Blah Blah Blah.

I got all of my paperwork together (finally) and sent it all in to the Indian embassy. It seems that every single piece of it was a total ordeal. Still, it's in. I won't have it back in time to go to Austria, which is fine - I had to change my tickets anyway. If all goes well, I'll have my visa back my a week from Monday. I have one tiny hiccup in the paperwork - I don't actually have a utility in my name. So, we switched one in the house to my name, but of course I don't have a bill yet. So, the utility company faxed me a printout of my account information - name, address, account number - for inclusion in my packet of documents. I sure hope they accept it.

Assuming they do, I'll get my passport in just enough time to board a plane for Germany for the conference, which starts a week Tuesday. For safety, I'll probably change my ticket to Wednesday and miss the first day of the conference. I'll be there for a week, fly to Spain, meet the niece, visit Gibraltar and Alhambra, fly home, unpack, re-pack, and fly out 3 days after I get back.

In order to help fund all of this loveliness, I've put my car on the market. Trouble is, I'm pretty sure someone just tried to scam me. It all sounded fine at first - the person wanted to pay for the car via paypal and had arranged for someone else to pick it up. Fine. Whatever.

Then she "transferred" more money than I'd been asking for the car into my paypal account, and asked me to withdraw the extra and wire it via western union to the pick-up person. Huh. THEN I got an email, which I've forwarded on to paypal's fraud department, because it indicated that the money for the car wouldn't be credited to my account until after they'd gotten confirmation that I'd wired money to this third party. Riiiight. AND the grammar was REALLY bad. I don't think so, Tim. Do I look stupid or something? Do people actually fall for this kind of stupid crap???

So, yeah. Car not sold yet. Still, I only listed it 24 hours ago, and I've had 5 inquiries. Trying to stay hopeful.