Passport woe

Yes, I should be in the State of California but I ain't; I'm in rainy and cool Dublin, fixing the problem of not having a 'machine-readable passport.
So when I turned up at the heaving Dublin airport at 7AM on Sunday, I was ejected unceremoniously from the queue. Somehow, in spite of telling lots of people over the past years to check the position of visa requirement before turning up at the airport, I had completely omitted to take my own advice. My old pre-2000 passport was not equipped with the chevrons and there was nothing I could do on Sunday, to remedy the want.
Bright and early, the rainy morning finds me waiting outside the cement block that is the British Embassy. But the passports now demanded by Americans are so hi-tech that they cannot be 'built' on-site, so they have to go elsewhere to be constructed: minimum time - 2 weeks. We (because I was not alone in my foolishness)were sent up to the American Embassy to demand emergency visas. Without much hope we went and after queueing for some time, with US Citizens inserting themselves at the head of the line whenever they turned up, we were then sent off to Jury's Hotel, who were used to this palaver. We filled in forms online and printed them out, eventually. Then down to a pharmacy who took the requisite photographs, digital not kiosk and I hared back to the embassy just before lunch and presented the paperwork to an official, having been through the security checkpoint and been festooned with labels to identify me as a genuine applicant.
Seeing the other applicants emerging with the sad news that they had to wait 3 more days, I was not very hopeful, but after payment of €80 and a few searching questions about my American husband and children, my green card etc., I was told that I could collect it at 3pm.
Wow - let's hear it for the US Embassy boys and gals! So now I am off to Americay in the morning for my 3-week vacation, now reduced by 2 days and will be able to see what my female offspring is getting up to over there + meet friends not seen for years. Phew!!
Stress or what? The photo says it all - but I am not going to produce it here - even if I could.

Happy Birthday, dear offspring

It is Junior offspring's 21st birthday today and I feel so sorry for him. He mixed up his filming dates and will not feature in today's shooting of 'Tudors' but maybe he didn't really fancy hanging about in the state of supreme boredom that being an extra implies. He will be doing some later in the week, if he can be bothered.
However, he has nothing else to do and is still in bed at 2 PM. Worse still, there was nothing in the post, because he already got his present from me and I gave him his card at 7.30 AM today, containing a front door key and €100. This appears to be all he will get - and even though he never buys a present or card for anyone else, it still seems very sad that none of our small family could get it together to put a card in the mail. He was at some festival last weekend as his birthday celebration, so there are no more scheduled as everyone is broke, too busy working or about to go away and saving their money for that.
Older sibling says she cannot afford to send him as much as a card and has been surviving on $40 since her last paycheck and won't have any more until the next one - I really am going to have to sort that one out this summer.
All I can say is that he is following in the family footsteps - my own 21st was likewise unremarked by family members and none of my friends elected to throw me a surprise party. At the last moment, I tried to organise a tea party, but nobody but my housemates turned up, which was just as well as the (self)-catering was crap. All a bit of embarrassment really...

I'm ba-a-ack!

After I don't know how many hours spent trying to reconnect myself to this blog, Someone Up There - at Blogger Support, I'm not talking about some theistic being - who now knows more about me than I care to admit, has managed to sort out the decidedly ungodly mess I got myself into, with passwords and usernames, blognames and email addresses tangled in a Gordian knot.
So, - I'm back and as a Lady of Leisure, indeed idleness is a required condition in order to try to reorganise my life into something recognisable.
I don't think I can bear to go into the horror that was the exams right now, I'm just feeling pathetically grateful for getting my secret (not so secret any more) diary back.