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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