ups and downs

I've been navigating birthdays all week long. Turns out that the entire world was born in August and September. More or less. And with birthdays come lunches and social events. I like lunches and social events, but they've been interfering with my ability to IM with Claudia, who's been going through a particularly stressful period lately.

She's still in Romania, and up until today, she didn't know whether she'd be given a teaching assistantship. Without an assistantship, she'd have no legal form of income, and she'd have to pay out-of-state tuition to boot. She kept putting off buying her return plane ticket until she knew, until her parents and I finally told her to get back to the US and figure out the situation from there. Thankfully, she got the assistantship after all, so crisis is averted, and my best friend is coming back home.

In the meantime, I've been trying to plan my trip to Toronto, with Claudia and Sarah, and unable to get an answer from either of them. I still don't know for sure about Claudia. She has to go get a Canadian visa for the trip, and the money is always an issue. Sarah's working on getting our dad to pay for (at least part of) the trip. I'm thinking I should call tomorrow and see if I can negotiate it. There's no way I can afford to pay for all three of us.

The whole trip is wrapped around the Hedwig convention, taking place in Toronto on the 24th of August. It's a short event to warrant a trip out of the country, but I'm looking forward to the trip, as much as I am to the convention. I'm in the mood for a spectacle.

And it occurs to me this evening that the trip overlaps with a team member's vacation. I'm not sure how that's going to work out, what with my boss now gone and me the (temporary) sole maintenance contact for our entire system, but I'm confident that it will. Really. In other words, the whole affair is a bit tenuous, but it'll work out, as things always do. My mom found my passport, which is a fabulous omen in and of itself.