the latest from the whirl-wind

Our lives these past few weeks have been a blur (which is starting to seem like a trend). For those of you who haven't heard, we got our certificate of eligability last week. Since then, every spare second has been filled. This is the first chance I am having to sit down to blog. After hearing word that the Certificate was coming, we have been hard at work sorting out every little detail.

We drove to Portland to give our cat, Marzipan, and our car, Norman, to my friend Theresa.

It was a loooooooong drive, but it was great to see our Portland friends.

Dropping of Marzipan was really hard, but I am glad that she has a new family who loves her. She also seems to really love Theresa's bed, which should help the transition.

While we were in Portland, I booked a moving company AND purchased our plane tickets to Japan. We are leaving Saturday 1/29/10 at 8:14 AM. We arrive in Sapporo Sunday 1/30/10 at 8:40 PM. That gave us three weeks (now only two) to get everything sorted out.

When we got home from Portland, we took all our paper work to San Francisco to apply for our Visa. We took at least 10 wrong turns, passed up 5 parking garages, and arrived just in time to hear, "I'm sorry, the office is closing for lunch in 2 minutes. Please come back in 1 hour."

URG!

Luckily we found a place to hang out, eat lunch and finish our paperwork.

After finally getting to the window, the man helping us whited-out 1/2 of the information we wrote down. He was also very concerned that one of the addresses we included was a residence and not a business. We assured him that our supervisor works out of his home, so it was both.

He gave us a receipt to pick up our Visas on Tuesday (1/18) if there were no problems or questions. They have since called to tell us it will be ready Wednesday (1/19). Please pray they don't call tomorrow or Tuesday to extend the date.

Now, we are working on packing up our house. The goal is to be out of this place by Saturday, then go stay with our friends from church.