5, 4, 3, 2, 1….

And OMG indeed.
We fly out Tuesday morning.

To add to the jolly mix of tasks below, there is a new one.
Just when I thought I had at least gotten all the travel plans solid…

We booked our trip to London via Dublin, to visit Tom's relatives.
(The ones who are relatively nearby in case Sair has some kind of awful emergency whose nature I cannot even comprehend.)
And they are lovely people.
Then we take the ferry across to Wales (cos I love ferries), a full day in Wales (cos it's Wales), then the train to London, hotel in Bloomsbury, near Sair's college, and five days to hang out before dropping her off.
Sounds great.

Anyway, yesterday I was Googling around with other questions, and

ACK

it appears I have messed up Sair's student visa.

It's a UK visa, so the customs people at the Dublin airport don't entry stamp it, because they are the Republic of Ireland and not the UK.
They went to some difficulty to achieve this, and aren't going to undo it now.
But even so, apparently  British Isles, all of them, Skye and the lot, are inside of some kind of free travel group, so going from the Republic of Ireland to the UK doesn't provide an entry stamp either.
So they are separate, but not all that separate.
Who knew?

I've been madly phoning and emailing people on the question.
It may be that we can find some guy in an office in London who can see that she is there and stamp it.
Or if nothing else works, I suspect she could grab a cheap flight to Paris, turn around and come back and be entry stamped over the weekend.
 But it may also all be moot.

We applied for her Irish citizenship back in January, and we told to expect it to take at least 18 months, or more.
Fine.
It came last week.
We can now apply for an Irish passport, and are told that one will take 4-8 weeks.
Apparently when one has a dual citizenship like this, what happens is that the US passport is for  entering and exiting the US proper, but for traveling within, and staying endlessly, legally, in the EU the Irish passport is used.
So I think she can just stay happily in London this fall (though I mail her the Irish passport when it arrives here, as insurance).
She can come home for Christmas on her US passport, leave in January on the US passport, but use the Irish one on arriving in London again, to enter the UK.
And it won't matter whether The US one was entry-stamped in August or not, because she can be in London on her Irish passport perfectly legally.

I think.
 

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Why I haven’t been posting much lately

Sair has homeschooled since kindergarten.
We went through lots of permulations of this – from charter schools to completely unstructured.
And last fall we had to pull the whole act all together, and do the college application thing – SATs, transcripts, letters, AP testing, financial aid aps, and the lot.
Having actually gotten Sair into the school of her choice, now we're in the last leg of things, getting her all packed up and otherwise readied for her freshman year in London.
Much sorting of clothing, acquiring of xl-twin sheets, and hunting out used copies of books.
Normally my position would be to travel light, and just track down everything there, but the exchange rate sucks soooooo very badly that instead we are bringing everything we can pack.
I know she'll have to spend a lot of those weak dollars, but I'm hoping to limit it to specifically London stuff – theater tickets, food, travel – instead of essentially paying double for things that we already own.

And there's been getting Sair herself ready.
Passport, yes; student visa, yes.
And, of course,  as soon as we'd done all that paperwork, another long-term project came through.
Sair's grandfather was born in Ireland, which makes her eligible for Irish citizenship, and we sent off that paperwork in January.
(Because applying for colleges really wasn't enough busywork, you know.)
They said it'd take a year and a half to process, but dang it, it just turned up last week.
So, YAY, she's an EU member now.
We will get the paperwork for her Irish passport going too, before she leaves.
Of course, if we'd had this is May, she wouldn't have needed to do the whole UK visa thiing, and we'd have missed all that lovely paperwork.
Sigh.
She also had two sets of health forms, the regular one for the university itself, quite short, and one for their global program, which ran to ten pages and required an actual physical exam by her doctor.
Who had to be a new doctor, because Kaiser had just kicked her out of pediatrics into adult medicine.
But it all went well, and now her shots are caught up.
It's not that they think London is that much of a health threat, but rather that they have  programs all over the world, and one form for them all,.
So now she is pretty much prepared for anything
We were all set to get her last two wisdom teeth out as well, but the surgeon decided at the last minute that they really weren't quite ready yet.
So at least she's not spending her last week at home with massive holes in her jaw.

So I'm off now to rent off Tom's aunt's house.
(Because sometimes I wear my landlady hat.)
I had a tenant set up since July 20th, visiting faculty from Norway who had a slight issue with the availability, but took it anyway: "We're committed to renting your house, and will work out some place to stay for the week before it's available."
Sounds fairly solid, yes?
But when I emailed them the lease on Saturday, they said they'd found a place, sorry.
They could have told me, instead of just sitting on it.
It isn't that I will have hurt feelings, or try to hold them to their word.
It's just that we leave on the 12th, and my summer tanants leave on the 15th.
Slight panic.
But I've found some nice graduate students, also from Norway, but I don't hold a grudge.
So all is well.

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