For much of the summer an underlying theme for us has been, “Find Mark’s Passport.” All of the drawers, closets, and hiding places in the apartment were searched and searched again. Numerous trips to the storage lockers were made, and dozens of boxes searched and searched again. A side trip to the emergency room was undertaken after I closed the car door on my finger. Finally after admitting that it was truly lost (perhaps stolen last October when I was robbed) I tossed in the towel and applied for a new passport.
There have been horror stories of people need a passport to travel and not getting one on time due to the backlog at the State Department resulting from changes in US policy regarding re-entry to the country after travel abroad. A ten to twelve week back log exists according to their site, so I paid extra, nearly double, to expedite the processing and return of my application.
This morning in my inbox a message from the State Department appeared, with this key sentence in the middle:
This means you should receive your passport on or about 08/08/2007.
Yay!
