Paperwork and Brain Fog

Aging is supposed to be something we accept with grace as the trade-off for living a longer life, and other than a few "dammit"s  now and again, I think I am dealing with it as best I can. 

As mentioned in a post a while back, we are planning a lengthy trip to China. We used to live in Asia and traveled to a number of Asian countries.  While I had not been to China over my life, I avoided such a trip wanting instead to place resources, time and money, to learn more about Europe.  Recently, my sister and sister-in-law encouraged us to join them on a China adventure and wanting to spend time with my relatives who live so far away, I decided to spend the money. The trip requires completion of a 4-page visa including attaching a few other documents and copies of documents. The trip organizer also included a rather lengthy set of instructions for all the paperwork. I put it off over the holidays. In January my sister sent me an email wondering if we had made our plane reservations since we needed to do that before filling out the Visa.   For some reason, I thought this was also a reminder to hurry and get Visa stuff done.  Another example of aging since I panic and do not think things through and do not ask for clarification as I plod forward.  We made our plane reservations a few weeks ago.

It took me three days to complete the Visa application (which is valid for ten years - China really loves us!).  I would spend three hours each morning and then put it aside for my sanity's sake.  I kept making mistakes because I realized that I was just filling out the PDF and not reading the directions on how and what to fill out!  As I age, I think I know more than I know and I hate the tediousness of directions anyway.  I used to be more careful about directions, but now I like plug and play stuff far more or resort to bribery to get someone else to do it.  Finally, I started to re-complete the application by reading whole sections of the directions.  That improved my accuracy slightly when I reviewed both of our sets of papers.   Finally, on the third day of this nightmare and after a few emails from my two sisters, I went through the application step by step, line by line. (For some reason in our inclusion of all the hotels and dates, they do not want to see you are going to Tibet - Political? - so we followed those directions and I omitted information on that stop.) Thank goodness this is all done electronically or I would have wasted reams of paper and expensive toner ink.  I scanned our driver's licenses, attached a check, completed the return address form and tucked in our passports.

I was sooooo proud of myself that I poured a glass of wine.  That afternoon I drove to the drugstore and bought a FANCY stiff envelope for mailing of the paperwork including our passports to a service that will do all the running around at the Chinese Embassy as well as send whatever is necessary to our travel company.  They said it could take up to 6 weeks for processing, so I should be sure we did not need our Passports before that time.   No problem!

Today I got an email from one of my sisters explaining that we should not send the stuff off more than 6 months ahead of the trip!  This would be seven months ahead of time when I counted my mailing.  I am hoping they will give me a pass...please.  If they send it back in a week or so, I will just have to return it, because it will then be in the correct time frame. (I actually expected them to send them back for some minuscule error anyway.)

I think sitting around all winter and passively watching birds, passively taking photos, passively eating carbs, and passively binge-watching TV in the evenings has overcome the blood-gorged pathways that send nutrition to my synapses when I ran the elliptical and lifted my weights two or three times a week.  You can't win.