Visas and tickets and boxes, oh my!

Oh dear! Well, it's official: this time next week, I will be on a plane to Tokyo. And then to Seoul. And then a cross-country bus to my city. Freaking out? Yeah, you could say that!

Today K and I traipsed all the way over to Atlanta today to drop off our visa applications and back. Since we're on such a tight schedule and I don't want to deal with exorbitant fares in booking tickets a day before we need to leave, we decided to do it this way and not leave the visas to chance with the postal service. Our mailman, in the last year, has lost several of my magazines, a few bills, and my new credit card. So, to say I have little faith in our passports getting back to us would be an understatement. It really takes a lot of time to go down there and back, but at least I'll have it in my hand on Monday.

K and I now have the names of our schools! K will be teaching at two schools, so that should be interesting for him. Our schools are on opposite sides of town, so that's kind of a bummer, but downtown is nearly right in between the two, and our coordinator is trying to get us an apartment there so we have equal commutes. Anyway we'd be closer to shopping and transportation, so that's fine with me.

It's funny now that I'm telling people about what we're doing, because all of a sudden so many people are coming out of the woodwork and saying things like "Oh I've been to Korea!" or "My friend/cousin/ex teaches English there!" In fact, an old friend of mine from high school suddenly sent me a message on Facebook and announced that she's been teaching there for the past 9 months! How weird is that? So we're going to get together soon after K and I arrive. I can't wait! How cool to have an "in" to my new country!

My last lesson with my ESL students was on Wednesday. I felt so bad to have to leave them so suddenly. Everything came together at the last minute and these jobs were either take-them-or-leave-them, and we had to take them. We had a little party, and the girls wrote me cards, and they gave me a beautiful framed picture of all of them in yukata and a cute little coin purse to take with me and use in Korea. So nice! I definitely had a little tear in my eye. One of my students e-mailed me last night after her middle school graduation to tell me how it went. She was chosen to give a speech, and I helped her put it together. Here's part of her message:

Thank you very much for your help.

maybe  I couldn't make it without your help

You are a great tutor!!

and GOOD-LUCK in Korea!!

 

Honestly, how cute is that? I'm so glad I had the chance to work with them. 

Public Service Announcement. And Niagara Falls.

Look what I did for Memorial Day weekend!

Yup, definitely went to Niagara Falls. I wish we would have had more time to hang out at the park there and do the boat ride or trolley ride and go to the aquarium and stuff, but we were on a really tight schedule. We actually went to Rochester to check out a long-term boarding place for our cats where they don't use cages-- difficult to find! It was a really cool place, run by two of the neatest people we had ever met. Even though we're in SC, it's totally worth it to take the cats up there because we know they'll be well cared for.

No outfit post today, and probably none for quite a while. Why? Because most of my clothes are packed away! The evening we arrived in Rochester, we did four phone interviews. Let me tell you, I just wanted to tell them all to shut up and let me sleep... but in the end it paid off, because we were offered jobs with all four! We had been planning to go to Korea at the end of August during the big foreign teacher intake time for public schools, but our financial situation started demanding we do something sooner than that. So after poking around for a while and then doing lots of interviews, we were offered positions at public schools in a small city. My position starts in mid-July, but K's is an ASAP position and they ideally wanted him to start on June 11. June 11!! It doesn't look like we can be there by June 11 because we're waiting for our Notices of Approval to arrive in the mail and then we have to wait for the embassy in Atlanta to process our visas. But it looks like we'll probably end up getting there the 13th or 14th. That's less than two weeks. Good lord.

Our apartment went from tidy and quaint to a hurricane of boxes almost the minute we got back from Rochester. I'm really tired of packing up and moving, ugh. This will be the.... I don't even know.... 23rd time I've moved in my life? The longest I've ever lived in one place is five years, when I was a kid. I can't even imagine what that would feel like now. Our landlord is already trying to screw us over. I. Hate. Landlords. They are the scum of the earth. I've only rented with ONE that has not screwed me over.

There is something else I want to mention. I know this post is kind of a downer, but I don't care. I've been trying to look on the bright side and find the good in people for the last year and I've only gotten burned. There is no good in people, deep down. At least not in Americans.

When we were driving back from New York, we were on a multi-lane interstate in Pennsylvania around dinner time, with quite a bit of traffic around. Suddenly, K notices a deer at the edge of the road and intuitively knows the thing is going to try to cross. It does. K swerves off the road as the deer runs into the side of our car (yes, it hit us, we didn't hit it). We go over the gravel shoulder and into a ditch. This all happened at around 75 m.p.h. I was screaming my head off and bracing myself when we finally came to a stop in the ditch. We sat there, shell-shocked, for a minute, and then made sure our body parts were all still attached. Other than some cuts, we were fine. But here's the thing that gnaws at me:

Not one person stopped. No one called the police for us.

We could have been unconscious in that car, and not a single person who witnessed the accident (and trust me there were plenty) gave enough of a shit to see if we were all right. I fucking hate people. I hate the apathy of this pathetic country. No wonder it's on a downswing. I was beside myself about this when we finally were on the road again, and then K told me that when a work buddy of his had had a really nasty accident and flipped his car after hydroplaning on an interstate in SC, no one even stopped then. The man flipped his car and rolled it into the woods next to the road, and no one even stopped. He was trapped in the car upside down and had to somehow call the cops himself.

What the FUCK is wrong with Americans?

I am sick of moving and I am bitter as hell that I have to go to another country to find a job that pays enough to live on and has health benefits and that I can't even finish my Master's degree even though I only need two more classes. But you know what? If it means that I can be away from a country full of such apathetic, self-centered assholes, I'm getting the better deal.

You want to help your country? Try looking at what's going on around you and actually help someone once in a while. I know I would, and in fact I have before, but I'm being forced to leave this land of selfish bastards. Whoever is out there reading this, if you see someone crash their car, for god's sake STOP and see if they're all right and see if you need to call a fucking ambulance for them. It's not that hard. It's really not.

The Secret Garden

When I was a kid, I loved The Secret Garden. My class read it in the second grade, and I loved the air of mystery of the garden and characters. Maybe it was that movie that partially inspired my love of nature. I always wanted a garden full of lush greenery and flowers, with high ivy-covered walls. This picture makes it look like I'm halfway there!

Did you ever read that book?

Yes, this is really my yard. Or, these days, jungle. It's nothing like the manicured 100% Kentucky bluegrass lawns that are prized in the North, but I love the various little ground cover plants that grow here. I love spending time in my little nature sanctuary. As long as I have, you know, bug spray :D

And it's also better when it doesn't start raining every five minutes! Yikes!

Jacket: $20
Dress: $13
Sandals: $16
Necklace: $10

TOTAL: $59
Woo-hoo!

dress - Target / jacket - Steve & Barry's / sandals - Payless / necklace - JC Penney

Makin' Stuff

I'm nearly finished with altering a dress I snagged a few weeks ago. I ended up hating it after I took it home, but I really liked the fabric so I decided to change the shape of it. I was putting the finishing touches on, including a drawstring waistband, only to discover the cord I bought for it is too wide for the drawstring tube! Arrghh! So I'll have to wait to post pictures until I can get more suitable cording. In the meantime, I thought I'd post pictures of more stuff I made.

I whipped up this tea cozy a little while ago. The bottom green polka-dot fabric was a scrap from another project (a coffee press cozy), and the rest of it I cut from a linen shirt salvaged from the $1.00 section of Goodwill. That stuff is great for practicing embroidery on! I don't know why I'm crazy about tea cozies (and coffee cozies) lately. Probably because they're simple and quick to put together and they can look like anything you like.

Look at my tomatoes!! Not bad for a patio garden, huh? There are about 8 on that plant right now, and the biggest one is almost the same size as my fist. OK, I have small hands, but still, I think it's pretty decent for a patio tomato plant! I'm trying to wait for them to turn, but looking at these pictures has me fantasizing about fried green tomatoes...mmm.....

These aren't really my project, but I thought I'd share them with you guys anyway. This is K's bonsai collection, not including the larger one he keeps indoors. We found a great bonsai nursery at a plant festival in April, run by the nicest older couple. The husband shapes all the trees and experiments with soils and things, and the wife creates the little landscapes around them and chooses the pots. I swear, it was like looking into a mirror of the future of us, haha.

I think this one is so neat. Bonsai trees that produce flowers and fruit just blow my mind. Can you see the little green fruits? We have no idea what kind of tree this is, and neither did the couple from the nursery unfortunately. I still love the look of it.

This little guy is cute, too. K is wanting to start experimenting with different tree shapes, so he got the two little juniper starters to play around with. In the background is one of the pots he bought at a flea market in Osaka. It's not the most beautiful pot in the world, but it has such a neat story behind it because it's from our first trip abroad together and K actually haggled in Japanese (which he does not speak hardly at all) with the owner of the stall for it. Haha! I was proud of him :P  He was too shy to order food in Japanese that whole trip, but he didn't let language get in the way of a good bonsai pot!

Have a good weekend~

The cost of day-to-day fashion

 I felt like it was time for a change in decor around here. The picture I used for the header is one of my favorites that I snapped from the plane to Miyakojima last December. What luck the shadow was so clear! What do you think?

 We are one step closer to Korea. Gosh, it feels like we've been in this waiting game for ages now. Well, we kind of have. We started thinking about this over a year ago and submitted our very first applications back in November. Maybe at the end of this, I'll have enough information to publish "Moving to Korea for Dummies"!

Late next week, K and I will be going to New York state to check out a long-term boarding facility for our cats. It breaks my heart that we can't bring them with us, but with any luck we'll be able to find a pet-friendly place and have them flown over to us. Anyway, we're making the best of this road trip and checking out Rochester and Niagara Falls while we're in the area. Money is tight right now since we need to save until our departure, so sadly I can't use the trip as an excuse to go shopping. I can, however, play with Polyvore and still get a fashion fix! Here are some of the outfits I came up with for this trip that I would love to buy, if, you know, my wallet was bottomless!

Something else I wanted to bring up today was an article I read earlier (from MSNBC I think) about the average cost of an American woman's daily outfit with accessories. The total was just over $1,500. That seems absolutely crazy to me! I would definitely be above and beyond this number if you counted my wedding ring, but the article didn't count wedding/engagement rings. I did a quick tally of my outfit, generously including my bag and everything in it as the article did, and still came under $240. Am I just incredibly cheap? I wonder where the women polled were from (the Upper East Side?!) and what the average would be for women my age. I'm really curious. Including underwear, clothes, jewelry (except wedding/engagement rings), accessories, bag and contents, is the article's number or my number closer to your daily ensembles?

The calm before the storm....literally

Just under the wire! We snapped these just before a huge thunderstorm rolled in. With the clouds thickening above us, the light was a little tricky, but I think these came out all right.

Other than today's storm, it's been a really nice weekend. It was warm enough on Friday night to go out to the drive-in! I love doing that. We saw the new Robin Hood movie. <3 Russell Crowe!  Do you like going to drive-in theaters?

This is one of my favorite dresses. I styled it back in January with a ruffly cardigan, belt, and beige heels. I think it switched to warm weather fairly easily. And I love the deep neck in front and back, it feels very 50s glam!

Sometimes I think I like taking all these pictures because there are very few pictures of me between the ages of about 10 and 15. I had some major self-esteem issues in those days because my skin was, well, let's just say less than perfect! I remember intentionally avoiding cameras and tended to wear baggier clothing so I wouldn't call attention to myself. I think I'm trying to catch up now for all the photo years I missed out on. I wonder if there are any other fashion bloggers who are like this?

And anyway, it's a good excuse to go to pretty parts of the city.

(Yes, I do all my own stunts! :P)

dress - Urban Outfitters / necklace - JC Penney / sandals - Payless / belt - NY & Co.

Rosey-Posey

This is possibly my best thrift-store find ever. EVER. Do you feel the gravity of that sentence? I consider myself a pro at thrifting, but I think I've outdone myself here if I do say so myself. Behold, a floral Betsey Johnson sundress, which cost me a whopping...

                        $3.

Like most girly-girls, I love love love Betsey Johnson designs and cheerful prints, but as a girl who is on a pretty tight budget, I could only drool over them in magazines, fancy blogs, and when they popped up on Modcloth once in a while. So imagine my surprise and delight in finding this one at such a low price... and then in my size!! I got it at a new "boutique" thrift shop. Hey, I'm sold on the place.

This makes the grand total of this spring/summer outfit $35. My kind of style!

I kind of feel like this dress was the universe giving me a little break. The day I got it, I was on my way to get an oil change, and was in a really, really bad mood because it was the day the M.A. graduation ceremony was being held. I couldn't get the thought that I should be walking across the stage with my colleagues out of my head, and I was so upset I started crying in the car. Well, I couldn't go to a mechanic like that (I already feel like they try to fleece me even when the prices are posted, maybe 'cause I'm female), so I drove around a little and stumbled upon this thrift store, which had opened only two weeks earlier.

Needless to say, my mood improved greatly after leaving. I also found a great linen dress which I'll share later on.

Hm. Although come to think of it, I still need to get that oil change.

I love going to the local coffee shop, getting iced coffee, and strolling around the historical part of campus. Now that the semester is over, it's especially nice because it's not crowded at all. It's funny, this campus is so different from most other campuses I've been on because it somehow commands respect and quietude. I rarely see trash or anything out of place here, and even when there are dozens of students sitting outside studying, playing frisbee, and walking dogs, it's still remarkably quiet. It's kind of surreal.

dress - Betsey Johnson / hat - Target / sandals - Target