here comes the bride...

I bought my wedding dress last weekend! I am so excited, I can hardly contain myself! I am getting married in four months, moving in a week and a half, and....


Wait...what?


Oh.


Right.


Uhhh...yeah, it's been a while since I spoke to you people, hasn't it? When last we met, this TeDiouS girl was having a nervous breakdown and was prepared to scratch out the eyes of the next UK Border Agency Officer I happened to run across. Preferably in a dark alley. While wielding a sharp instrument. Well, here, let me tell you the tale. Or, even better, let me summarize so we aren't here for another month.

My Guy, supreme being that he is, did manage to get permission for us to marry in the Anglican Church and arrange a wedding date* for us in the short space of an afternoon. All while so sick he could hardly stand up straight. Honestly, it was almost a blessing that he was so terribly ill, because I have no clue how he would have managed to get all the things done that needed doing if he had been stuck at work. The Lord works in mysterious ways and all that.

So, I toddled off to a friend's house that same night to get the papers from the church that My Guy had sent me faxed in. (Can I pause a moment here to have a very minor shrieking bitch-fest over how idiotic it is that my only means of communication with the Border Agency was via fax? FAX!? Who even owns a fax machine or has regular access to one? And why could I not just email them back? They obviously have computers and email...they emailed the wedding proof demands to me after all. Which I then had to fax back. From my mom's friend's house. Because she is the only person I know on God's green earth who actually has a fax machine in her home.)

I waited, terrified, to hear back from the UK Border Agency. When the email finally came in the next afternoon I swear my heart nearly stopped. I was sure that this time it would be good news. I gave them what they asked for, everything should be fine, right? Right?

I will never learn.

I opened that email with every hope that my Visa had been approved and I was about to be told it was on its way to me. Instead, my heart dropped into my shoes as I read the note from the UK Border Agency. Followed swiftly by my stomach. And possibly my spleen. I couldn't even understand the email at first I was so confused. It said that my proof of a wedding date with the church was not good enough. They needed proof of a civil ceremony. With all kinds of snotty italics and bold letters just in case I missed it. They gave me another couple of days to supply this, along with also requesting that I send them my intended travel date. Which I did in the original document package I left with them in Toronto. Along with photocopies of my plane tickets and itinerary. So good to know they were paying attention.

My fiance and I began trying to figure out what they were asking for. How could we show them proof of a civil ceremony when we were getting married in the church? If we got married in a civil ceremony, we couldn't also get married in church. Surely they couldn't be telling us we weren't allowed a church wedding? That had to be illegal, right? The more we read, the more confused we got. The Border Agency's own website said that only those already living in the UK had to show they were registered for a wedding, as you CANNOT register until you are in the country with a valid Visa. Which is what they were supposed to give me! Plus, a ceremony in an Anglican church has every bit of authority as one performed at a registrars office, also reiterated on their own site.

Completely baffled at this point, with them seemingly expecting the impossible, I wrote up a letter explaining exactly why I couldn't give them what they wanted. I quoted their own site, gave links to the pages I cited, quoted from the registrar's office site as well as from an email My Guy got back from that office when he made enquiries about what they were asking for. All of it telling them they were asking me for something I couldn't possibly give them. Oh, and I also repeated the info on my travel plans they asked for, which was all exactly the same as I had given them the first time around. I made another trek to the almighty fax machine.

And then I waited through the longest weekend of my life. It lasted at least three thousand days. I swear.

My Guy and I were watching something together online when I got a blip.

I had mail.

Oh, my God.

I nearly swallowed my tongue. But, you see, I had finally learned my lesson. And while last time I guess I may have been excused for my ray of naive optimism, this time I knew it could be nothing but bad news. I had, after all, pretty much told the Border Agency officer handling my case that they didn't know how to do their job. I may have even allowed a little bit of anxiety-induced terseness to creep into the tone of the letter I had faxed in. As my shaking finger moved to click open the email, and my body tried to remember how to make my heart beat, I regretted every last speck of that terseness. What if I was banned from the UK for life? What if I had to start the application process over again because I hadn't been able to somehow provide them with impossible documents? What if it was all over?

The agony of it! Waiting for that email to open, My Guy and I on the edge of our seats and our sanity...and then.....

I slapped my hand over my mouth. Oh. My. God. Oh my god, oh my god, ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygodohmygodohmygod....


Five words.


Your Visa has been issued.


My heart suddenly slammed back to its more usual location in my chest. I was moving in a month. I was going to England. I was going to get married! It was all actually going to happen!

It has been a few weeks and I am still in a state of shocked disbelief. It hardly feels true to me, and maybe won't until I step off the plane in England with My Guy standing there waiting for me to rush into his arms. Or hobble over and fall down at his feet. One of those.

So, I hope you people are all astute enough to pick up on the lesson to be learned from all of this. I mean, yes, I am sure there are things to be learned here about never giving up, and persevering, and true love conquering all and leading you through in the end, and all that. Yeah, sure, that's all lovely and sentimental and *sniffle* and whatever. But the real lesson learned here...?

Sometimes telling someone in authority they are being an idiot is the way to get the job done.

*nods soberly*

Now, stand there and tell me that didn't just put a ray of light into your soul! :o)


...


...


...


hmmm...?


What now?

Oh, right. The wedding dress. Do you mind if I tell you about that next time? I need to just sit here and smile happily to myself for a bit. Again.



*the wedding date is 27 feb/2010, for those of you dying of curiosity.

Because I don't have enough stress in my life...

Breathe....just breathe....

...


...


...


Ah, screw it. Who needs air anyway?


Okay, a little background. My Visa application was put in two week ago-ish in Toronto. The website on which I filled out said application had led me to believe I would know the answer within a few days. Only to be crushingly brought back to reality by the lovely woman to whom I handed over my three inch stack of paper, who informed me that realistic times for my type of application would more likely be in the one to three month range.

Three MONTHS? Ummm...I do have this tiny little problem of having travel plans for November sixth. And plans for Christmas in Wiltshire. AND PLANS FOR MY LIFE, DAMMIT!

*takes a deep breath*

...


*and another, because one is obviously not enough*

Okay...

I'm fine now. Or have tipped over the edge into the quiet tranquility of madness. One of those.

Turns out, according to an email I got this morning from the UK border agency, that what I should have been planning, was my wedding. In a country that I don't even know if I'm being allowed into yet. Makes perfect sense to me, how about you people? Beyond all expectations and hope, by some divine gift of the immigration gods to whom I have been praying on a regular basis (once every three and a half seconds for the past six months or so...), my application has actually been reviewed by an entry clearance officer inside of three weeks. It's an actual miracle!! Only...not. I am pretty sure real miracles are not supposed to leave you in the grip of a panic attack. This breathlessly anticipated email did not say Yes! Come on over! Nor did it say No, we obviously don't want you. What it did say was that my application was incomplete.

I'm sorry. Say again. I must have kittens stuffed in my ears. Incomplete? My application was three bloody inches thick! I got raised eyebrows from the Worldbridge staff on seeing the gargantuan proportions of my application. I have every detail in there about me and My Guy from the day we were conceived to the second I dropped it off in Toronto. Everything!

Except.

I had everything in that application except a confirmed date for my wedding, of course. How silly of me. I am supposed to have booked my wedding with a registrars office or church before knowing whether I can actually go to England or when. My head is spinning at the logic of this. Or it may be lack of oxygen from the panic attack. One of those...

Of course, having to have a wedding date set up and ready to go does not seem like a reason to panic. Until you get to the next line of the email. Which says this has to be accomplished IN THE NEXT TWO DAYS! Not just set up and ready to go, but a letter written to testify to the fact that we are set up and ready to go and faxed in to the UK border agency. In two days. My Guy hasn't even talked to the local church yet to see if he can be married in the church after having already been divorced. We planned to do all that sort of stuff together once I got there. Now he has to somehow get everything arranged on his own, by friday. No pressure there.

The deadline is a big deal. If we do not accomplish our task by friday, I will have to resubmit my application. And the humongous fee. And wait all over again.

I swear to you the UK border agency is testing me. To see how badly I really want this. Well, I'll show them! I will get a date set, get them their letter, and fax it out to them before they can blink! Hmmph!

Or...I will sit here helplessly while My Guy frantically tries to get all this done for us in the next two days.

And meanwhile I will keep busy with trying to remember how to breathe.

it's in! finally!

I am so excited!

...


...and I feel a little sick.


But mostly SO excited!


The oh-so-important, much-talked-about Visa Application has finally been submitted. I can't even tell you how many times over the past six months I have said "...once the application is in..." Well, now it is. In.


Yikes.


I spent four and a half hours worth of my day yesterday filling it in online, after finally receiving all the papers I needed from my fiancé. Well, almost all. There was one bank statement that just never came, so he sent off the packet without it, and we crossed our fingers that a screen print of the account online would be enough. So you already know what arrived in his mailbox yesterday, don't you? *sigh* On the bright side, if he spends another five pounds he can get it to me before I have to physically hand in my application and the massive stack of paper that goes with it. Many, many trees have died in the attempt to get me to England.

Now I get to go plan a trip to Toronto next week. I think I get to go to the British Consulate there. Or something. I should probably find that out. Well, wherever it is I'm going they want to "collect biometric data".

*cue the discordant violins*

Does that sound as creepy and ominous to everyone else as it does to me? And, yes, I know that it only means they are going to take a digital photo of me and do some sort of scan of my handprint. But I can't help getting hazy visions of me strapped to a cold metal table in a dark room, the only light coming from behind the beings looming over me, shadow-people with enormous heads and shiny metal implements in their long-fingered hands, clicking and screeing in their alien tongue, all set to collect my biometric data...

Gah! I haven't had enough sleep. Obviously. Or I've watched too many episodes of X-Files. One of those.

So, I am off to the big city. Spending yet more money before I actually even know if I am going to be allowed to go to England in the end. I shudder to think how much has been spent on this process so far. Let's see...


Birth certificate $25
Passport $90
Postage $100
Application fee $1100
ticket to England $1000
ticket to Toronto $600
hotel stay in Toronto $200
passport photos $15

actually getting to go to England? priceless...and SO worth it!

Garage Sale Part I: The Wrath of the Gods

I am so tired today. This was the long-awaited garage sale weekend. We had been previously outwitted in our sale efforts by weather and prior commitments, but this one was gonna be it, come hell or high water!

Be careful what you wish for. Or about saying anything within hearing of the Fates.

Sigh.

Yesterday dawned....cloudy, drab and wet. As per usual this summer. But, having faith in the Gods of summer despite their lack of general attendance this year, I got up at stupid-o'clock ( by which I mean any hour before 8am. At least.) to set up tables and plaster pre-printed price stickers (thank you, WalMart!) on all that stuff that I no longer wanted and/or couldn't be jammed into a suitcase for a cross-Atlantic flight. Which, as you may recall, is roughly ninety percent of everything I have ever owned in my entire life or vaguely equivalent to the complete contents of a high-rise apartment building, courtesy of the spacial rupture in my bedroom closet which somehow allowed it to hold approximately three thousand times it's actual mathematically-calculated physical capacity in accumulated junk... erm... treasure.

*gasps in a deep breath, recovering from that sentence*

So. Tables were up, stuff had prices, spare change was hurriedly found. I should mention that all of this was taking place literally inside the garage which, though we insist on calling them garage sales here in the rural wide open spaces of prairie Canada, is actually completely wrong as these things invariably happen in the driveway or on our front lawns. However, despite my unflinching faith in the Gods of summer (you can't help but believe in Gods who will throw blistering sunshine and plague-like hordes of mosquitoes at you in the same afternoon, then make sunscreen and bug spray impossible to wear together. Only a spiteful... I mean playful... God would dream up that particular hell, forcing you to choose between third-degree sunburn and disease-carrying, itchy mosquito bites)...where was I? Oh, yes, despite my irrational faith I couldn't really help noticing the big dark clouds accumulating overhead. And the ominous thunder in the distance. Oh...and the fact that it was already raining. Yeah. Determination can only get you so far. Still, I lived in hope that there would be a quick shower then sunshine and rainbows would rule. Tra la la.

So you know what happened. It was bound to. I mean, I had flagrantly mocked the Fates and tempted the Gods beyond all endurance. The heavens opened up and it poured. Great gushing gallons of rain spilling from the sky, with me trapped in the garage along with all my worldly possessions. Just typical.

Thank the stars for those hardy garage saling souls who will not be turned aside by flood, fire or frippery when making their Saturday rounds. The sale was open for a grand total of an hour and a half before being shut down due to the combined power of the second scariest thunderclap/lighting bolt of my life and the fact that everything from my very first baby doll to my very recent and expensive craft books were mouldering and wilting in the damp air. And yet I still managed to make almost a hundred dollars. Go figure. I think a large part of that had something to do with people not wanting to actually step back out into the wet and the very real risk of death by lightning once they were in the relative dryness (and by dryness, I mean air so wet you practically needed scuba gear to breathe) and safety of the garage. Or it could have been the superior quality of my second-hand junk beckoning them in from the street and mesmerising everyone with the previously-owned goodness of it all. One of those.

So...two hours of lugging and sorting and pricing for an hour and a half of selling, garnering me a whole $92.85. Oh yeah. It was worth it.

I can hardly wait for next weekend, when I can have the pleasure of experiencing Garage Sale Part II: Sell Harder, where we will see our plucky heroine spit in the eye of the Gods and win a victory for garage salers everywhere. The heartwarming tale of the summer.

At least I don't have to price anything next time.

*gets a sinking feeling*

Oh...

wait...

...except that giant pile of superior second-hand stuff that was somehow completely forgotten in the basement when the sale items were being dragged out into the storm yesterday.

Well, crap.

one man's trash...

I realize I need to get on a regular schedule with the whole blogging thing. Sometimes I write in the middle of the night...as now, at 4:12 a.m. Other times in the morning before hauling my butt out of bed to start the day. And I publish whenever I finish, making the whole thing pretty much random and inefficient. Which kind of sums me up nicely, really, so I don't see that changing any time soon. Organization is one of those things I always say I'm going to do, or look into, or plan on investigating. And that's about as far as it ever gets somehow.

As evidenced by the sheer amount of trash that has been taken out of my room in my quest to purge before making the big leap over the ocean. Now, my bedroom has never been what you might call neat. It's ...lived in. Which is about the truest statement you'll ever hear, as I spend a good 22 hours in here on an average day. The other two hours are me in the bathtub. Cleanliness is next to...well, I'm clean, at any rate. Just not neat.

I never quite realized, though, how much actual stuff I had accumulated in thirty-plus years living in the same spot. I am still not sure how it all FIT in this room. Imagine a little room, ten by ten, with a corner of that taken out for a built-in closet. It is wall to wall furniture with a small floor space in the middle. That's it. But somehow I managed to throw away eight garbage bags full of total junk. We're not talking little Kitchen Catcher bags either...these are full-on Man from Glad black garbage bags with room for a small German car and that fridge-freezer you've been meaning to toss out. And lest you think I had nothing but garbage in here, there is at least that much set aside for the garage sale this weekend as well. The sale stuff seems to be taking up every available corner of the rest of the house. Where did it all come from? I swear the closet in this room defies the laws of physics, being somehow bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, my very own TARDIS of built-in storage.

Only now I have to whittle down my worldy possesions to what can reasonably fit into two suitcases and a carry-on bag. Which probably hold more than the little flat I am moving to anyway. It's what you might call compact. Sort of like a can of condensed soup.

Oh, and to update you, because i know you are waiting on tenterhooks for news, my laptop has decided to go for the full benefits package of humiliation by deciding to work! AFTER I had already performed the angry-customer phone rant. A bit of a glitchy start, but now the thing is working perfectly fine. Which annoys me more than it being broken ever did. And there's no one I can reasonably phone to rant about it!

So much for my new laptop. Now I have to work out how to break it again before I move. Dammit.

The root of all worry

It's a weird feeling, suddenly having all these actual grownup worries. I have never been the worrying sort, no matter what has been going on in my life. And trust me, there have been some truly concerning aspects to my life. Things any sane person would worry about, and for very good reason. But I've always been the type to just sort of shrug and wait to see what happens.

But now. I worry, I mull, I fret. There's the Visa application and getting everything done that needs doing before I leave this country, and things to get done in the next country before I get there. Which has all been sort of nibbling away quietly in the back of my head for several months now. But this past week I found the true meaning of worry. I know, I am a bit old for this stunning revelation, most folk go through it at about the age of eighteen or twenty when they are trying to make a go of their first apartment. And I have heard my siblings struggle over this issue many times over the years. But this problem has never touched me in any significant way.

Money. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. I have never before experienced this twisting, clenching in my gut that comes with wondering how we will afford to feed ourselves every month, much less ever get our hair cut again. And clearly we are going to have to learn to walk on our hands because no way are we getting new shoes! How do people do this? How do they live their lives with that gnawing, churning, writhing in their guts?

So here's what I've decided. I won't do it. I am going back to being the one who shrugs and assumes it will all work out in the end. I am going to be happy with what we have and not worry about what we don't. I am going to beat worry into submission with my natural cheery optimism. I am going to face life with a smile and a carefully planned budget.

I am going to let my hair grow to the floor and obstinately forget that long hair makes me look like cousin it.

I am going to remember my guy and our overwhelming love and what this is all for...

Aw, see? I feel better already. :o)

a place to call home

This weekend my fiance signed the rental agreement on our new flat in England. It's an odd feeling, knowing I have a home to go to in a country that isn't even mine yet. But the flat is another large step in getting me there, as I have to show on the Visa application that I have suitable accommodation, among other things.

And there can be no arguing it is suitable for the two of us. It's all awkward angles and odd slopes and strange corners, nothing where you expect it to be. Which is somehow ridiculously appropriate. It is so oddly laid out, in fact, that the photos my guy sent me just confused me, so he built me a little model of it online so I could see the weird and wonderful shapes we are going to attempt to furnish. Don't even ask about the windows. They are beautiful, absolute features in our high-ceilinged flat, lovely architectural details that give us unimpeded panoramic views of brick walls and parking lots. These windows make the space. They are also triangle. Including the one nine feet up in the bedroom with other flats looking down into it. I foresee this being a problem. At least for shy folk like us.

A quick search of the internet, of course, was all that was needed to instantly find several solutions to this window fashion dilemma! Every one of them hideously impractical and prohibitively expensive. The great Google has finally let me down. Luckily, we are a resourceful pair and came up with our own fix. Short of drawing you people a diagram, though, I doubt I can accurately explain our genius in the fabric arts. Lets just say it involves a lot of puckering and gathering, wire, and dangly bits that will need to be artistically chopped off. You get the general sense from that, right?

So, one decorating obstacle hurdled from across the ocean and feeling quite proud of myself. Not that this Goldbergian contraption of window fashion has actually been built yet. It's more of a ...concept. But I am sure my guy will be able to actually execute it, no problem. And if he gets confused, I'll build him a little model of it online so he can see the weird and wonderful shapes he is going to attempt to construct. No problem.

Uh oh.

You feel that? That was a "famous last words" moment right there.

Sigh.