I think this is it (is it?)

When you make plans to travel abroad for an extended period of time, gentle reader, take some advice from yours truly: expect your timetable to be subject to change.  You may be one hundred per cent ready to go in October, but find that your visa application won't be finalized until the beginning of December.  Sometimes it's nobody's fault.  Other times it's somebody's fault, but you'll never know it because they can hide their face behind a filing cabinet a half a world away.

So again, even if you're ready to go, make sure you're hunkered down somewhere comfortable in the meantime.  Make the best of being left to your own devices.  You know... devise something!

As it happens, December is about to dawn and Tara and I, at long last, are within a week of finally seeing our work visas.  I just got back from Seattle, where I turned in the final application at the South Korean General Consulate yesterday.  Our visa issuance numbers were a long time coming (pending a much-delayed inspection of our work site), but they finally came through last Wednesday.  Assuming no further delays, we could have permission to work in Korea by Thursday.

So I'm happy.  I've been feeling fairly stagnant at her parents' home in Canby, Oregon, unable to summon much drive for anything besides cooking a few meals and gorging on Netflix.  Holidays have come and gone, and they've been nice, but they've also been reminders of the passage of time.  Sometimes, the job I knew was waiting for us seemed more fantastical than real.  But now I'm warming up and I feel like moving and doing again.  With such a big change in my life, I feel more acutely aware of all I could be doing in the time left to me in America.

Of course, it's not as if I've been totally inactive in this period.  I finally finished Dreaming of a New Set of Strings, and that's not nothing!  I've also been writing poetry, as well as book reviews on Goodreads (a site which is somewhat unfairly encroaching on the territory of the good old WFJ Book Club).  The Wave Function Tumblr is also humming along as it does.  But Tumblr is easy, and I want to get back to trying something hard.  Something to be proud of.

Hopefully, you readers will see that something soon.  In the meantime, here's a song that makes me want to be less of a lazy-ass writer guy.