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So, today I got my request for the nursing transcript to go from my Uni to the US to be assessed sent in. Thankfully it’s only cost £25 this time – being a repeat of my previous request. This allowed me to tick the first box of my items in the ‘the great escape (list)’ in the kitchen. Kathryn’d already made a start on her items…

…to be fair, a second one is just waiting on that International Money Order from the bank arriving – then that can be ticked off too. Of course, these ticks are the ‘application sent’ ticks, not the ‘oh yay, oh yay, we’re moving oh yay’ ticks.

I’ve also popped off an e-mail to a few shipping companies, and I’ve also mailed a bunch of random customs brokers in the SeaTac area too. And I’ve spoken to Jonathon at JLH about fitting costs for the Escort axle / diff / brakes / sierra box – which is a bit painful, but he’s going to get back to me with a quote.

So that’s all in progress.

I’ve also made bread-and-butter pudding (but with Rhubarb and Cranberries instead of Sultanas. I know, WILD!).

Aaaand in less good news, I think the bearings on the washing machine are starting to go. It’s fairly abused – with both Kathryn and my work being uniform-wearing working places it gets used a lot. I also am not the nicest in terms of keeping loads light… So it wouldn’t be entirely surprising, but it would be quite upsetting. I’ve looked at what’s involved in changing washing machine bearings – and it’s definitely doable, but given the thing weighs approximately 80,000 tons (it is an insanely heavy washer/drier) the idea of moving it – probably outside – and then stripping it down pretty much completely does not fill me with deep, deep joy.

Or something like that. I am attempting to envisage this bit like the moment the rocket boosters start on a space rocket, lots of fire and smoke and seemingly not a lot of movement.

Today not being a bank holiday mean that, despite me being post-night super tired we stopped off at the bank with the International Banker’s Draft form. Continuing the theme from Friday’s visit it was not a quick process.

The cashier hadn’t done one for ‘years’ and didn’t really seem to believe me when I explained that I’d been to that very branch on Friday, and they’d checked, and it was still a paper-based request. She then (whilst being very nice) spent a long time going through available online forms… her colleague having suggested that she also thought it could be done online, or at least, electronically at the bank…

After a lot of staring and searching they both concluded that they were wrong, and that the woman who’d checked on Friday was right, and that we needed to use the paper form. Then I asked how much it’d cost (because if it was insanely expensive I might have to come up with some other plan). The Cashier, having decided that she couldn’t reasonably quickly find the information handed it off to her manager who then ended up ringing somewhere and waiting around 10 minutes on hold to find out how much it’d cost, and it seemed, how to actually process the form.

Finally we reached what I think is success. The form is being faxed… they will then get the requisite monks out of retirement to hand ink the relevant piece of papyrus with the runes required to transfer $88 to the US. That done, they’ll summon a horse and cart, and speed to the house.

When it arrives I can send off another piece of the ‘getting registered in the US’ paperwork. Still, the slight delay is probably handy – it’s giving me time to practice NCLEX questions. It turns out that US nurses are expected to know a lot of care for what we in the UK would consider specialities – for example I don’t recall learning about care of the post-craniotomy patient. It’s not something we see a lot in the ED. Some of it I can answer just through knowledge of fundamentals + guesswork – but I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere near a passing grade yet. When people said it was hard I don’t think I’d quite realised.

Anyhow, so that’s going well.

In bad news, my laptop’s taken to resetting itself. Fairly frequently, with an accompanying Kernel panic, at least some of the time. Sometimes it just does it without recording anything. This, I’m taking it, is bad. Unfortunately I’m a bit unclear about where we go forwards from here. I’m hoping to receive my Jolla tablet in the not desperately distant future – which means that perhaps a desktop plus tablet would be a better combination. But it’s not going to arrive just yet, which leaves this period of distressing absence of a reliable computer.

Weirdly, and I do wonder if it’s temperature related, it seems to run at around 70 degrees C, which seems a trifle hot – and the fan runs pretty much continuously. I stripped it down ages ago though, and it didn’t seem to be full of fluff or crud.

Meh.