Dossier Sees the Light of Day (????)

Yesterday, the MOE (Minstry for Education in Kazakhstan, for those of you playing along at home - this is the government agency that matches us with a child) asked for us to update our FBI clearance. This is the first communication we've had from any level of the government in Kazakhstan. Our fingerprints and clearances won't expire until August. So this leaves us wondering... are they just being proactive and getting us to run our prints again because our file is going to sit there until the clearance DOES expire? Or does this mean that our dossier is finally seeing the light of day and is possibly headed somewhere soon? We simply don't know.

What I do know is that Russell and I rushed down to the police station yesterday afternoon only to wait and wait and wait to get fingerprinted. We watched a woman come into the police station to get her car out of impound only to see officers "sneak" up behind her and arrest her right there in front of us... apparently she had a warrant out for her arrest! Sheesh! So at least it was an exciting wait...unfortunately for that woman. We finally got the fingerprints and I planned to send them off to the FBI first thing in the morning.

Except that first thing this morning, I got a call in my office (at 7:45am) saying that one of our two campus goats (which we keep for weed control) was found limping down a busy, main road not far from campus! So I grabbed a truck and went out looking. I found her, being held down by a friend from work who had gotten there first and was huddled on the road side (in the snow and high winds). Both of our goats been attacked by dogs and scattered away from their pen! So I spent the morning with my friend at the vet's office, getting the goats fixed up. Poor babies. They're okay now - but both have lots of puncture wounds and scrapes. They're pretty freaked out. We're moving them to a more secure paddock closer to the central part of campus.

So after trying to deal with that, I still hadn't mailed off my fingerprints... I ran to town (which is 20 minutes away) to get a money order, but then realized I'd left the required cover letter for the clearance check request back in my office. Ugh. Back & forth & back & forth all morning. Long story short... the fingerprints are now being overnighted to the FBI office. Whew. I wrote "ADOPTION APPLICATION' all over the outside of it so it goes to the right office (we learned that lesson the hard time the first time we did this... it took WEEKS and weeks and weeks to get our clearance back). The second time we did this, I wrote all over the envelope, and they turned it around in 10 days. Cool. Keeping my fingers crossed for that to happen this time, too!