hard time about this name from the few people I've shared it with; no one will be able to pronounce it, she will have to always explain it, etc. Well I first heard it when there was a girl in my 4th grade class named it and none of us, nor the teacher had any problems saying her name correctly, so I'm not really worried about it. In any event, after researching it I found out it is a name used in Lithuania and it just so happens that my grandmother is Lithuanian and I immediately felt like this was the spelling I was meant to use. The only problem with the spelling is it uses a diacritic to signal the way it's pronounced which means it will forever be mispronounced in the US and diacritic marks aren't printed on official documents in the US so I don't know.

All of this led to me reading wikipedia articles about Lithuania, Lithuanian people, Lithuanian language and Baltic languages and I thought maybe I should learn Lithuanian.  That itself is nothing new as I'm fairly sure I've wanted to learn every language out there at one time. But then I was driving home on the beltway and I was driving behind a car whose license plate read VILNIUS. Coincidence???? Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania. I got home and was googling Lithuania some more when I decided to google my grandmother's maiden name, which led me to her obituary.

My grandmother died while I was living in Spain and I honestly don't think it really hit me that she is gone until this evening. That I can't ask her why her parents immigrated to the US (a better life I'm sure, but still). I can't ask her, did her parents meet here or in Lithuania? How old were they? Did they keep in touch with their family in Lithuania? Who else came here besides them? Did she grow up with a huge extended family in Massachusetts or just her parents and siblings? Did her parents speak Lithuanian at home? I remember her teaching me Lithuanian phrases, specifically something to the effect of "shut up cabbage face" and I repeated it to my dad who was none too happy. I can hear her voice in my mind and I'm scared it will slip away. And so I'm struggling to get all my thought's down on this digital paper here, so I can remember later how she made me ramen noodles after school with shrimp, and how she was such a giving, thoughtful person. My parents separated when I was young and later my younger sister was born. Her father died when she was an infant and she never met my mother's parents. She shares a birthday with my grandmother and my grandmother would visit us and she would always remember my sister, she would send her cards on her birthday with little checks in them just like she did me and my brother. My grandmother was an extraordinary person. Tonight I miss her so much. 

Bucket List recap

So.....totally failed on that blog regularly one.

 

ride my bike on the C & O canal path–I managed to walk on it but not bike

take a tour of dc monuments at night–fail, was waiting for bf's nephew to arrive but he never made it here

try white water rafting in WV–did not raft but we grilled on the side of the road by the Shenandoah river

eat ice cream at Miller Farm–honestly not sure how I managed to fail on this one but it's not too late, maybe tomorrow

Eat crabs–check!

go camping at Assateague Island–Assateague Island camping on the weekends fills up like a year in advance but I did sit on the beach one night and all around us   people were making little bonfires which I had no idea was allowed

visit Art Museums–not a one

take the canoe on the water–the canoe went out on the water but sadly I never got a chance to ride in it

buy sparklers for 4th of July–fail. I knew in advance that fireworks and the like aren't sold in my county, this was just poor planning on my part

go to a movie at a theater–been trying to do this one for the last 3 weekends and     something always comes up

take a girls trip–drove to Philly with my girl

make homemade ice cream–fail

eat a cheesesteak in Philadelphia–partial. When we went to Philly we went to D'Nics in the Reading Terminal Market and had their famous roasted pork sub sandwich which was AMAZING and totally worth the drive. Perhaps another trip is in order. Incidentally, that started out as a trip to READING, but luckily I looked up the D'Nics address before we left.

make churros–fail and I even have the churro maker and the dough mix which is why it even made it on the list in the first place

read 5 books–this one is so sad, why do I not have time to read?? I finished 2 and half books. The first was called This Love is Not for Cowards by Robert Andrew Powell. It was great, it feels like a memoir but it's about Juarez and their soccer team and the fall from major leagues to the minors. I loved it so much I read another book by him called Running Away which was a memoir of how he trained to run the Boston Marathon. It was also great, made me cry. The 3rd book which I haven't finished because I've been super busy is Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. And the 4th book I've had checked out and renewed and checked out and  renewed all summer is The Art of Political Murder which I haven't started. I don't even have a 5th book lined up.

take pictures, print and frame them–oh well, just add it to the fall bucket list

find a place to go stargazing–I was going to say never happened except that while camping at Point Lookout there was an incredibly clear night where you could see millions of stars in the sky.

take a road trip–drove to Philly, see above

learn how to grill–check!! I am no master griller but I now know how to start a fire and put the meat on the grill and turn it over. Basic I know

visit the Hirshhorn sculpture garden–fail, still want to go

find Einstein monument–CHECK!!

eat at a place that's been on Food Network–Check, went to D'Nics in Philadelphia and Taquería R&R which probably shouldn't count because I've been going there since before I knew it was on food network, it's not far from my house.

try to blog once a week–we know how that worked out

build a tiny house–still on the list. I am obsessed with tiny houses

 

 

 

Summer Bucket List

I've seen these lists on other blogs and always thought they were cute so I thought I'd make myself a little summer to-do list. I also thought if I post it here it might make me a little more accountable for trying to do these things instead of wasting the summer away working. 

ride my bike on the C & O canal path

take a tour of dc monuments at night

try white water rafting in WV

eat ice cream at Miller Farm

Eat crabs

go camping at Assateague Island

visit Art Museums

take the canoe on the water

buy sparklers for 4th of July

go to a movie at a theater

take a girls trip

make homemade ice cream

eat a cheesesteak in Philadelphia

make churros

read 5 books

take pictures, print and frame them

find a place to go stargazing

take a road trip

learn how to grill

visit the Hirshhorn sculpture garden

find Einstein monument

eat at a place that's been on Food Network

try to blog once a week

build a tiny house

Cover letters and stuff

I am conflicted. About the future. About the present. Shoot, even about the past. It always feels like time is just passing me by, like I have to wait for something to happen before I can start living. Not to say I'm not living my life cause i'm still getting on with it. I just don't know where I'm headed or what I want to do. I'm always scared I'm making the wrong move. 

So after a year of working part time at my job, they made me full time. And it's a decent job, the pay is...ok. It's better than unacceptable but nothing to swing from the chandeliers about when you live in a high cost of living place like metro dc. I mean literally for the past year I have been gunning for them to make me full time. I'd bug my supervisor that this job was too much work to be just part time. I'd work tons of extra hours whenever they needed me. I am efficient and organized, whereas my boss is the creative type. She loves me cause I came in and made her life so much easier. This job previously was just a bunch of tasks divided up among several full timers and part time employees. I arrived and took all those things on and made it clear, "wouldn't it be great if I was here full time!" And so now I'm full time. I can't stop thinking about what I'm going to do next. 

Seriously, I just "got" here and I already feel like this is not the job for me for the rest of my life. I mean sure it's fine for a couple years. I wouldn't say that I can't learn more here cause I know I can indirectly. Not in this specific job but from the organization as a whole and from the people in other positions I work with. But since those things aren't quantifiable in dollars, it's hard to think about that as a benefit when your job just barely pays you enough to just cover your living expenses. 

And then I think, well when will I ever earn "enough". I mean technically, if I can cover my bills than it's enough right? I mean I could even manage to save some money if I ate beans and rice and eggs everyday and didn't drive all over the place. 

I have been wanting to go to grad school basically since I graduated but there has always been something holding me back. And now, I can't decide if it's really worth the investment. I suppose that really depends on what you study and what type of job you plan to get when you finish but we've been interviewing for another position at my job recently and it's really made me question some things. First off, people barely look at your resume. I had to go through 50 some applicants for my boss and weed out all the bad ones. I don't have time to read through your work history and it's boring. I glance at it to see if anything interesting pops off the page but mainly I go for the cover letter. This is your chance to truly sell yourself. So many people use a generic cover letter and don't tailor it to the job and don't really talk about their experience. 

(As a side note, this was funny to me. Years ago on best of craigslist I read a post from rants and raves about cover letters and the poster talked about crappy cover letters and then posted a great cover letter. I modified that cover letter for every job I applied for after that and always got called for interviews. So as I was reading the cover letters, what should appear but my go to cover letter! Practically word for word the same as the one I read on craigslist.) 

Then I give my boss the top 8-10 and we went through them with the other person interviewing with us and we chose the ones we were going to interview basically from the ones I had already picked. So most of the top ten have masters degrees. and experience of course. But it makes me think two things. One, you practically need a masters degree to even be considered for jobs these days because everyone you're competing with has masters degrees. And two, people with masters degrees are going for a job that is basically comparable to the job I'm doing now! It might be one pay grade higher than where I'm at but I actually never looked up the job when it was posted so I'm not sure exactly what the pay range is. Do I really want to go back to school just so I can get a job that is slightly better than the job I have now? And if I study something different, I have the problem that I don't have any experience. Practically all my experience in the last 7 years is ESL. I'm interested in so many things but I feel like once you're in education you are practically STUCK in education. And if I'm being honest what I really want to do is open up my own little boutique hotel in a beach town in Mexico. 

Ok, so i don't actually think I'm stuck. I truly believe it's never too late to do whatever it is you want to do. i just haven't really decided what that is right now. 

"Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken." – Frank Herbert 

been sleeping, but feeling motivated today =)

In like a lion...can you believe it's March already?

Forgive me blog readers, I have sinned. It has been many many months since my last blog post. Believe me, there has been quite a lot going on but not much I can share right yet. Husband is still in El Salvador. Did I mention his waiver was denied? Yeah that kinda sucked. We're in the midst of refiling but it just seems hopeless. I really do try to think positively but, I don't know. I've been working a ton, trying to pay down debt. If anyone is out there, write to me in the comments! Tell me how you're doing, include a link to your blog if you have one. 

Hola!

I've been back in Maryland for just over a month now and I feel horrible for not blogging more. I have no immigration updates for anyone who's wondering, we're just still waiting. I've been camping out in my mom's basement for the last month and I'll be moving into an apartment at the end of July. I got a new job at my old job, so I'm working at the same place with the same people but just a different, better position. I also have some huge news that I can't share on the blog but if you're interested email or facebook me!

While I was in Spain, I had started jogging doing the C25k training program. I've been trying to keep up with it here but between the 104 degree temperatures and not being able to get a routine going, I've been really slacking. Hopefully once I'm in my own place I'll be able to get a better routine established. 

Honestly it feels so good to be home. I loved Spain but it was pretty lonely. I do however miss gazpacho and olives and sidra. 

concentra-te

Ok so on the one hand, I've been doing much better the last few months, but this is comparatively speaking with fall and winter. In reality, I've just been lazing around doing nothing. It's time to focus. I have five weeks left in Spain and yesterday I just laid around being depressed about how I wanna go home NOW and what am I doing here and why can't I just go home and blah blah blah and on and on. Well, julie, STFU. Five weeks is nothing. You've made it this far, it's been seven months. Only five weeks left to go. Five weeks left and we can add it to the list of things you completely finished and didn't quit even though you were kicking and screaming the whole way through.

Spain
4 months in El Salvador
year of AmeriCorps volunteering with the boss from hell
semester abroad in Mexico
university-only changed your major five time but the important thing is to finish.

I think it might be getting longer than the list of things I have quit. The thing that made most of these experiences bearable and got me through to the end was making at least one good friend at each step. I wouldn't have had nearly the great experience I did in Mexico if I hadn't become friends with Traci. Out of AmeriCorps, I got Elizabeth, through El Salvador I met Jen and a ton of facebook friends who've been exiled throughout Latin America. And from Spain I got Ryan and Joey. I can't think of any good friends I made in university except during study abroad. It's hard when you go to a commuter school though.

SO, five weeks left to get myself ready for Maryland. Things to do:

buy a car
find an apartment
find a job
apply for grad school
study for gre

I already spend hours looking at apartments on craigslist which is pointless since they'll be gone by the time I get home. So my goal for this weekend is to apply for three jobs. Maybe it's a little early still but it doesn't hurt to practice writing a few cover letters. I know, doesn't sound like a good time to me either.

feel better

I was cleaning out my drawer and found this "to do" list for my time here in Spain. It's from November 27, 2011 and while the only thing I can cross off the list is feel better, I can definitively say, I feel much better these days. 

feel better

Riguas

A couple months ago I picked up this package of sweet corn flour (or mezcla de maíz dulce). I thought it looked interesting and maybe it would taste like Cheesecake Factory's sweet corn tamale cakes. And then I never got around to trying it. Today I stopped being lazy and mixed up the batter according to the directions on the bag. Well it doesn't taste anything like sweet corn tamale cakes at all. But as I was eating these little semi-sweet corn cakes, I knew I'd eaten something really similar before and then it dawned on me that they taste exactly like riguas. I've only had riguas in El Salvador but they're kinda like corn pancakes. A quick google search brought up a picture of the flour I was using which said it was good for making, among other things, riguas from El Salvador.

I don't know if I have it in me to make tamales while I'm out here but that is on my list of things to attempt for the first time. I have corn husk wrappers to make tamales de elote but I don't have any banana leaves to make chicken tamales. Plus they just seem like a lot of work, so we'll see. 

holaaaaaaaaaaa

Enjoy the time you have left. Seriously this might end up being a little whiny, just a warning. I'm sooooooo ready to go home. I've been gone since June. I've been alone since October. Everything has gone wrong and yet everything is exactly as it's supposed to be. I have 6 and half weeks left and then I'm going HOME. I'm not going to make any declarations like I'll never do this again, cause you NEVER know, but I don't like living alone. It's boring. It's lonely. I've come to realize I'm a total homebody. I can only go out so much, it gets old quick.

 

I've started drinking here and I've realized some things about myself. I'm not an alcoholic but I have alcoholic tendencies. I'm drinking because I'm bored. I only want to drink to get drunk. One drink is a waste of calories. Sidra is the Asturian "nectar of the gods." Three bottles of sidra is happy, four bottles is sloppy. I'm a happy drunk. I just like to laugh and hug everyone. I don't like to get sick.

 

There was a period like after high school, early college where I was definitely a drinker and then it just kinda stopped at some point. The whole time I was with M, I almost never drank, probably cause he never drank. We'd go to family parties where all the men would be drinking and someone would hand him a drink and he'd just carry it around. All of a sudden, he gets to El Salvador and he starts going out and getting drunk. The first time he came home drunk I was livid. He had left earlier that day to go play soccer and I was home, at his family's house, cause I didn't venture out much by myself. His sister asked me if I was going to eat dinner and I said I was going to wait for him to eat. She gave me a derisive smile and told me he probably wouldn't be home for quite some time. I didn't know where he was but he finally stumbled home at 2am wasted. I had NEVER seen him like this. He would NEVER drink with me when we were in the US. To top it all off, he was a HAPPY drunk. He was so happy he couldn't understand why I was so upset. I have a really hard time staying mad at people. Especially ones that are giggling uncontrollably. But this night was definitely a turning point. I was pissed cause he left me alone for so long, pissed cause he went and got drunk, and super pissed cause I realized I'm pissed and have NOWHERE to go. There is no stomping off, going to another room, going to my mom's house, going to a friend's house, or just going anywhere else. I'm isolated in the campo of El Salvador and have no friends, nowhere to go, and no way to get there if I want to leave. There aren't exactly buses running 24 hours a day here. I don't know anyone with a car. I don't KNOW ANYONE. Independence was out the window.

 

So I don't know what made him start drinking in El Salvador but I've heard he's been drinking a lot more since I've been gone which I can relate to I guess since I've been drinking so much too and I chalk it up to being bored and not having anything else to focus on. It's probably worse for him since he doesn't have a job there. I have my job to get me through the week and I have a couple of friends I sometimes see on the weekends. We go drinking of course.

 

So June marks one year since we left. Our waiver was turned in December 27 and I guess right now we just wait. I don't even know if there's something we're supposed to be doing or if we just sit back and wait for them to contact us. If it takes a year from when we turned in the waiver then we're a third of the way through. Hopefully it takes less time!!!!!

I've been really bad about updating lately, probably cause I've been so out of it but I'm going to try to be better!! 

So it goes...

Oh blog readers, I've neglected you and I feel like so much has happened but I haven't had the strength to tell you all. I read a lot of blogs and I know what it's like when all of a sudden they drop off the face of the earth and you're left wondering, whatever happened to them? I'm going to keep this as honest and as vague as possible.

 

Basically, there's been a lot of….marital issues…stuff that started like 2+ years ago. Or 4 really. So the short story is, M is still in El Salvador. He wasn't going to come to Spain but then he got jumped on the bus to San Salvador and said he wanted to get away and come to Spain for a little bit. And I was sort of dreading it. I was dreading the possible fights, and the sleeping arrangements, and all the associated drama that I felt like I had escaped by living alone here in Spain. Living alone here has been so good for me. Therapeutic even. I've always considered myself responsible and able to take care of myself but I've become independent in a different way here. Emotionally independent if that's even a thing. I would definitely say M and I had a codependent relationship.

 

So after laying down some ground rules we bought him a plane ticket and he flew from San Salvador to Madrid. I was waiting for him at the airport when I got a call. He was being detained and was awaiting an interview for more questioning. I started crying. I was crying for him, I was crying for me, I was crying because I felt like we were on the brink of some closure but maybe this wasn't the right place for it. And then I was crying because I felt an overwhelming guilt because deep down I felt this wave of….relief.

 

Salvadorans don't need visas to go to Spain but turns out that doesn't mean they can just show up like Americans can. I realize this was pretty naïve on my part but if I had known we would have been much better prepared but I had no idea. I'm pretty sure had we been together at the airport, they would've let him in but that's neither here nor there. They asked him a bunch of questions and denied him entry. He's not in any trouble or anything, and he's not barred from coming to Spain some other time. But he had to sit in detention for 48 hours before they sent him back to El Salvador. And he wasn't allowed any visitors or contact besides phone calls.

 

 So where does that leave me now? Well, I'm still here in Spain, working for the moment. My contract is up at the end of May and I could stay here or go back to the US or go somewhere else. It's kinda up in the air right now but I'm leaning towards going back to the US this summer and looking for a job. 

I'm still around

Seems like I've hit a blogging dry spell. I think holidays will do that to you. I should give you all an update that M was able to submit his waiver packet to the embassy, on Dec 27th.

Calatravas

Calatravas is a shopping center housed in the Palacio de Congresos de Oviedo, designed by the famous Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
You can see more pictures here.

Little things

I got my library card in the mail today! The smallest things can brighten your day.

A Survey

I’ve posted a poll over on the right because I’m just curious what brings people to read my blog. If none of the categories fits you, feel free to leave something in the comments.