You Make Plans, God Laughs

God is really enjoying himself right now. Peeing in his metaphorical pants, even.

Something I am sure you all know about me: I'm a planner. I don't know if I was always like this, or it came with teaching/kids/moves, but I think I was bossy when I was little and I have to plan things out. Limbo is hard for me.

There was a call this morning at 5 a.m. my time that I should have just participated in because I was up until 1 a.m. thinking about it/reading/surfing the web out of nervousness and then I woke up at 7 a.m. with the thought "check my e-mail." And all visa hell had broken loose. (Not really.)

We are in a delay because the UK Border Agency has a backlog. It sounds like America, so I am sure we will be very happy there.  The people giving us the information from the vendor company were not very specific with details, and, as mentioned before, I need details, so I called the UKBA employer help line this morning to see when things would get going again.  Dan, with his heavy British accent, was very helpful in telling me the backlog may be resolved by May 5. Or not.*

I may have mentioned in previous blogs that we were going to have our house packed up on Monday? Oh, not so much. And that whole "moving out by May 31?" We are hoping they will let us stay a little longer.  Otherwise, we will be homeless, and our stuff will be who knows where, and I will feel some sort of kinship to the guy who lived in the airport all those years, with no home country.

Of course, I have also come up with contingency plans and plans for those contingency plans should they fall through. One of them involved going to India and practicing family yoga. Or having our "temporary housing" be a cottage in the woods in Canada. I am not entirely joking about either of those. Friends and family, we're coming, and we may be staying longer than you thought.

While this delay sort of shot my whole schedule to hell, it also isn't the end of the world. I can't say that I am even cautiously optimistic it will work out, because right now even though Ellie and Sam are enrolled in a school beginning in August we may not have a visa to live there and for them to begin attending this school at that point. But. Some perspective is warranted and this is all part of the adventure, albeit one that I would rather not experience. I would rather experience the kayaking in the fjords of Canada part.

Do they make backpacker backpacks in kid sizes? We may just be hosteling around Europe this summer. You can see it, right? College kids coming back from the bars, Sam with his paci and blanket. We could totally rock that.


*This is just part 1 of the visa process. Then we get to go have our biometric stuff done (I don't know what that is, but they also take our fingerprints and is all high tech and probably because of terrorism), and then we have to send off our passports to the British Consulate in NYC for an unspecified amount of time. Josh travels almost constantly, so finding that window was fun the first time, and I am sure will be a jolly right-o** good time the next.

**British slang is pretty fun. I don't understand Cockney rhyming slang really, but I do like phrases like "Bloody hell" and "Bob's your uncle" and I have been trying to teach Ellie and Sam that, while they don't actually have an uncle named Bob, it is a useful phrase.