KABOOM

This past week wasn't the best. In fact yesterday I felt a hair trigger away from a major explosion.

I still don't know the date that I'll be leaving for Kazakhstan. I have a LOI window from mid November to mid February, and usually you plan to be there on the first day of the window, but my coordinator is still checking with in-country staff to be sure. So even though I have my wonderful LOI, I'm still waiting to learn when I'll travel.

For the past two weeks I've been struggling to get my VISA application sorted. I know that my friends who had a total of 2 weeks from LOI to travel would think I'm insane that it's taken me two weeks to get the deed done, but I keep getting interrupted. Last Friday I spent a bit of my lunch hour getting new copies of all the forms and a print out of the PDF file of my LOI and I planned to work on it on the weekend. See I've been coming home from work with the intention of getting everything organized, only to be so tired after the frantic day at work that my brain lets me down. Only thing, I left the bag with all the paperwork in my office, so I couldn't work on it last weekend, and I didn't get back to my office all this week (not looking good for next week either) (Oh, a bigger catastrophe, I left my knitting in the office too - oh the horror of not having my knitting)

Yesterday I was determined to get the deed done and have my VISA application all complete. I went into work early and re-re-reprinted everything, wrote my cover letter, had my passport , photocopy of the important page of my passport, my certified cheques and the VISA application (2 copies because I know I'll make silly mistakes filling it in - I've already misspelled my name twice) when I realized I didn't have the 2 passport photos that I'd had done the two weeks ago. I tell you I hope they are not in the bag at my office. If I don't find them today I'm going to redo them.

Oh, the other fun of the week was my missing money. My agency requires families to put the amount that is required to cover all the in country costs of the adoption in a trust account with them, so that when families do get the frantic call that they have days to travel the family isn't scrambling to arrange the money.

The money was wired to my account at the end of last week, BUT it didn't reach my account. It got lost. Now rationally I know it's just not in the right place and all those smart banking people will find it, but I'm not completely able to cope at the moment. ARGH. I later found that my money had gone to New York City. Hey, I'd go there too if I could. Hope it had a nice visit. I came home yesterday to find a nice voice message from my bank to say the money was safely in my account, it made the journey correctly the second time. YEAH!

The week and all it's stress left me exhausted. When my sister opted to go to bed last night at 7:30 (the usual time at the group home) I thought that sounded like a wonderful idea, and I too went to bed at 7:30.

A good night's sleep and a holiday weekend should help to even out my temper, and I'll get that VISA application off to Ottawa today, so hopefully next week will just be the usual stress of October doing 3 different presentation to 3 different groups of about 75 teachers and principals on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. OH and did I mention that I was just informed about the Friday presentation on Thursday of this week - I don't have time to really prepare for it, so I'll have to spend some time this weekend working on it. ARGH. And I still don't know when I'm leaving for Kazakhstan. NOPE not going get away from that hair trigger temper any time soon.

I NEED MY KNITTING!