No One To Blame

This sums up the last few days in my world...

Quite a bit of stress these days, some of it self-induced. I spent a good part of yesterday morning booking our trip to Cambodia for next weekend. Later in the day, someone from Kevin's office told me that we cannot use our diplomatic passports to get the Cambodian entry visa online (in advance) nor can we use them to get an entry visa upon our arrival in Cambodia. We must use our tourist passports. It was great to have this information in advance especially because a) we travel with our diplomatic passports and would have arrived in Cambodia with only those in hand and and b) guess what? As "luck" would have it, my tourist passport expired in early April. Agh!!!  Cue panic attack. 

For a while, it looked like Kevin and the kids were going to have a nice trip to Cambodia. Fortunately, I called around last night and, instead of using our tourist passports to get an online visa or a visa upon arrival, we can use our diplomatic passports to get visas at the Cambodian Embassy before we leave. The old fashioned way. Monday is a national holiday here and since we are leaving on Friday, I was concerned that the approval and turnaround time at the Cambodian Embassy wouldn't be quick enough. However, a couple of friends told me that it should only take a day or two so it looks like things will all work out. I hope to get all of that sorted out tomorrow and we should be good to go. I also made an appointment at our Embassy to renew my passport. I am not sure about the visa requirements for Vietnam (where we will travel in June) but I don't want to have to worry like this again. So absolutely not what I need right now.

I know I should be getting rid of stuff (and certainly not buying more) but I couldn't resist these...

Over the last few weeks, I have had some epic shopping trips trying to finish up my "to buy" lists! My friends and I spotted these plates in the pottery section of Chatuchak (the large weekend market) a couple of weeks ago. As is typical in Thailand, after asking if there were more available, we were told, "no in stock". More often than not, vendors would rather not make a sale if, in order to do so, they have to exert any effort beyond collecting your money. "No in stock", "no have more" or "no find" are familiar vendor responses. So frustrating! However, my friends and I knew the drill and we continued to dig around the shop (and I mean dig!) and uncovered a large pile of the plates so we were each able to get a few sets. 

The color is what first caught my eye but the detail on the rim is just so "Thai".

I bought a few in the blue celadon and then spotted the same plates in green so picked up a few of those as well. Each plate was under $1.00 USD.

I bought the rest of these plates at the next vendor over and love the detail on them. 

Kevin is on his way back from the U.S. and we are all very excited to see him. He is only here for a very short time and, with our trip to Cambodia next week, he really won't be unable to relax and get into our routine but it will be nice for us all to be together again. 

A representative from the moving company is coming this afternoon to survey the house and estimate our shipping weight. We have an allowance of 7,200 pounds for our HHE and we shipped 6,700 pounds here so not an awful lot to work with. However, we did bring several heavy items that we are not shipping back so it might all even out in the end. Fingers crossed. If not, I will continue to sort and reduce. 

Have a great Thursday.