I know it has been an unusually long times sense my last entry; many things have taken place. Before I get going on that I just have to say the State of Arizona has stupid laws regarding records.
In order to be considered to teach in South Korea, immigration and customs requires the applicant to show they have no criminal record by getting a criminal record check from my local sheriffs office. No problem right? I am a law-abiding citizen, I should be able to simply go downtown and get it. Pretty easy, right? Wrong. Not in Arizona. In this strange state it is legal to bring your fire arm into a bar but it is illegal for the state to give you a document to show a foreign government your not a child molesting sicko. To me this is crazy. You need a CRC visa to go abroad, for international adoption, tough.

Devilgirl and I were left with two options: get a CRC from the FBI or from the state of California. Devilgirl decided to go the FBI route and after three weeks they still had not even entered her data in the computer. She called our local representative in congress, Harry Mitchell he got on that for us. She had her FBI check in a few days! I could type lots more but will let her write more on that.

I chose to get my CRC from the state of California. I got fingerprinted at my local police station and mailed it to Sacramento. Looking back this part was quite quick when compared to Devilgirls CRC process. The annoying part was there was no phone number I could call and check on the process, just a voice mail where you could leave a message and they would get back to you; usually when I was driving and could not answer the phone. Anyways, I had my CRC in two weeks. Now, I just had to get it apostilled. This was what made getting the CRC from California a pain in the butt. I had to actually go to California from Arizona to get it certified. Not wanting to spend a lot of money I decided to do something I vowed never to do again: take the greyhound bus. *insert dramatic music*

My mother dropped me off at the The Phoenix greyhound station at 11 at night on February 2nd. The people standing outside and more so the people on the inside were terrifying. The people there make carnies look like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. There were people I was sure I saw on America’s Most Wanted. One man had dried urine on his clothes; another girl had socks so dirty the only hint that they were not dyed brown was the very tops were white. I quickly sat near an old woman and commented on the scary people. She laughed, told me she was happy a “ruffian” did not sit next to her and we had an interesting conversation for a few hours. She left on her bus about 20 minutes before my bus was scheduled to arrive. Two hours later (aaarrgggggg!!!!!), my bus pulled up, I got on and was off to San Diego. It was about 2 in the morning at this point and the bus was not packed so I got two seats. I keeled over and attempted to sleep. Then at 4 in the morning a 5-year-old Hispanic kid attacked me. He climbed over the seat in front of me and pounced on my head and chest. Normally being awakened in such a violent manner my reaction was to come out swinging. As luck would have it (for the Hispanic child), I realized two child feet were pressed against my face.

In the confusion I screamed for him to get off my face. I was unable to go back to sleep after that, I took out my Motorola Droid [which will be useless once I get to Korea :'-( Tear] and used the Google maps application and the built in GPS to find out where exactly I was. The two guys in back of me noticed the light coming from the screen and kept asking me questions.

"Hey dawg, where you going?"
“San Diego”
“Hey dawg is that an iPhone?”
“No”
“What is it, dawg?”
“A Droid”
“Hey dawg, can you get on the internet with it”
“Yes”
“Can you look at porno with it?”
“I assume so”

Imagine about 45 minutes of this. Then imagine his breath smells like the fish tacos he ate last night. Yes, it got old very quickly. When I got to Santa Ana where I was to change buses and go to San Diego I had already missed my connecting bus because the bust was two hours late picking me up in Phoenix. The greyhound attendant, as most greyhound attendants are was totally useless, clueless and rude. I have had better customer service in a Tijuana swap meet. From what I gathered the next bus to San Diego was in four hours, which was really was not going to work for me. I started poking around the bust station and realized that Amtrak also was in the same station. Doing the math I realized the next train would get me to San Diego in two hours, if I waited for the bus it would be six and a half hours until I arrived in San Diego – the same amount of time it take to drive from Phoenix to San Diego. I opted to pay the $20 and get to San Diego with time to actually have fun. The Amtrak was awesome, made me want the government to build trains to go EVERYWHERE in the United States. Amtrak really is an asset to our country and an upgrade of everything that is greyhound. Anyways I got my stuff taken care of and then I found 15 geocaches before I was back on the greyhound at 11pm that night. San Diego made me realize how I could never live in the country, when devilgirl and I settle down and move back to the United States, I am going to look into living in San Diego. Love it! Oh yeah, the attendant at the San Diego station gave me good customer service. It was like I was on a different planet.

I was placed in a town south of Seoul and Devilgirl was placed in a town to the north, we asked and I got moved to the same town. Right now we are just waiting for our visa to get processed and we will be off! Exciting!