Wild Day in Olympia

The beat goes on.

Yesterday was Secretary of State day for the Weinbergs. We had to take all of our paper work down to Olympia to be authenticated and notarized. Since one of the documents had been notarized with a stamp that is now expired- apparently they cannot change stamps until the day of expiration- we had to go back to that person and have her re-notarize it for us, which meant we had to wait for their shop to open. We did that and were on our way down to the capitol.

We hadn't quite made it to Lake Stevens proper and I said, "Are you sure we have everything we need before we drive all the way there?" Teresa asked me a question about a document that I had received in email form. I had been waiting for it by fax and then the lady in DC decided to email it to me instead, so that was a bit confusing; was I waiting for a fax still, no it came by email.

Then there was still a letter that was supposed to be delivered from someone, I can't remember who, from again somewhere on the east coast, "Did we already get that one?". 'I think before we go all the way to Olympia that we had better go back home and make sure we have every single piece of paper we could ever need".

As we were driving home we past Kimmy leaving for Seattle with Ian and we waved as we passed. We got home and about 2 minutes later Kimmy walked in the front door; "What happened, aren't you guys going to Olympia". "Yes" we replied "But we think there might be a package we are waiting for on Fedex". She walked into the house, picked something, I don't know what up, and walked back out. She came back in 5 seconds later and said, "Fedex is here". Thank you Lord for not making us wait and for not letting us get all the way there w/o that piece of paper.

Still a little frazzled we made sure we had every thing we needed and headed back down. The mall parking lots are bursting as we drive past on the freeways- people attempting to find the perfect gift that will change their "listed people's" lives, while being in a frenzy because they waited until the last second to purchase this life changing gift. I'm glad I am on my way to Olympia- should we ever be super excited to go to Olympia to visit the Secretary of States office?

We get to the office and the people there are really nice. They do this kind of thing all the time, so they know a bit more about what they are looking for than we do, but each state and country is a bit different and each agency has a different set of docs, so they are not totally sure what they are looking for either.

We found out that they expect every doc to be notarized before it gets to them, even though our agency made it sound like there would be some that would have to be authenticated and notarized by them. The lady said it happens all the time, but thankfully she didn't send us home or back out, she just did that for us.

We had all of our family background checks done previously, with the home study, and we had to go to the local police station to get one done for Washington state, which really made no sense to me, since that is wHere T has lived almost her entire life. Our home study provider sent the ones they had to us, since we had already paid for them. We handed them over to the lady at the SofS office and she said she had never seen this form before, it always looked different. She advised us to go the WSP and get a new one and have it notarized while we were there. So off we went to WSP.

We got on the computer in their lobby, since it is cheaper to do that then have them input it for you, and finished that up, but then the lady there told us it would be between and hour and 1-1/2 hours to get that back completed. In the mean time we had copies to make, so we went for a late lunch and went to Kinkos to copy all the paper work.

We had thought that we needed to wait to copy all these forms until oAter the authentication took place, but the SofS lady said that this was incorrect and that many agencies tell their people the wrong thing to do, since once they have been authenticated the forms cannot be separated from each other. Ok, we'll do that now.

We checked the PU time for Fedex while there and got the copies made, went back to WSP and picked up basically the same forms as we had previously, just now they were notarized by them and back to the SofS's office.

Everything looks great there. They were really fast and told us of a BofA that was closer than the one tHe other lady had told us, as we needed to get a cashiers check to send in the packages for the processing fees for all these docs. Got the cashier's check and went back to Kinkos to send them all off.

While there we explained to one of the staff what we were trying to accomplish and he was excited because his sister is in the process of adopting. We have a lot of docs to send and some are going one place to be processed and some are going to another, but could arrive with the other packet. So we wanted to put them all in one single envelope so the first person could do the work and then send them all to the next person. "No problem, here is how we need to do this", was his reply.

He grabbed an envelope and had me put the docs in that one, but then it was not large enough to accommodate all the other papers, so I took those out of that one and asked if he had a larger one. He did so I took those papers out and transferred them. There is a point to all this rambling.

He finished the transaction with us, but had not put the stickers on the envelope. T and I were a little reluctant to leave w/o those stickers and the address being on the envelope, but after about 2-3 minutes I finally told her we were going to leave and let God handle this. We left, got in really thick traffic on the way home, were late to Garrett's non league game, which he didn't start, so it didn't matter thatf we weren't on time.

I went to the concession stand, at half time, to get a hot dog since we ate a long time ago, and went to pull out my wallet, which is normally in my jacket pocket. I put it there when I am logging many miles in the car, so it doesn't make me "crooked" in my back pocket. It wasn't there. It wasn't in my pants pocket. "Oh no, did I leave it at Kinkos in Olympia"?

I went out to the truck and thankfully it was on the floor of the back seat- it had fallen out of my coat pocket sometime in the long drive home. "Thank you Lord".

The rest of the night was uneventful and we got home, relaxed a bit and T checked the voice mail on the home phone. A message from the Kinkos guy in Olympia. A client of theirs had found our checks in the "first" envelope and they had not gone on with our forms. When I had taken the docs out of the first envelope the checks must have slid out of those papers and were in the bottom of that envelope and not made the transfer to the bigger envelope. They put them in the safe over night and I have to call him this am to give him instructions.

When T let me listen to the message all I could do was laugh and think about how many obstacles we had to cross and how many places we could have fallen down and what would have seemed to be one of the easiest parts ended up being the crashing point. God gave us some glimmers along the way yesterday and He can still make all this work. It's really is too big for us now and it will be fun to see what He does with all this.

Please pray that all this gets done in time, especially with all the holidays and weekends in the middle of it all. I'll keep you posted.