Category: Uncategorized

This will be a quick one, as today has a lot going on.

I just wanted to let my people know that my theory on verbalizing that something is lost results in its being found is once again proven true.

The day that my daughter was supposed to leave for Portugal (Thursday 11 September), I was notified by USPS that the passport had been received at a San Francisco postal facility. This was an overnight envelope, but it had been scanned in after 5:00 PM, so I thought it would be overnight from the following day. Since this would be over a weekend, I was also prepared for it to possibly arrive on Monday.

I was extremely relieved to see that it was not languishing on a desk or behind a file cabinet: progress was evident.

For three days, that notification did not change. There was no indication of where it was, just that it was “moving through the network.”

FOUR DAYS later (Monday 15 September), almost to the hour, there was finally an update. The envelope had arrived in a facility within an hour of my daughter’s home, and the item is “currently in transit to the destination.”

They said it should be delivered by 9:00 PM on September 18. A week after they got the overnight envelope, for which we had paid over $30 for expedited shipping. Now, I understood that when they said that it should arrive by Thursday, that meant it could also arrive Tuesday or Wednesday. It also said a signature would be required, so my daughter resolved to sit at home for potentially the next three days waiting for this delivery.

Yesterday (Tuesday 16 September), I received a text from her that the passport was left in the mailbox. No one even came to the door. Arrggghhh!!!!! At least it arrived. I am now (somewhat) at peace.

But USPS: come on, do better.

Don’t use USPS. It’s a disaster. If it’s important that something arrives on time and that you know approximately where your item is along the way, go with FedEx or UPS or DHL or whatever other shipping business that actually runs like a business. USPS, if you can’t handle overnight service, DON’T OFFER IT.

Looking forward to having my daughter here in five days. She will have missed three days of language class. Almost two weeks of her visa will be wasted, which is not insignificant when every single day matters for this kind of thing. But I’ll take the win. At least the passport wasn’t mangled or stolen.

I was supposed to be picking up my daughter from the airport this morning. She was supposed to start Portuguese language classes on Monday (3 days after arrival). Instead, we have had to reschedule her flight. The uncertainty is maddening. The worry is real.

I love all my children fiercely. I am extremely proud of them all, and I will always do all I can to help them be happy and feel safe. But because of who my children are, none of them feel safe these days. The daughter who is supposed to be in the air right now is waiting to hear from someone who can tell her where her passport is, wondering when she can join us here in Portugal, feeling particularly unsafe. This is unacceptable to me.

My beautiful, brilliant, wonderful daughter is transgender and autistic. She currently resides in Utah. Until this summer, she was a student at UVU. She would not have been present at the Charlie Kirk event for several reasons, not the least of which is his hateful statements about transgender people. I’m not here to discuss the murder; I’m just illustrating the multiple layers of stressors on her right now. I just want her here with me.

So why is she not on the flight right now? Her passport is missing. She received notification from the Portugal embassy in San Francisco that her student visa application was approved on August 26. My daughter followed the instructions in the notification to send in her passport to have the visa stamped into it. She overnighted it and included with it a prepaid overnight envelope to be returned to her. The instructions said to note when the travel date is, ostensibly to ensure that it is returned in time. We knew that it would be a tight timeline, but we had every reason to believe that the passport would be returned in time.

We have heard nothing, even though it was indicated that the turnaround time should be within five business days. They don’t take phone calls, and emails have gone unanswered. When do we blink?

I am the queen of overthinking and anticipating Worst Case Scenarios. If we decide to report the passport lost, we could theoretically expedite a replacement and get it stamped with the visa in time for the rescheduled flight. But what if soon after reporting the passport lost, the original shows up?

I am sure that everyone at the embassy is doing their job. I’m sure they’re busy. We are grateful that the visa has been granted. But this limbo is unbearable. My daughter has been working hard for several months trying to get to Portugal. She wants to learn Portuguese and attend a university here.

She wants to live somewhere where she doesn’t have to worry that being at the wrong place at the wrong time will get her or someone she loves shot by some random wacko for no reason at all. She wants to live somewhere where she doesn’t have to listen every day to people talking about how her very existence is offensive or dwelling on the fact that a couple of the MANY school shootings were by transgender individuals, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of them have been at the hands of white cisgender males.

She wants to live somewhere where the politicians are at least trying to represent the people of their state or nation instead serving their own interests and lining their own pockets. She wants to live somewhere where the health and insurance industries actually exist to help people instead of generating massive profits for a select few while millions of people are denied care or are driven to bankruptcy by the care they do receive.

No place is perfect, no institution is perfect. Life isn’t perfect for me here, and it won’t be perfect for my daughter. But it’s orders of magnitude better here. I expected to spend this weekend showing my daughter around this wonderful place that I love. I had a plan for helping her adjust to the time difference before she began classes on Monday. I was excited. Now I’m worried and scared.

Believe it or not, I’m not writing this to complain or generate outrage or even sympathy. I’m writing this because I have the fervent, irrational belief that when something is lost, it turns up once I have complained out loud that I cannot find it. This has been proven to a significant degree by data gathered over the course of more than 60 years.

This is my last resort silly attempt to get the universe to shake loose that passport and get it back into my daughter’s hands. I know that there are so many people dealing with much worse ordeals. But right now, my world is centered around getting my daughter here.

Please send out a good thought, good vibes, prayers, or whatever you do to ask for a good outcome. In return, we will take you to lunch when you visit us here. I’ll let my daughter choose the restaurant.

Best:

Okay, yesterday (Tuesday 26 August, 2025) was something else. There is no way I can convey all the emotional intensity, but maybe I can at least give you an idea of the quantity of emotional currency expended yesterday. This is gonna be a long one….

First: We got a phone call on Monday evening asking if we could come in to a bank at 10:30 yesterday morning. We had been working hard to get a good bank account, so we were quite happy to accommodate this request. It’s a little early for our lazy old retired selves, but it fit nicely into the rest of what was already shaping up to be a heavily-scheduled (for us) day.

Y’all, this bank is gorgeous. We qualified (barely) for a private banker, which means we get to meet in the inner sanctum with a stained glass entry overlooking a gallery that often hosts art exhibitions. This entire round entryway is stained glass (including the massive skylight) and mosaic that took my breath away. It makes me happy just to be in that area.

Our banker is a lovely woman with a wardrobe I would give up chocolate for. She has been very helpful in our efforts to open up a bank account that will provide us with chipped debit and credit cards. I understand why this is not a simple process since we don’t have our residency cards yet, but we passed an intensive screening process and were eventually approved.

The meeting with her to get everything set up took over an hour and a half, but the meeting room we were in was spectacular with an equally impressive view so I didn’t mind it too much. There’s a balcony we couldn’t stop looking at; it’s the picture accompanying this post. Any LOTR movies fan will understand why we were geeking out and fantasizing about obtaining that as a home.

We got that squared away just in time for our lunch reservation with our friends R & R (I won’t share actual names unless I get permission). They are a couple of sweet 20-somethings who are helping us out with interpreting for us as we deal with government matters. We had appointments at 2:30 to hopefully clean up a little issue, and we thought it was only right to take them to lunch beforehand.

We ate at a place we really like (Nougeira’s: it will get its own post at some point), and then rushed to our appointment at Finanças.

Worst:

There we learned that there’s nothing we can do and we are stuck in a vicious loop of “you must complete step A before you can do this but you can’t do step A with out doing step B which we can’t do without completing step A….” Ugh.

The man at Finanças suggested a possible work-around through yet another government agency. R & R graciously accompanied us to pursue this avenue, which was another dead end and a waste of half an hour.

So, frustrating to say the least. But at least we were successful at removing one matter (bank) from our to-do list.

But wait! There’s more. My final appointment of the day was a bright spot: meeting up with my friend M to learn more about each other and help each other with English and Portuguese (she’s from Brazil). M is a beautiful woman who is always a pleasure to be around. We met up in front of Burberry as planned, and we walked and talked. We window shopped along the way to an açaí place she wanted to show me.

I was very tired before going to meet M, but I felt immediately reinvigorated when she greeted me. We chatted as we ate our açaí parfaits. Then I received a text from my daughter A: she had just received an email informing her that she has been approved for her student visa. YAY!!!!

I will also write a separate post about this whole situation, but in summary: she is coming here in less than three weeks to begin learning Portuguese with the ultimate goal to attend university here. Our backup plan if she didn’t get the student visa was to basically ping-pong her back and forth: 90 days here, 90 days outside the EU, 90 days here, and so on until she was able to secure some type of longer-term visa.

So I was very relieved and excited to know that she is now cleared to stay here for at least a year. The catch: she needed to get her passport to the embassy in San Francisco so the visa could be stamped into it, and she needed to have it back before September 11. And this coming weekend is Labor Day weekend. The approval letter said it can take 5 business days to get the visa on the passport, so we’re cutting it VERY close.

We told her to gather the necessary papers and her passport and go immediately to overnight it all to the embassy. She was also to purchase a return overnight envelope for the embassy to send the passport back to her. Her initial response: okay, I’ll do that ASAP. My response: no, do it NOW. I know it sounds overbearing, but we are heavily invested (emotionally and financially) in this process, and we need to do all we can to get all the moving parts working as efficiently as possible.

Ummm:

So off she goes, and she texts me once mischief has been managed. Only a few minutes later, I get another text informing me that she has been in a wreck and she will update me when she can. Mama Bear panic time! 😉 A is transgender and autistic and in Utah, so I worry even more than most moms might. She assured me that it appears that no one is hurt, but I’m concerned that she might be overwhelmed with the overall shituation. I feel bad about insisting that she rush out to send her passport, etc.

It’s late afternoon where she is, but it’s after midnight where I am. I know I won’t sleep until I know that everything is okay. Eventually, she lets me know that reports have been filed and everyone seems to be okay. Her car is not a tangled mass of wreckage (nor is the other car); her main concern is that she might not be able to sell her car as planned. I’ll take that minor hiccup, as things could have been much worse.

Finally in bed, I’m processing the day’s events. I’m glad that I am still pleased about the wins of the day. I take a little time to think about a dear friend who I learned during the day has just died, and I thank the universe that my balance sheet is still far in the positive column.

These kind of days are rare for me, as far as the unsatisfactory portions are concerned. I am acutely aware that my life is extremely easy compared to the vast majority of people on this planet. I hope that wherever you are, far more good things happen to you than bad. Whoever you are, you are loved and important. Take the good, do what you can to improve the bad, and walk away from the rest. Life is too short to dwell on the negative.

Just a couple of blocks from our little apartment, we came across this gem. Rio’s is a lovely place with wonderful food and service. Some might consider it a tad pricey, but I believe it is not that bad and well worth it. If you want to give it a try, I suggest you get the couvert (pictured) and an order of Ovos Rotos (Broken Eggs) and am inexpensive bottle of wine (if there are two or three of you) or a cocktail. If you are not wowed, you will have had a nice little snack and drink for just a little money.

But if you like it, decide what it’s worth to you and then settle in for more deliciousness.

Their couvert (pictured with this post) is interesting and well worth experiencing. Many places have bread, olive oil and/or butter, and maybe a few olives. Rio’s couvert is unique with unusual breads, caramelized shallot butter, a nice olive oil, and an interesting egg yolk. It’s 4 euros per person.

We’ve been to Rio’s several times, so I will not list here everything we’ve ever had there. Suffice it to say that we have liked everything we have eaten (and drunk) there. But our absolute favorite is the aforementioned ovos rotos. I kind of think of it as Portuguese poutine. It’s patatas fritas (French fries) covered with caramelized shallots, thin-sliced presunto (a type of ham), and topped with an over-easy fried egg. The waiter then breaks the egg for you and blends it all together, and the result is splendid. *chef’s kiss* We have made it a bit of a hobby to try the ovos rotos in several places, and so far this one has been the best.

I recommend sitting in the back: it’s a covered patio area that I always find delightful. But anywhere you sit in Rio’s is lovely. It’s a wonderful place to take a little break from your activities.

The portions are generous, so I recommend starting out with one or two tapas per person. Leave room for dessert.

Feel free to comment to this post if you have questions about items on the menu or their wines, and I will happily respond.

You can see more about Rio’s here:

https://www.instagram.com/rios_tapasbar/

My husband and I had been discussing moving out of the US for quite a while. There are many reasons, but the quick easy answer is that we just don’t feel like the US is a good fit for us. If that’s a justifiable reason for parting ways with a job or a relationship, I think it fits here as well.

We discussed many options, and some that we really liked just weren’t practical. For instance, emigrating to New Zealand would have been our first choice, but at our age we would have had to tie up all our net worth in investments. That just seemed too risky.

Our top choices ended up being Sicily, Portugal, and Canada. We considered others but removed them from our list for various reasons. I had an incredibly good feeling about Sicily. I had never been there, but just saying the word and thinking about its rich history made me feel so peaceful and complete. It’s quite possible I would have visited there and realized it also was not a good fit, but we never got that far. But we really liked the idea of being in Europe so that we could explore the whole continent at our leisure.

My husband had concerns about our later years, worried that we might develop memory problems and struggle with a foreign language. This is the main reason we decided we felt most comfortable about Canada. Also, it was easily accessible to my kids and my mother. I won’t go into detail right now about our experience trying to emigrate to Canada. We met a lot of great people and did a lot of cool things in the year and a half we lived there, but we were ultimately defeated by the bureaucracy.

I should point out that we are financially very comfortable. We do not need to work, and we have plenty of money to do whatever we like. It has never been our intention to be a burden on the system of whatever country we landed in. We do a lot to contribute to the local economy. We go out of our way to patronize local small businesses, and we pay our taxes. We try to make things better wherever we are.

After spending a LOT of money trying to make things work in Canada, we decided to move on. We had taken a trip to Europe and spent a couple of weeks in Porto and Ponta Delgada. We really liked Portugal, so when we realized that Canada wasn’t going to work out, we changed our focus to Portugal. We also made a couple more visits to make sure where we wanted to live in the Porto area. Things fell into place nicely as we began the process to get our visa.

My husband is a big wine enthusiast and sommelier, so it was important to live in a good wine region. We also wanted a temperate climate, good restaurants, good views, and lots of history. The Porto area checks all those boxes. There are several Michelin star restaurants close to us, and we have been enjoying trying them all.

So here we are, in our tiny 1-bedroom apartment, waiting for our residency cards and for our permanent home to be completed. They tell us it (our condo) should be done in the next month or two. The residency cards…who knows? I’ll keep you posted.

I wish I had thought to start this long ago, when we decided to move to Portugal. I can’t change the past, but I can do my best to recreate timelines and share memories as they come to me.

I can however commit to sharing things as they occur going forward. The future will unfold and be documented here; the past will be covered in as organized a fashion as I can manage.

Today is Monday, the 14th day of April, 2025. It’s a beautiful day here in Porto, although some might disagree. Objectively, it’s a tad chilly, breezy, grey, overcast, and occasionally rainy. But I love this weather. I am sitting across the table from my wonderful husband, and I have a nice view of Porto. This is a good life.

We arrived in Porto on 03/04/2025 (get used to European dates: day/month/year), and we have been staying in hotels until our bed is delivered TOMORROW!!! Our living arrangement is complicated. We have purchased a condo in Vila Nova de Gaia, across the Douro River from Porto, but it won’t be completed until later this year. So we had to decide: where would we live until we can move into our permanent home? We could get a short-term rental of some sort, but since we are familiar with the vagaries of construction we know we can’t be sure how long we would need to rent a place.

Our decision was made a little simpler by one of my children. She is a beautiful, brilliant young woman facing a lot of challenges. Put simply, she is transgender and autistic. Her life is daunting enough without the additional stresses being placed on her by the ever-deteriorating political climate in the United (that word seems questionable) States. I know it was very difficult for her to ask if she could come to Portugal and try to make a life here. If she is that uncomfortable in the country where she lives, it is a priority to help her find a place where she feels safe. So we decided to buy a small apartment where we will live until she arrives in Portugal. Then this apartment will become hers.

So we will be transitioning from living in a roomy two-story home in Washington to living in a 68-square-meter flat in a strange new country. Talk about adventure!

It is our desire to not live as expats surrounding ourselves with others who have moved here from other countries. While it is nice to have connections with others who have uprooted their lives, we want to learn the language and the culture and be part of the Portuguese community. I am in my 60’s, and Portuguese is a challenging language, but I am determined to become fluent. We also intend to become citizens of Portugal as soon as possible. In other words, we are Becoming Portuguese.

I will be documenting our process here. It may be very stream-of-consciousness as I think of things to share, but it will hopefully be interesting and informative. Feel free to message me with questions or suggestions. I hope that this might help others who decide to start their lives over, whatever that might look like.