Monthly archives for August, 2013

Back in the U.S.

For those of you who aren’t connected to us by other social media, two weeks ago my father was diagnosed with stage four cancer in his abdomen. Due to the extent of its spread and other complications it is inoperable. When he discovered the news my brother was in Afghanistan, my sister in Washington State, and myself in Italy. Over the past week we and our families have returned to our home of Tennessee to spend time with our father while we can. It is an incredible gift to all be together, and more importantly, to have the chance to say goodbye. Due to the circumstances I will be staying in Tennessee likely until the end along with my sister to help my mother during this time. For that reason I will have to put the blog posts on hold for a while. My hope is that once I return to Italy I will be able to pick up where I left off. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the blog and the next time I post you will get an email. For those of you who are interested in what is going on with our family you can see the Facebook page we have setup at: http://goo.gl/X9v7ZJ . Also, some of you may not know that my father is a pastor. Even though he is now at home receiving hospice care he was able to gather enough strength to give his last sermon at the church he just began pastoring only a few months ago. This was his last message: http://goo.gl/FLjAhr  Until better times, thank you.

Have Cats Will Travel

Since we started this little journey there has always been more than just Amy and I. We have two cats that we’ve had almost as long as we’ve been married (nearly 10 years). As with all things included with moving out of the country, taking animals with you involves, you guessed it, bureaucracy. One stroke of luck of course is that in Italy, cats don’t require a long quarantine to move into the country, just a clean bill of health. However, there is a specific order in which you have to do certain things like give them rabies shots and such. They first have to be digitally tagged, then given a rabies shot. We did it in reverse order before we even knew we would be going out of the country. By the time we figured out we even had a problem to fix there was too little time left to fix it.

Ironically, it scuttled an option that I was pretty hesitant to go through with in the first place which was to take them on the plane with us (to save on even more paperwork and bureaucracy on the other end). Traveling with small dogs I see people do all the time, cats not so much. For us there would be a couple of reasons to give pause. First, one of our cats has essentially turned into a bit of a grumpy old man (I’m still considering changing his name to Walter). He likes us well enough, and anybody else he spends enough time around. That “enough time”, however, takes longer than your average TSA security check, and one of the things that would have to happen is they would have to come out of their carriers during said security check. Riiiiiiiight.  Yeah, that’ll go well. The last few times we’ve taken that cat to the vet they’ve had to bring out the thick leather falcon gloves and examine him without taking him out of the carrier, and a few times he’s even had to be sedated…through the carrier no less. I would have handed off that little job to the TSA guy before I even pulled off my shoes. “Here you go pal, best of luck. Oh, and those little white latex gloves aren’t going to help you much, but you might want to keep them on hand to clean up the blood with.” Of course, it also might mean I’d have a cat on a terror watch list somewhere. The second reason is even if we made it through the security without one cat getting us arrested for possessing a deadly weapon, the other cat I’m fairly certain would get us banned from flying on that particular airline ever again. You see, the grumpy old man actually travels pretty well, he just doesn’t like strangers. The other one loves strangers, he just hates traveling, period. As soon as whatever you’re in starts moving he starts the yowling, panting, and generally freaking out (he doesn’t hold a candle to my father-in-law’s cat who drools everywhere and looks like something out of a pet cemetery movie though, thank the Lord).  We’re pretty sure he’d make all that noise the entire plane ride. It drives us nuts, and we like him. So I can only imagine what other passengers would think.

This, of course, was no longer an option (darn the luck) so we were to our next option, which is to have them shipped after the fact. In steps Amy’s mom, who at this point deserves some kind of award for taking on this half of it. Countless hours of driving and keeping them at her house separate from her little puppy (whom they have a tendency to stalk and torture). Shipping a cat is a lot like sending an underage child somewhere on a plane, except you don’t put the little tike in a crate and store them with the luggage (no matter how much noise they make). They have to be secured in a crate and sent with food and paperwork, and they even have to be hand carried by someone from one flight to another if there are connections. In this case Amy’s mom was willing to take them to Atlanta (there’s an IKEA near by, that didn’t hurt :) ), where they could do a direct flight to Rome. By my math she has done about 38 hours of driving for us in this whole process. Thank you , thank you, thank you…..

Now this gave us an excellent excuse to do a few things. First it gave us an excuse to go to Rome, what a shame. It also kinda pushed us out of staying in a hotel and into the corporate housing for the time being because not many places take pets (at least cats anyway). That’s a bonus. I know it sounds awesome to stay in a hotel for a few months and all but we’ve done it before. It gets old pretty quick. A few days after moving our stuff over to the temporary housing we set off to Rome, which is a five hour drive from here. I won’t get into the details of that part simply because I’ve got to write an entire blog entry on driving here, what a rush. Suffice to say that to get there in five hours you take the Auto Strada, which is basically like an Interstate but it’s also a toll road. It takes about 40 Euro to get from here to there and then another 40 to get back, but the road is much nicer than the non-toll roads. Strangely enough the drive from here to there reminds me a lot of driving from our hometown in West, TN to Knoxville, TN (or even from Charleston for that matter). The mountains between here and there are beautiful and there are even towns perched up on peaks every now and again.

city on a hill

Really cool stuff. Unfortunately where we were going in Rome didn’t afford us any site seeing really, the airport is on the outskirts and by the time we got there we were honestly just ready to eat and go to bed. The following day was going to be all about paperwork and charades.

Picking up “cargo” as an individual and not a truck driver is a little strange, especially at an airport. It feels like you’re taking a canoe through the Panama Canal or something. The process starts where you find what you think is the cargo place and wander around lost until someone tells you where to go, then you sign in with security and hand over your passport. In exchange they give us a tag to put in the car window, a couple of badges, and directions to follow the big rig going through the gate. From there you proceed to the Delta cargo office. Lucky for us we ran into the guy we needed to see getting into the elevator. “Oh, I just saw them. Lots of meowing….”.  Yeah, that’d be Milo, who should be hoarse by now. This is where we had to get paperwork signed to take to the vet. After doing his part the guy gave us his number and then jokingly (I think, anyway) told us not to call him.  From there we had to walk back across a large paved area through the security place we started at and up to find the Vet. An important note here is that here in Italy (and I think most of Europe) they don’t number floors the same way we do. The ground floor is 0, what we would consider the 2nd floor is actually called the 1st floor. If they know you’re American sometimes they’ll try and do the math for you and tell you what we would call it. I think the Delta guy got confused because he sent us to what we would call the 3rd floor…and nobody was there. Well, one guy was there, and fortunately he spoke a little English. Apparently that was the “Government” floor. Fantastic. The floor below was the one with the Vet. When we found her we discovered that there was going to be an issue. She didn’t speak a lick of English, and she looked as confused by the paperwork as we were. After a few minutes of charades she decided to take us to a guy a couple of offices down the hallway who spoke a little English. Turns out he was who we needed to see anyway. He didn’t talk much but after filling out yet more paperwork he hands it to us and tells us to go see the customs folks next to pay the fees, which of course is back through the security checkpoint and back near where we started. This was kind-of hidden away but once we found it they were more than happy to take our Euros in exchange for yet more paperwork. From here we were told to go and wait by the big open doors where stuff is being brought out and wait. Finally, the end of this process. We picked a spot and waited, and waited, and waited a little more. There were about five forklifts rolling around like they were in a ballet, but eventually one of them came out with a couple of familiar animal crates sitting on a pallet. I think people were surprised they were cats and not dogs, but there was no mistaking the yowling (this was still Milo).

Cat Delivery

Bear in mind they just spent well over 24 hours in a box getting only a little food and water the whole trip. No bathroom breaks, no beverage service, and no window seat. Milo was simply ready to get out of the box, you could tell he was stir crazy. Binx on the other hand was doing this thousand yard stare that looked like he’d been through a war or something. Poor guy was out of it, we were a little worried for him. Once we got them back to the car and got things situated we let them out one at a time to use a little box and then just left them out together for food and water. Milo, the one that hates to travel, was all recovered. Litterbox, food, water, sleep, boom, back to normal. Binx on the other hand spent the first 15 minutes trying to cram his fat rear end under the passenger seat, and we weren’t even moving yet (we still had 5 hours to go though). Eventually he calmed down and napped. It was Milo who, true to form, yowled pretty much the whole trip back jumping from the back seat to the front seat and back again every few minutes.

Now of course they’ve been “home” for long enough to get back to their normal selves except I think they have a little bit of jet lag. Night time now is a battle where they want to be awake and downstairs and feel like we should be there with them, making racket and noise to be sure we know they still exist. Or they’re hungry, but they’re always hungry. I know that some folks are shaking their heads (especially you Dad :) ) thinking this is an awful lot of work and expense for a couple of animals. Honestly, I just need something to yell at.

I'm a human

Flashback: Titles Really Are Important

After the whole passport fiasco it should come as no surprise for folks to learn that I’m not really big on bureaucracy. I understand that some of it’s necessary, but with the nature of the beast being that it makes you want to rip your hair out (or somebody else’s, honestly)  leads me to prefer as little of it as possible. That alone makes my last few days in the States (and the fact that we’re in Italy, which apparently has perfected annoying bureaucracy) that much funnier in a “I may have to be medicated at some point” kind of way.

A short history of my Nissan Titan. A few weeks before we found out that we would be going to Italy, we were pretty thoroughly convinced that the opportunity had passed us by and as such we plowed through a long list of things we had put on hold that were getting kinda time sensitive. One of those things was a Nissan Titan that I was trying to sell for my brother who is a Chaplain in the Army and spending a few months in Afghanistan (thanks, bro!). Honestly, I really wanted the truck (and I was having a little trouble selling it anyway) and since we were pretty sure we weren’t going out of country ourselves we did the paperwork, traded in our older truck and bought it from my brother. Loved. This. Truck. Had there been any way to keep it I would have, but alas it was not to be. Interesting plot point is that its previous registration and title was in Tennessee. Spoiler alert, this becomes very important later.

Of course, discovering that we actually were going out of the States meant that I had to sell it, but we had to wait a little while because, well, we kinda had to drive places like work and stuff (who knew, right?).  So as the week before we left was upon us we finally got to where we could sell at least one of them and then sell the other a few days later when we could get along with just one car. Of the two we chose the Torrent because we needed the truck for a few things to get the house ready. To make this as simple as possible we decided to take both of them to Carmax and sell them off, not a problem. We took them both there to get an offer just to be sure we could handle it financially and sold the Torrent back to them (we had gotten it from there a couple of years before). So, fast forward a few days and we have 60 some odd hours to go before checking our luggage and having our bodies scanned (more good times) I take the truck in to get it re-checked and sell it. All goes well, I get the same offer as before, I walk up to the business counter and after a few minutes I discover that Houston has a problem. Or rather, I have one, a BIG one as a matter of fact. They started asking me questions like, “have you recently moved?”…..Um….no, I’m about to. “Are you sure?”  Well, I have been skipping out on my time at lumocity.com and ginkgo biloba pills, let me double check. NOPE! I didn’t forget that I changed residences in the last four weeks. I did buy the truck a couple of months ago, but the paperwork should all be done now. See, here’s my registration and proof that I’m paying on the loan. Yeah, none of that matters apparently, the title for the truck has been sitting in some bureaucratic purgatory for two months and is in some status where I can’t actually sell the truck (I have to add a note here that every time I’ve tried to even type the word “bureaucracy” I have to have spellcheck fix it. I. Hate. This. Word. But I’m not bitter). Anyway, so what is the remedy I ask? Not sure, they say, you should check with your bank. Fantastic! They close in 10 minutes. In one word “traffic”, I didn’t make it. Moving on.

The next morning (the day before we leave) I was sitting outside our bank branch waiting for the clock to tick past 9 hoping that this was going to just be a quick fix but pretty sure that the odds were somewhere between 1 and the headline “Genius Billionaire David Basham…” being printed. When I walked in the doors I managed to meet with the same lady that setup the loan for the truck so she knew the back story and took a look for me. Turns out that it’s not the bank holding things up, the truck title never left Tennessee. They didn’t have it, thus, they couldn’t release it. So, do you know what that means? Yep, a trip to the DMV! For a least a split second I entertained the idea of going home and simply saying “we’re not going…”.  Ok, not really, but come on?! The DMV? They hold the key to getting this done before tomorrow? It’s like having Dr. Kevorkian being scheduled for your life saving surgery (I did, however, begin checking the news for my being declared a billionaire).  Fine, on to Leeds Ave. where I can get a number, sit, and contemplate the meaning of life just because I have the time (even though I really, really don’t).

DMV

Apparently now they use algebra in where you are in line, there’s a confidence boost for you. As my number was called and I explained my situation (you know, about this leaving the country thing) and after a few clicks and a half ream of paper printed later they explain to me that Tennessee apparently doesn’t use the same system as South Carolina for titles so they have to do it manually and it just hasn’t been done yet. Two weeks I get, even a month I’d understand, but TWO MONTHS? I could have walked it there and back by now myself. Apparently some of my frustration started to seep through (with that sentence I secured the understatement of the year award, go me) and as I re-explained how I was going to be on a different continent come the next afternoon one of the managers overheard me and stopped for a second. Sadly, I can’t remember this guys name to save my life. He asked for my phone number and said he would take a look into it with another one of these he had. I honestly didn’t expect to hear from him. I left the DMV, and dropped off my stuff at Comcast to cancel my internet access and as I was leaving I get a call. “Hey, because it was there so long they were happy to rush it through, should be available to sell tomorrow.”  Am I being punked? Where’s the camera? I thanked the guy as best I could and tried not to say “I love you, man” as I ended the call.

Of course, this was no guarantee. Carmax was saying it could take a week so we spent all evening figuring out what we would do if we couldn’t sell it before we left. The really crappy part here is that Carmax doesn’t open until 10 AM, our flight leaves at 4:45 PM. The DMV opens an hour earlier than this, but the wait time that morning to find out the title status made it not worth going. So, after getting to Carmax a tad early and waiting for the business office to open we handed the documents to a young woman and asked her to check for us. It dawned on me about halfway through all the clicks and logins she had to do that we just dumped a LOT of pressure on this woman. After explaining everything we stood there looking at her as if she was going to decide whether we won the lottery or not. Ok, you can stop holding your breath, sure enough it was where we could sell it. Forty-five minutes later we walked out with a check and headed back to the house to get our stuff and go to the airport to check in a little early, and then celebrated our last few hours at Buffalo Wild Wings enjoying boneless wings and sweet tea they aren’t going to be serving in Italy. Oh, and the moral to this story is, you know that thing people say about titles not being important? Not universally true.LoveThisTruck But Had to Sell It