Well, you can see by the LONG gap between the first couple posts and this one that this person who issues the 'golden ticket' (Letter of Invitation) must have had an exceptionally nice vacation. So nice that he/she spent most of the summer enjoying it and only very reluctantly resumed work.

But, patience is a virtue and so now we must be brimming with it (feels kinda tingly) since we finally did receive out LOI on August 22nd. We depart at 6:33 pm Sunday, September 3rd for Petropavlovsk by way of Frankfurt, Germany and Astana, Kazakhstan.

We're already into the new school year and Claire starts as a high school sophmore while Julia enters 3rd grade. We have a tradition of taking their picture in front of the house on the first day of school, so here they are.

We're scrambling trying to get all the final pieces in place before we depart. You'd think that with all that time spent waiting, it would just be a pushbutton operation at this point. Not so. We're notarizing and apostilling the last few forms, making copies of tax returns, getting an obscene amount of pristine cash from the bank, et cetera, et cetera.