Tag: UAB

Intangibles

by pennypostcard • September 18, 2025 • 1 Comment

When we move overseas and I begin a new posting, it’s hard to convey just how completely my life changes—let alone to describe what those changes look like. My social media may offer glimpses of where I’ve landed: snapshots of a far-flung place, unfamiliar foods, and me appearing happy and at ease among a group of strangers.

Yet curating outward appearances can give the impression of being in a kind of faux-vacation mode, masking the reality of what it means to settle into daily life in a new country. A picture can be a worth a thousand words and still not fully capture how radically everything has shifted—from your commute to your surroundings to your diet. From the outside, it might look entirely positive, or, depending on one’s perspective, overwhelmingly negative. Lately, I’ve been trying to find a way to write that describes the intangibles of this period—so that I can more accurately depict life here from afar.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Packout, Check

by pennypostcard • July 29, 2025 • 0 Comments

Last week, the packout for our PCS move to Burma began on Monday and lasted through Wednesday. It was longer and more nerve-wracking than I expected — probably our longest and most stressful packout ever… I’m glad it’s over!

Foreign Service, U.S.

Quickly Clockwise: Learning Burmese, Weeks 41-42

by pennypostcard • June 26, 2025 • 0 Comments

For the last two weeks, it has felt like time is moving more quickly by the day towards our upcoming PCS. An international move requires an annoying blend of small detail management and big picture perspective, all of which eats up extra time and energy you don’t have while working full-time.

During the final stages of our 2013 wedding planning, I would often awake from nightmares of walls covered with clocks, their hands spinning clockwise out of sync and with absurd rapidity. I don’t think I could ever care as much about a PCS as I did our wedding, nor do I think the stresses are equivalent.

But my strategy of trying to keep on top of a myriad of details — lest they pile up and overwhelm me later — generally serves me well.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Anagen

by pennypostcard • February 24, 2022 • 4 Comments

It has been five and a half weeks since we ended our time in Mexico and returned to the United States, and it has been three weeks since we moved from the temporary hotel lodging into the northern Virginia house we rented for the next two years. Despite the house still being mostly empty and having to spend more time than we wanted cleaning in order to settle in, it does feel more like we are building a home here with each passing week.

Our 450 lbs of Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB) arrived nine days after we moved in. We’ve also purchased almost all the furniture we need for our home offices, dining room, living room, den, and bar area, even though pandemic-related supply chain issues have meant only half of it has actually been delivered so far. Mexican Customs also thankfully cleared our household effects (HHE) to depart Mexico without incident; the State Department notified me last week our HHE had arrived safely at a warehouse in El Paso, Texas, signaling the remaining 5,700 pounds of our things will catch up with us sooner than anticipated.

Foreign Service, U.S.

1,940 Miles Later…

by pennypostcard • January 31, 2022 • 3 Comments

We arrived in northern Virginia two weeks ago, and have been at an extended stay hotel suite on Temporary Quarters Subsistence Allowance (TQSA) until the house we rented is ready for us to move into. My orders authorized up to 60 days of TQSA, but fortunately our house will be ready this week and we were able to put enough survival furniture together until our household effects arrive to make things comfortable for the two of us.

I have been on home leave, but V has been teleworking literally beginning the day after we rolled into Alexandria on a freezing late afternoon and unloaded two carloads of stuff into the hotel. On my orders overseas he is always my Eligible Family Member (EFM) or “dependent,” but he is also a civil service federal employee in his own right. Therefore, when we departed Ciudad Juárez after my curtailment, his arrangement as a Domestic Employee Teleworking Overseas (or DETO) came to an end. Now that he is back at his regular duty station – Washington, DC – it’s back to business as usual for him… and in the pandemic that still means remote work.

Foreign Service, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Virginia or Bust: Tennessee, Snow, and Home at Last

by pennypostcard • January 22, 2022 • 2 Comments

The day we rolled into Tennessee was day three of our road trip from Ciudad Juárez to northern Virginia. As we checked into our Knoxville hotel and unloaded the cars for a third night in a row, we’d crossed nearly 1,500 miles (or three-quarters) of the trip and expected to make it to northern Virginia the following day.

I’d been living in the mostly dry warmth of the desert sufficiently long to use my weather app infrequently, although our last week in Juárez had been marked by infrequent sprinkles. But because Knoxville’s temps were dropping below freezing, we glanced at the forecast and realized we might need to slow our roll.

Foreign Service, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Virginia or Bust: Ciudad Juárez Across Texas to Arkansas

by pennypostcard • January 17, 2022 • 6 Comments

We departed Post Ciudad Juárez this past Thursday and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border for the last time into El Paso, Texas, officially ending my third Foreign Service tour.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

PCS Countdown, Part II

by pennypostcard • January 8, 2022 • 3 Comments

The new year has come and gone. In the week plus since my last blog post, and as the days tick closer to our Permanent Change of Station (PCS) packout, my tempo of pre-departure preparations has become more frenzied. I’ve come a long way, and given the amount we accomplished today there is still quite a bit to do tomorrow but we have made it to the home stretch.

Foreign Service, Mexico

PCS Countdown, Part I

by pennypostcard • December 31, 2021 • 4 Comments

Over the last two weeks as I’ve started preparing for our next Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move, I’ve also been what’s known in the Foreign Service as “Acting.” That’s when you cover your boss’s position while also covering your own, and it’s common during the holidays or transition seasons when many people request leave at the same time. Since I was also Acting for all of last December, my boss offered me the chance this year to take Christmas off. However, I’d elected instead to take leave in January for Orthodox Christmas and New Year; I’d wanted to take V to San Diego to show him old places I love, and to Tucson to explore new places together. Of course, since we subsequently decided to curtail, we need to prioritize packing out and returning to Virginia in favor of traveling for fun. I’ll still take a few weeks of home leave once we get to Virginia, but there won’t sadly be any desert or west coast involvement.

I will reflect in the future on the thoughts and feelings I have about things I won’t be getting to do here. For now, I am looking forward to returning to Virginia. I’m particularly grateful that it’s much easier to PCS from a border post than it is from posts that involve air travel. In my limited experience of three Foreign Service posts so far, it seems the more developed a country is and the more you set up your life there, the more difficult it is to unwind everything at the end.

Foreign Service, Mexico

Checking In to a New Post, Pandemic Style

by pennypostcard • August 30, 2020 • 4 Comments

Typically when a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) arrives at a new post, they spend much of their first two weeks “checking in.” Check-ins consist of a variety of consultations with people in your section, the leadership of other sections, security and HR briefings, and one-on-one meetings with any people you supervise. There are also the practical matters of getting your badge, receiving your unaccompanied air freight (if you’re lucky), navigating between your house and the consulate or embassy, and generally orienting yourself and finding your way around your new environment. But my first two weeks were spent mostly quarantined at home, in line with Post’s 14-day stay-at-home policy for all new arrivals.

So how does checking in work in the time of COVID-19?

Foreign Service, Mexico

2,184 Miles Later…

by pennypostcard • August 12, 2020 • 2 Comments

If you’ve been reading the blog for more than a couple of years, you’ve probably noticed that every time you see a post called “X Miles Later…” it means we just finished a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move.

Previously, these moves have all been via airplane: my 2015 move to Tashkent for my first tour (6,329 Miles Later); our 2017 departure from Tashkent (6,498 Miles Later) quickly followed by our move to Australia for my second tour (7,572 Miles Later… which, by the way, brought my total airline miles in 2017 to a whopping 37.4K, a personal best); rounded out by our 2019 departure from Australia (5,225 Miles Later…). But of course this PCS was a little bit different, as we drove almost 2,200 miles across the south to our Mexican border post and no planes were involved.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Pandemic Packout

by pennypostcard • July 26, 2020 • 7 Comments

For the first time since early March, last Friday we welcomed other people into our home. But they weren’t guests; they were masked movers coming to pack so we could finally leave for Mexico, three months late to the day.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Leaving the Nest

by pennypostcard • July 12, 2020 • 7 Comments

Since we found out just over two weeks ago that Ciudad Juárez moved to phase one and our Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move could go forward, we have begun preparing to leave the United States in earnest. Finally knowing our departure date has allowed us to do so many things that have been tangled in knots since the shelter-in-place orders started in mid-March. We are now less than two weeks away from departing for Mexico, and although there is still a lot to do, I feel like we have it pretty well in hand.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Better Late Than Never

by pennypostcard • July 5, 2020 • 1 Comment

In the last 10 days, tremendous progress has been made towards our move to Mexico, which froze in time when the coronavirus pandemic lockdown started in March. First, U.S. Consulate General Ciudad Juárez transitioned from phase zero to phase one in what the Department calls the “Diplomacy Strong” framework, harking a continuous three-week decline in COVID-19 cases in Juárez and green-lighting moves for incoming officers. Second, we sought and received a packout date for later this month, freeing us to divide our possessions between air freight and car carry (since we are driving), and things we will finish, donate, or leave behind. These two key steps have unlocked all the tasks that we couldn’t do when we had no idea when we were leaving – post office change of address, purchasing a second car, planning our driving route and making reservations, and more.

Foreign Service, U.S.

A Bumpy-ish Landing

by pennypostcard • September 21, 2019 • 16 Comments

Tomorrow marks three weeks since V and I returned to Virginia and started the several months of training required for my next assignment to Mexico. A few aspects of the transition and settling-in process have been bumpier than I expected. Although moving to the U.S. (“home”) should be easier than an overseas move to a new country, in a lot of ways it isn’t. Without an embassy to help you set up your life (again), there is a lot of surprisingly tedious stuff to deal with on your own, and not much time to manage it.

During this Permanent Change of Station (PCS) from Australia to Virginia, between problems with our new apartment management, problems with timing our unaccompanied air freight (UAB) and storage deliveries, and problems with my car turning up damaged from two years of overseas government storage, the past few weeks have felt like one aggravation after the next. And all of that doesn’t even take into consideration my new full-time job of Spanish learning, and the challenge of going from two incomes back to one. However, on the bright side and after a lot of effort, expense, moral support from friends, and some luck, things are starting to settle bit by bit into place. (Warning: lengthy rant ahead.)

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