Ramblings of a Nervous Wreck!

I got my passport sent off today, woohoo! It will arrive in Buffalo by noon tomorrow. I hope they begin processing it before Thanksgiving and before the holiday slowing-down-to-a-sludge begins for them. My stupid anxiety and paranoia keep making me feel that I didn't do all the steps correctly, or send the little package off right, and the pessimism in me automatically turns the dial to Worst Case Scenario Thinking.

Getting tired of all that. The anxiety, paranoia, and pessimism have been dramatically warping my life since I was a child. Of course, I get told that I'm simply being stupid and to not think that way, but nobody seems to get that it's just not easy. Believe me, I've tried. I WISH it were that easy.

We started by going to Food Lion so my mother could cash in a container of coins that she had accumulated over time. Then we went to Walmart to pick up Thanksgiving food, check for legal-size print paper (which they didn't have, which means I have to traipse to the other side of Roanoke to the nearest Office Max), and to get photos done for Buffalo.

The guy at the photo lab was bemused when I showed him Appendix B of the region specific form section of Canadian immigrating. I asked him if he could adjust the crown-to-chin measurements to what Buffalo required, and he said he would try his best. He just kept staring at me as though I had asked him to take a picture of me nude. I guess he doesn't get immigrants very often, LOL!

The photos were done in fifteen minutes. I accidentally glanced at them. Can I just say ew? I looked drunk, with a beach ball face and a slight double chin that even stretching my face out a bit to lengthen my neck couldn't hide. Oh well, I'm sure Immigration has seen worse.

Maybe.

After we got all that we needed (and my mother saying she needed a tranquilizer to deal with my "stupid" anxiety), I sat in my niece's car and meticulously trimmed the photos to specification. They ended up a little crooked, which bothered me. I really don't know if Buffalo is going to accept them at all, but if they don't, they don't. I can't do anything about it right now.

Then we drove back to Food Lion to buy the turkey, which was supposed to be 39 cents a pound. The wild turkey chase (lol) and dreams of stuffing a cold carcass came to an end when a stocker informed us that they were sold out of everything but turkey breast. We didn't want to make a pilgrimage (lol) back to Walmart, so we bought a breast (now that just sounds weird).

Then it was off to the post office! At this point, I was so stressed, mushed in the back seat with my younger niece and my carseat-age nephew, trying to pore over my checklist and made last minute corrections to envelopes and stuff while the car was moving... well, my hands were shaking and I wanted to cry. Told you it was bad, LOL. And the guy in the post office was a total grump. I tried to be my usual cheerful self, and he wasn't having any of it. I just KNEW he was thinking "Bah, HUMBUG!" in his head the entire time. In the same bored drone that he used when speaking. I wondered if he had ever smiled in his whole life. Yikes.

So I think I got it all right. There's no use worrying about it. After so many months of worrying and the way my stomach has been acting up lately, I'm afraid that I might have an ulcer or gastritis (I was SO GENEROUSLY given gastritis around this time in 2008 and it was a horrible experience). Yeah, I worry too much. I worry needlessly, stress needlessly, lose sleep needlessly. I can't even summon up joy that I sent this stuff out, because I'm worried about jinxing myself and something going wrong, mainly with the photos.

Yeah, I'm a nervous wreck for no good reason!

But as long as everything goes well, this is the final wait. At this time next month, I'll either be back in Canada or getting ready to head up there. My husband is very excited and has been in an excellent mood lately. I can't wait to be home with him :)