The Road Ahead
It's a rainy Saturday, because of course it is (god forbid I have weather that would allow me to look at my hives, its been too many weeks!), anyway, at least it's good weather for writing. I presently have four entries on my to-do list to write as soon as possible:
1. The Road Ahead: Update on upcoming travel plans and Cristina visa
2. A guide to the Otways for Medium
3. The Apinautica - Chapter 6 (first scene in Australia).
4. Book reviews of Unaccompanied Women in Norway, Three in Norway (By Two of them), Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), and To Say Nothing of the Dog
More on these later, but first thing's first: there's been a development with Cristina's visa!!
Cristina's Visa (to bring my fiancee here)
The bad news: the Department requested all the police and medical checks all over again, since it's been about 16 months since it was all filed. This is all kind of a big hassle. In fact so much of a hassle tha the lawyers say they'll have to charge us $1000-1500 more .. which is also a hassle.
The good news: is I'm pretty sure, and the lawyers concur, that this probably means they're finalizing the consideration of the visa and once we get all this in it may only be a few more weeks to months until a decision is reached! I think we'd kind of settled into thinking it would essentially never actually happen but now that this has happened I've been thinking all the time about how amazing it will be to actually have her here with me.
By far the most irksome of the requests is for me to once again have an FBI background check. I remember this being a hassle last time as well. One must fill out a bunch of forms, pay a bunch of fees, get fingerprinted by local police and have it mailed to them. And this last aspect, getting fingerprinted by local police, has turned out to be absolutely mind bogglingly difficult. I don't remember how I got an appointment last time, it might have been by pulling personal connections with the police force, because the official appointment booking website and phone number both NEVER show any openings. And even when I'd finally gotten one last time, I arrived to find they'd only take payment in an obscure form of payment nearly no one uses any more (money order from the post office), and when the FBI results finally came it was via an email with stern warnings that it could only be accessed once, like some kind of god damn exploding message, so I went out of my way to use a more dependable computer than my then-very-undependable computer. And so I'll have to go through all this mind you, when I haven't even set foot in the states since the last time I got an FBI background check.
I think the lawyers are saying as long as I've thoroughly documented my attempts to make an appointment and in light of that I haven't even been to the States in the interim, I should hopefully be able to get this requirement waived. But its not a certainly the department won't be officially annoyed about that and it's altogether a huge hassle.
The Road Ahead: Upcoming Travel
So first there was Ghana. They want me there from May 19th through the end of June. This is two weeks longer than last year, and I'm excited because this is the kind of work I most want to be doing and it even pays better than my regular work here.
Then Guinea asked if I could do another project there this year, and conveniently the three weeks right before Ghana fit right into our mutual schedules. BUT that's only two weeks away now and the official planning arm of that organization hasn't even gotten started on it (flights and visas) so I give it about a 50/50 of going forward vs falling through. But if it does go through then I'll be in West Africa for two solid months, which I think will be the longest I've continuously been in Africa.
And then one of my cousin's is getting married a week or so into July. Incidentally my cousin is getting married in a red wood grove -- my parents got married under a brazilian pepper tree, my older brother got married in a red wood grove, I've always said if I get married here in Australia Ii want to get married in this California red wood grove here; it seems we have a bit of a family tradition about this. I haven't been to the States in three years. And I'd probably be traveling there directly from West Africa (the Organization is going to hate me when they start trying to plan flights and get all my weird requests). And then if I'm entering the US from east, well then I miiiight as well visit my 96 year old grandfather in Rochester NY, whom I haven't seen in many years and he's getting up there. And if Australia really really wants an FBI check from me then I can more easily get it while I'm in the US.
After a week or two in California, IF her visa hasn't been approved yet, the plan is to meet up with Cristina for a month, I'm still wishy-washy between Spain or Colombia. We've been talking about Spain for over a year but on top of all this travel it feels like it would make more sense not to travel "backwards" to Europe and just go to Colombia, although practically speaking where we spend a day traveling to is probably much of a muchness between the two.
And then here's another travel-philosophy circumstance: after two weeks in California and a month with Cristina that would have me returning to Australia in mid August .... only to leave two weeks later for the world beekeeping congress in Chile. Or I could spend two more weeks with Cristina but you know even if we've settled ourselves in some cheap and beautiful remote beachside corner of the world, in lost income alone spending additional weeks on vacation is expensive, and it would still be way more cost effective to fly back to Australia, work for two weeks and then fly back to South America then to just say hang out in Colombia those two weeks.
But maybe, hopefully, Cristina's visa will be granted by then. Ideally if it was granted while we were traveling together that would be nice because then we could travel to Australia together. Ever since Mexico refused her entry I've been afraid to depend on her traveling alone, not that she's not an extremely capable woman but I think border security would be less likely to play games with her if I was there with her on my arm.
Other Things
I've posted a few things to Medium now(introduction, and the Melbourne, Penguin Prom and Grampians parts of my "Visiting Victoria" series; and one of my stories that had previously won third place in some international travel writing competition, The Road to Zenzellma) and "joined a publication" (globetrotters), so I can make posts that everyone subscribed to it would see. It does seem like if you use it right you could potentially get more interaction than on livejournal now, and some people do seem to use it as more of a personal journal, but by and large it does seem still more oriented to public facing posts. And there's a lot of crap on there that looks shamelessly put together for SEO and/or by AI. One thing that's kind of funny about Medium is instead of "likes" there are "claps" and you can clap an entry ("story") you like up to 50 times so it can look like you're getting a lot of likes but then you realize it's only three people.
Last week I wrote the first draft of the first scene of my first stay in Australia for the book I'm working on. Because this is a travelogue and not a everything-that-has-ever-happened-to-me, like the US parts it goes a bit more into exposition to speed through Australia, but this first scene I chose to focus on is a story I often find myself telling, how on my first day working for a very negative boss I got stung up a LOT more than usual, possibly indicative of bees sensing how one is feeling. Anyway I'll probably post that bit here tomorrow.
Okay, on to other things!