I woke with the strong feeling that I needed to go to the office if I was ever to get any headway on my work this week as Monday-Wednesday, I got baby stuff to work out. I went to the OU around 8:30 with my flash disk full of comments on my lit. review from my supervisors. Sixty one comments on 3000 words, which I figured was one comment for every five words although this is, apparently, wrong. I got to my desk, hoping to clear out about half of them, the easy ones, and work on my strategy for the rest of them. If you follow my tweets, you know that I was not happy with the comments I'd read so far and was feeling like sending a nasty email, although I had not yet send such an email and thought I would take a little more time to work on it before I shot myself in the foot.
I started working through them, and it turned out that they were actually quite good and although I would have liked a little more encouragement, I was feeling like I was understanding and seeing the problems they were seeing. I hacked and cut and thought and deleted and replaced and worked through all but nine of them, leaving me with some more restructuring to do and rewriting, but I made some headway.
I went back to the apartment at about 12:15. Our apartment is small, but it's even smaller when there are three adults and two kids in it. I have been telling people that the only place I can be alone right now, where I can lock the door and no one will fuck with me in the bathroom at school, although even that has its limits. Needless to say, I've been a little crazy.
I was supposed to take my mother-in-law and Naomi to church, but the plan got changed, and instead of being sent to sit through the whole service, I had to take Yoko's mom and then go to the supermarket to get some supplies. This left me with about 45 minutes to myself at McDonalds, where I enjoyed cheap coffee, free Internet, and a little bit of freedom from the women in my life.
On the bad news front, igetting Mei a visa is going to cost 465 GBP, about five times more than Naomi's, because we're going to have to apply from within the country. I'm going to see if this is in fact the case, but if my interaction with the home office up until now is any hint as to how things will go, I am guessing the message I will get is, 'All the lines are busy now. Goodbye.' Seriously, no stay on the line and we'll be with you in three hours. It just hangs you up. Well, we'll see. The good news is that Mei will have claim to British citizenship when she turns 10, provided we stay in the country until then. She would then have three passports and be the envy of all her friends, I'm sure.
Finally, singing to Naomi 'Get on your boots, sexy boots!' when it's time to leave backfired today when she repeated, 'Seki butsu!' No, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm just a bad father. Stop calling me Stephen.