RECHARGING THE BATTERIES

I'm really tired at the moment. It's been a fairly stressful couple of weeks here (for me anyway).

I've organised selling the apartment and buying another. This meant dealing with real estate agents, the bank and solicitors which I've done before but this time it was all compressed into a week and a couple of days. The bank guy was bloody pedantic and I had to go through lots of hoops to satisfy the mortgage demands even though we've got plenty of equity to cover the loan. Things were made more difficult by the Old Girl being in another country and needing to get papers to her to sign and to get a Power of Attorney from her. Also, her earnings history for the last couple of years has been in another country and via an overseas bank. My earnings history over the same time has been both non-existent and minimal.
Anyway, it's now sorted and I take possession of the new place at the end of next week.
But I'm tired.

I've also been organising to get a visa to go to and stay in UK. This is not as easy as it sounds.
Unless you want to pay thousands of pounds to immigration 'consultants' it has to be done on-line via the most complicated website I've ever come across. It must have been designed to keep people out of the country. I'm reasonably well educated, reasonably intelligent and know my way around computers but boy, this one is a doozy. I had to pay on-line also ($700) before it would let me submit the application. Now I have to wait for anything up to 8 weeks for a visa (I want to go over there in 5 weeks time).

To make things worse, the last two weeks have been the busiest at work since I started with export orders, new vintage releases, label redesign, creating a new brand, writing a company business plan and marketing plan.

Whew!

I know that Richard and Robert will scoff and regale me of horror tales of their working days and write posts of their own on these (although Richard will delete his when he wakes up next morning and reads what he's written under the influence of chardonnay). He needs to download this for his computer:

Still, for a man of leisure like me it's been bloody hard. OK?

So I'm going up north for the weekend to recharge the batteries.