I've been thinking about starting up this bad boy for awhile and so here I am over a year later.  In the meantime a lot has happened, and in terms of my blogging habits my attention has been turned towards reading others versus writing my own. There's a huge network of expat women writing about their experiences living abroad with their native spouses - some of them by choice, many of them involuntarily as a result of immigration issues. For some it's an adventure and for others it's a slow countdown to when they can return home. 

I always stop reading when that happens. It's discouraging to read that these families can no longer tolerate the homesickness, or Mexican schools, or the wages, or whatever it may be. I can understand those feelings but at the same time, I moved to Mexico in the first place on my own. I wanted that life in a foreign country - at least, as I saw it, until I had had my experience and would move on to the next. In the strange way that life works, once I figured out that Mexico was where I'd be long term, it became necessary to leave. Back to the United States to make some moolah (and by make it I mean not see a dime because it's all going straight to student loans aka the bane of my existence).

Anyway this is the part of the blog where I'd normally click the little x on the tab and stop reading. When you're trying to figure out how you can make a life in Mexico, it's not helpful to see it not work out (immediately), and also, hey, I grew up here, boring. But I do have a great opportunity this year teaching first grade at a Spanish immersion school, and I'm at least grudgingly grateful for the fact that I'll be less in debt by the end of this (although back to that bane of my existence thing, I could gripe for quite awhile on my opinion on higher education costs in the U.S. of A). 

So I am in Minnesota and I've been here since the end of February, with lots of other happenings in the prior to and in between. Trips back and forth between here and Cozumel and a graduation in Mexico City. I sublet an apartment in Munich for six weeks and drank my first full beer at Oktoberfest. My job with a company in Saudi Arabia ended its semester and then, without explanation and precipitating the need to move and make some money, continued to push back its start date further and further until four months had passed and I was on a plane north. In June Mr. Zepeda and I got engaged when I went back for a brief visit, and last week I turned what feels like the very old age of 26 and started my first week with the adorable rug rats of first grade. 

That is my recap and reintroduction. We'll see how this goes...