The next chapter, in which we visit a notary and herd cats....

First of all, thanks so much to all of you for the good wishes, encouragement, and prayers. You have no idea how much I treasure all of you, and am so thankful for your support in this process. I am hanging in here, and have a much better report for today...

So, today we treked out in the rain with our huge pile of documents to be notarized (not to mention the multiple copies of each in case we made a mistake...which we did!) Steve had called our friend Jack at the bank to ask when would be the best time to come by--bless Jack, he said it was not a big problem at all, and even stopped by while we were there to ask if there was anything else he could do to help us out. But I think the lady who acutally notarizied the documents was a bit overwhelmed! At one point she just stopped keeping track of the different documents and asked if she could make a copy of my list of paperwork and attach it to her records. I felt so sorry for her, especially since I was so seriously OCD about the whole process and obviously stressed.

I should mention that this was in part because today has been way crazee--we found out yesterday that one of the kittens has a respiratory virus and needs to be on antibiotics (including antibiotic eye ointment--try that on a cat! Luckily she's feeling better today, but she's putting up a stiff battle against the eye goo.) However, until she's better, she has to be kept in quarantine from the other 2 cats--that means she's taken over the laundry room. Unfortunately, the laundry room is right across the hall from our bedroom--and last night as we were going to bed, her brother decided to serenade her outside the laundry room door (that, or he was saying, "nyah nyah nyah--you're locked up and I'm out here!") We made the decision to move her to the other end of the house to the office, where we wouldn't hear all this. Wouldn't you know, the office door doesn't shut as well as it should--we woke up with her in bed with us this morning--so much for quarantine. We promptly returned her to the laundry room, and she was not happy.

To complicate matters today, one of the guys from the church showed up this morning to replace our dishwasher---great idea, not so great timing. It's raining, I'm trying to herd cats out of his way (he had to go through the laundry room to the garage to turn off the breaker--so I had to move Amelia, then make sure the other cats couldn't get to her, then make sure they didn't escape when he left the doors open...argh!), and I'm trying to prepare dossier paperwork and do my actual job while finding him the vacuum cleaner, a bowl, old towels, you name it. Bleah.

Enough complaining about getting a new dishwasher. The best news of the day was that, having sent scanned copies of the dossier to C in NC, she told me that everything looks great--no changes! Whoo Hoo! Steve is making copies of everything now, and I'll take it all downtown tomorrow for the apostilles. That means it could all be in the mail Friday.

So, a crazy day, but with ultimately good results. God is good---all the time. Oh, and today is my mom's birthday---Happy Birthday, Mom!