Oh my goodness… who would have thought that moving to a new country and starting our lives over from scratch could be so stressful? Ok, I guess I did anticipate this all being incredibly stressful, it’s just so much though. The good news is that our visas came through with no issues whatsoever. Thank God! They also gave us the move date we requested, so we don’t have to rush things any faster than we already are.

I wanted to write another post here in order to remember what’s going on in my head at this point. It’s amazing how much of my life I tend to forget and this should serve well to record this part. My husband and I are pretty overwhelmed but are finding time to just step away from it all here and there to just collect ourselves. There is so much to do, I can’t even start to list everything. It’s making us a bit delirious.

Things I didn’t anticipate include the nightmare of booking our plane tickets… ok, not a nightmare but damn frustrating. We finally found a decent flight with two seats together (sitting apart isn’t an option for me… more on that later maybe), this is after several hours of research. I went to book the flight and my bank blocked the charge. Here’s the brilliant part, my bank is closed on weekends and NONE of the supposed after hours help that they contract out could help me. Ok, fine, I’ll use my credit card. Nope! I had a pending charge on my credit card that I couldn’t pay on because of the pending status, and because of this charge we didn’t have enough room on our credit card by about $50. You’d think that bank could up our limit $50, right? No. So I ended up reaching out to family who came to my rescue. Thankfully the two seats were still available and we officially have our tickets booked. What a relief! Another thing I didn’t anticipate was the TOR number that we’d need before the movers can pick up our stuff and before we can ship our dogs. I finally sorted that out, I think, and submitted our application tonight and am just praying it gets approved before our move. There’s so much more to do but these are huge time sucks that I hadn’t accounted for.

Nearly everyone we run into who knows we’re moving asks “are you excited?” and it sounds awful but both my husband and I might start twitching the next time we’re asked that. Why? Because we have been so out of our minds with this whole process that our moments of excitement only come in little bursts here and there. We really haven’t had time to let this all fully soak in. BTW, if you’ve said this to us and are reading this, please know it’s not your fault we’re stressed out of our heads, that’s a totally normal thing to ask. Actually, the question I’ve heard a few times that I just don’t get is “Why would you move to Scotland?” and at this point my response tends to be “why wouldn’t I move to Scotland?” and after the initial annoyance I manage “it’s just home.” Ok, I’ll quit being a grumpy-butt now… wait… no I won’t, just give me one more here. I have had a lot of people make suggestions to me about how to handle the move or they’ll tell me things about Scotland in such a way like I haven’t done any research or have no idea where or what Scotland is. I think this only annoys me because of the sheer amount of work I have put into this and in some way my currently ridiculously oversensitive brain twists it into thinking they’re undermining all of my work I’ve put into this. Yep, that’s where my brain is at folks.

Ok, I have more to say but apparently I’m supposed to be making dinner at the moment. More soon!