What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Progress has been made! I finished the last piece of artwork for the drawers. This was the larger one, which was a bit more complicated than the others. However, it is done now. Yay! I also attached the pulls on the lower cabinet doors. Somehow, as usual, I managed to install one of the pulls in the wrong place, even though I measured. I managed to fix it, though.





Also, the treadmill arrived! I didn't expect it until Saturday, so I was very pleased. I had a good time walking on it and have already discovered some things. First, there is no chance I can listen to music while walking. I have no patience for that on the treadmill. I will have to do that when outside, which is fine. However, what I can do is work on Portuguese homework, respond to text messages, write stories, and read. Second, I am dopey after I walk, so I am probably going to need to eat some apple after I get off, as otherwise I can't really think. Clearly, this is my blood sugar dropping, probably from walking faster than normal combined with studying a language. Lastly, my left knee is already starting to hurt. It occasionally hurts when I walk a long distance, but I'm guessing that walking faster than I usually do is making it hurt sooner. When I talk to a doctor, I'll have to see what they say.

I had planned on finishing my computer hutch before I started a new project, but I'm not feeling like starting on the sphinxes just now, because they will be a bit of work. Instead, I think I'll make another hoodie.

Today is also the one year anniversary of us leaving Russia. It is fitting that I can also announce that Sasha sent out our boxes (just two) not too long ago, and they left Russia yesterday. Of course, that doesn't mean that Portugal will let them in, as customs here is notorious for sending back boxes, but I'm hoping that it will all work out. We'll see!

Two days of doing things in a row has completely worn me out. This isn't a surprise. So, today, I was really low energy. On top of that, we got a call just after I got up about one of the many deliveries that were scheduled for today, so I postponed my shower until after that. It took a while to actually arrive, so I decided to postpone my shower until after the second delivery arrived, which never happened. They are now coming tomorrow. However, after days of trying to order a dehumidifier, Joel found an alternate one from a place that is more local. For 2 euros more, we could have it delivered in 2 hours, and it actually arrived in two hours. Amazing! So, now, we have some hope of our laundry drying and our place being pleasant to live in (rather than being damp, chilly, and musty). Also, the repairmen came by and declared that the entire roof must be replaced (not a surprise).

In other news, we managed to hook up with Sasha today and spent about an hour and a half sorting though our stuff in Russia in hopes of seeing some of our possessions again. We will have him send a single box to see what shows up. It isn't going to be the most thrilling things, but I will be very happy to have some of my clothing again (and a bunch of paint brushes). We have one more box to go through, which we can hopefully deal with soon.

I also painted another tree and a half on the closet box and did a bit more work on the cushion covers for the benches. However, we are running out of ribbon, so I won't be able to finish anything until we get more. I plan on hemming the tablecloth while I'm waiting. I may also make some more compression socks if I have time. As much as I'd love to make another t-shirt, I need socks more.

Today, we contacted a few different places to try and figure out what comes next. So far, we still don't know where we should be applying for Portuguese visas. However, we heard back from the translators, and supposedly they will pick up our background checks and apostilles tomorrow. If that ends up working out, it opens up some options for us, even if we can't apply for the Portuguese visas right away. So, we are cautiously optimistic.

We're edging closer to the half-way point of our time in Estonia. The time we have remaining really is enough to do plenty of things, even though it feels short. However, I'm used to having some idea of where I'll be going next, or at least where I'll be living in three weeks. I can't say that right now, and it is stressful. There are reasons why going back to the US is a poor choice, which I'm not going to go into here. The main issue is that there are a lot of balls in the air at the moment. We don't need to know where every single one will land, but we need to know about some of them. To try and handle some of this, I have started writing our options out in computer program form. It is a tried and true method of handling lots of options and different possibilities. We also plan on Monday to contact some more people to see where some of those balls are, in hopes that we can narrow down our options. * crosses fingers * I'm pretty worn out. I hope we can resolve this soon.

I still intend to post a big update, but I'm also still sick. I spent all day with a headache and feeling nauseous, so I was pretty much only able to produce snot. Hopefully, this will pass soon.

We're on the bus to Narva. The ladies next to us are speaking Portuguese. We consider this a good sign.

I don't have a lot of emotional energy to write this, so it will (probably) be short. Everything on the ground here is still fine. That being said, we're going to be moving our base of operations to Estonia in a couple of days. We are planning on coming back after that to pick up more stuff and get things sorted out, but we don't know if that will happen. Hopefully, Russia will let us back in. Once all of our stuff has been moved to our new base of operations, then we'll somehow get it shipped back to the US. We will also head back to the US at that point. Our new lawyer was incredibly kind and helpful. With luck, we will be in Portugal by the summer.

I'm pretty tired and have more stuff to do than I have time (as nearly everyone does), but I held off on posting here yesterday, so that I could post when I knew what was happening with the QR codes (for covid vaccination that we have been trying to get for months). The good news is that we were able to get them. Yay! Mine seems to have been fine, but Joel's seems to be having some trouble. His account isn't showing the vaccinations, even though we got them at the same time. However, he was able to get a paper copy of the code, so that is something. Phew!

In other news, we have finally gotten tickets to go look at Lisbon. We'll go in February and are very excited about it. Now, we just need to keep our fingers crossed that there are no problems that keep us from going.

Well, there are two ongoing issues that are still ongoing. One is the walking issue. On like Thursday or Friday night at 4:30am, a painting fell off the wall (those 3M tabs that are supposed to hold paintings on your walls without damaging wallpaper or whatever aren't terribly reliable). The crash, not surprisingly, woke us up, and I just could not fall asleep again. That led to me not going out for a couple of days and not being on top of the whole drinking water thing, plus I started getting my period. So, yesterday, when I went out again, walking was tough. Today, it went better, but it wasn't great. I will try to be good about drinking enough water in the future, but there is a whole "house of cards" situation going on where I build a continually more complicated structure to manage my illness, which becomes progressively harder to maintain, simply because it is so hard to remember/manage to complete all the steps. We think that sunlight is probably a factor in why I'm doing so much more poorly recently, so hopefully, the situation will improve in the spring/when we move to Portugal. * crosses fingers *

The other ongoing issue is the proof of covid vaccination. Yes, we have little pieces of paper that say that we were vaccinated. However, the Russian government wants you to use their system, which consists of a website that connects all kinds of government services together. In theory, this is great. I always prefer making an appointment or paying for something via a website instead of in person. The problem is that, as foreigners, our documents don't match fit into the system well. We spent a great deal of time trying to get our passports into the system, and the website refused to accept them. Part of the problem is that everyone else in Russia is trying to get this to work too. Another part is that to get appointments to see the people to fix these problems, you have to be able to use the website that we can't use. Well, we were finally able to get appointments with the pension service to talk to them about why our passports weren't working with the website, since it is their database that the website queries for the passport info. However, those appointments were going to be in mid-January, and we will need the vaccination proof via the website on December 1. Needless to say, this was stressful.

I decided that perhaps I could get some more information from our immigration lawyer, so I emailed their office, before finding some more Russian government agencies that I could try to contact. Within about 20 minutes, the lawyer called and said that the magic trick to getting the website to accept our information is pretty easy:
Take the entire passport number and put it in the box for "series", which our passports don't have. Then, put a zero into the passport number box. It worked! Yay! This means that we have completed the first step! However, our proof of vaccination didn't show up. Well, according to the website, we have to have our accounts verified. To do that you can make an appointment with a multifunction center (via the website, which we can't use until our accounts are verified), use an online function via our bank (which doesn't work now, because our passports are using this strange scheme from the pension service, and which previously the app said didn't work with foreign passports), or though some other services, many of which say that they won't handle foreign passports. There is also an option to get a registered letter, and if the post office lets you have the letter, then the government assumes that you are who you say you are. Originally, I didn't go for this, because it says that this kind of account can't be used for everything, because it could take a couple of weeks, and because I thought that maybe going to the bank and trying to get them to change our passport number would work. However, getting a letter from the post office is probably our best bet. So, that's what we're going to do. Hopefully, this will work. After that, we'll find out if this crazy passport number thing has also screwed up our vaccination paperwork. Luckily, we have to go to the hospital where we got our covid shots to get our flu shots, so hopefully, we would be able to resolve that. Unfortunately, that is a long walk (12,000 steps), and I'm barely able to handle 5000 steps right now. However, I'll stress about that after we've gotten our accounts verified.

I have had days (maybe like 4!) of walking mostly like a normal person. DAYS! I got my new glasses on Thursday, and the normal walking started on Wednesday (I think). So, it isn't conclusive that the glasses are helping. It is usual for me to have some days where I can walk normally. However, if this continues, I may declare that the glasses for distance are doing their job. * crosses finger * I'm happy to see some progress on that front.

I continue to have much less knee buckling, which is definitely because I'm drinking more water. I was having issues with blood sugar, but after some trial and error (plenty of error), it looks like some quantity of carbohydrates between 155 and 160g/day is probably the right amount. Not only am I not starving, not stuffing myself in a desperate quest to not feel so terrible, and not feeling strangely ill, but I'm able to get a tiny bit of stuff done.

The next hurdle is dealing with immigration, which should happen in about a week. I am really stressed about it, even though it just involves standing in line and talking to someone (probably briefly). If we get our residency permits, there may be more standing in line or sitting around and waiting. However, I don't think it will take more than a day or two to get everything done. After that, I'll talk to the lawyer, which isn't especially stressful. Once immigration is all sorted out, we should be mostly done with stressful things for a while.