Unpleasant news

Just got back from a wonderful vacation but so depressed I don't feel like writing or doing much of anything. The calls for the August A-100 have gone out, and James's clearance renewal still isn't done (after eight months--and he'd already had a clearance before!), so he can't start then as we'd long been planning, which would have set us up to be a perfect Chinese-speaking tandem couple working away in Beijing next year. Isn't it awful when your dreams are crushed? (No melodrama here, huh?) I am very bad at handling disappointment--and more than disappointment, the feeling of having long-held and very well-thought-out plans not work out.

Anyway, it's a long story of stuff that has been stressing me out for months and that I haven't been writing about here, but I guess the moral of the story is a) sorry I haven't been writing much, and b) the State Department giveth and the State Department taketh away.