1 post tagged “visas”

i do believe that this march is the craziest month i have experienced in a long time. it's a mixture of the very bad, the very good and the very stressful. i can't believe how many appalling and generally stressful things have happened just in a couple of short weeks - and not just to me, but to a lot of people i know too.

• our car - our lovely alfa - was stolen (and to add insult to injury, when djeli went to pick up the vw golf hire car he found he'd been "upgraded" to a vauxhall astra. how that is an upgrade completely eludes me)
  
• a very precious friend found out she is likely to have cancer
• i am flat broke. i don't recall ever having been this strapped for cash in my life before (except that time i got stuck in belgium but at least that was just broke, not actual debt)
• a friend of mine got back from skiing to find a client of hers had died suddenly. then the mother of a friend who was staying with her died. then the friend of another friend died.
• djeli found out that, far from being in the fabulous position for contract renewal he thought he was, his project hasn't been allocated budget and so he'll probably be out of a job come the end of the month
• we just found out that our landlord is no longer working in the job he had in australia, in spite of our being told last time we saw him that the deadline for his project had been extended. given that his wife has hated every minute of being in australia, the chances of his taking another job there are pretty much nil; chances of them coming back here and asking for their house back are pretty much 100%
• if the previous point comes to fruition, this will happen mid-june. just after my parents arrive for a 2 month stay which is kind of dependent on our having somewhere to house them. with djeli's telford job come to an end, the semi-planned move to birmingham is also cancelled so we could all be living under newspapers in hyde park.
  
• mid-june is also when our visas are due for renewal, something which is currently a bit up in the air due to our tax having got way out of hand, so we need to deal with the tax and make that all sweet before we can even think of putting in the visa renewal application, and of course, we can't even contemplate trying to find a new place to live without valid visas, and djeli is pretty much unemployable without same due to the time-scales of the sort of projects he works on.
• i, of course, was working on a Grand Plan, with djeli's fabulous support, which would have seen me taking most of the year off work to sort out our finances and pull together a load of backlogged adminny stuff to really try to get my composition career off the ground at long last. this is looking increasingly cloud-cuckoo-land, even if djeli hadn't finally worked out everything from the joint account and discovered that i owe him £3,000 (i've been trying to get this figure out of him for 2 years now), and if he's out of a job, i'll be the only one who can still be employed in the space up till the end of the visas.

so... um... i've seen better months! but there's been flipsides too:

• yes, the car was stolen, but it was stolen just after we'd come back from skiing and it's never been so empty - all djeli's luggage and coat were inside, his ipod was inside because it had been to france with us - even the lovely fluffy picnic rug was inside! so the only annoying things that were lost were the fm transmitter (which IS a nuisance because they don't make them with signals that strong any more) and the shovel (from the Big Snow the other month). so yes, it's bad, but it really could have been a lot worse.
• i've achieved soooo much this month - finally managed to sort through all the junk that's been cluttering up the place for ages and am now getting through the big backlog of projects on my to-do list and generally getting things done (thanks, david allen!) - this includes sorting out my australian tax and heading into the final phases of the satie arrangement for america, which have been on my to-do list for 3 years and 2 years, respectively.
• penury has given me a new-found interest in budgeting and it feels good to be getting back on track and being able to plan for my money a bit
• the accounts ARE getting done! this feels like a huge step forward, and if we get through all the horror-things on the other list ok, then i'll be able to take them over and hopefully keep them running smoothly so we don't get into such a pickle again. at any rate, it feels good that there's forward momentum happening at last. and while the £3,000 is a bit of a horror, i'm glad to know what the number is - there were moments when i thought it might be much, much worse - 2 years' worth of christmases without knowing how much money you have can do a lot of damage...

so that's march as of now. bring on april, i say!