Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Anatomy of an errand FAIL

I set out this afternoon on foot with Magdalena in the stroller intent on accomplishing four errands. Let's see how it went down.

1. Pick up Miriam from school. Done. No complications. Now I had Magdalena in the stroller and Miriam on her bike.

2. Get my signature on a financial document notarized. We walked from Miriam's school to the bank. I talked to one lady who told me to go to the next lady. The next lady told me to go to the guy one cubicle over. That guy told me to go to the Health Center since the doctors there are the ones with special rubber stamps for notarific purposes. The whole time, both girls wailed loudly for chocolates since they always get chocolates at the bank but of course today, there weren't any. Objective FAIL. As a bonus fail, I went to get money out of the ATM on our way out and I could not for the life of me recall my PIN. (I have since remembered it.)

3. Obtain a campus registration sticker for our car. I had collected the necessary documents ahead of time so I was sure I had this one in the bag. Not so. We got up to the traffic office and it was closed. Apparently they close every day between 12-2, and I was there right about 1ish. I chose not to wait around. FAIL.

Back to 2. I decided to go to the Health Center even though I had really enjoyed not spending an hour there every day like we did a few weeks ago with the various sicknesses we had going on. We waited for a while and it looked like they'd be able to do what I needed but not before the girls tore each other to pieces in a coloring page-related dispute. So we bailed. FAIL, again.

4. Return library books. The way Miriam told it, the walk from the Health Center to where her bike was parked on a rack was a veritable death march BUT WE MADE IT. And we returned the library books. Success!

Appendix A. Later in the afternoon, we got to Miriam's first ballet lesson on time. Another WIN.

Appendix B. Magdalena pooped her pants within 5 minutes of our arrival at the ballet studio. This might have been a fail except that all the bathrooms around here have these magical spray nozzle things by the toilets (often instead of toilet paper, which isn't so fun for that situation, but for a poopy panties situation it's brilliant). So she was sitting pretty within about 20 minutes, albeit without pants. We'll call this a WIN.

Altogether, not a bad show, don't you think?

MISSING

HP7