An Opportunity to Help with Microcredit in Ghana

This is a cool opportunity to help out an organization and get potentially win some neat stuff if you read, write or have a pulse. Check it out.
The Misadventures In Candyland: Operation "I Heart Joy Like BR80" Contest: "Hello friends. I've had problems with Blogger, so this is a new 'contest' post, only condensed. I hope by now, you know who New Medicine and..."

Process vs Outcome

We have had an email from the Medical Council. The paper will come on Monday, provided some small details can be confirmed by Steve's future employer. So by August 2nd we should be able to apply for our visa's. In one of life's odd coincidences, Steve took the boys bike riding on Long Island in Casco Bay last weekend. He met the owner of the local store/restaurant and the local sherrif who who was the husband of one of his old nurses. After chatting about our NZ plans for a while, (a really long while the kids tell me) they said he had to meet someone on the island and introduced him to the head of the New Hampshire NZ consulate. He was there vacationing there with his family. (Maine, and I guess New England as well, is a very small town). He is helping us to expedite the visas and they should only take a week to process. I am sure it will all work out. Everything else has come together so far, but I am so struck about how much we can't control. There are so many pieces to this and to everything in life that we have to trudge through and take care of, piece by piece, yet the outcome of it is beyond us. The key to keeping our sanity (ah...sanity, that precious yet elusive little devil) we (I) have to let go of how it all turns out. Monday will come...Monday will come...

My first post.

All that stuff at the top of the blog. It isn't true. Well, not exactly true. It will be true in about 20 days. Right now, we are still in Maine. Still in our gargantuan house surrounded by the mess of trying to cull down everything into boxes. Still living a feral summer existence filled with long days of endless streams of neighborhood boys in and out of the house like lines of ants in search of food. But we are getting there. We have a few small hurdles left to clear. We are still waiting for the paper from the New Zealand Medical Council giving Steve, the hubby doctor, the officially right to work in NZ. It is the same paper that forms the crux of the visa applications which sit on the counter piled 150 pages high waiting to be sent in to the embassy. Those form the crux of the basis for purchasing our tickets. I am reminded of the types of children's stories like Half Magic, in which a wish is only half granted, or in which a wish is granted in a very concrete way. We wished for excitement and adventure. Well, getting your visa four days before you are scheduled to fly out is certainly very "exciting." The moral of the story: Be careful what you wish for.