Teeth and visas

I got my permanent crown. It actually does feel somewhat better than the temporary. I hope it continues this way. I really don't want a root canal. The way things have been going for me dentally, it probably wouldn't help anyway, and I'd end up having the tooth extracted. I don't want to be gumming my food on the trip.

We got our visa kits in the mail over the weekend. It contained applications for visas to India, Cambodia, and Tanzania. The one for Tanzania wanted the applicant's father's name and husband's name, but only for women (heh, heh). TCS is taking care of all the other countries. For these, we have to send the applications, our passports (!) and a check for hundreds of dollars to a travel document service. They promise our passports will be back two to three weeks before the trip.

My wife is driving two hours each way to get my father's visa kit and mail it and ours off today. I'm hoping the estimate of getting the passports back two to three weeks before the trip is a worst-case scenario, and having sent it off well before the deadline we'll get it back earlier than that. I'm not going to feel comfortable until I have it back in my hands.

One word of advice in case you're copying an Indian visa application: It's two-sided, so make two-sided copies. We missed that and had to go back and make more copies. My wife also forgot to sign her passport. Probably not a big deal, but she had already made copies of it for various purposes and had to go back and make more copies of that, too. Oh well, at least Kinko's (now FedEx Office) is close by.