Nope. Nada. None. So we’ll have to reschedule our flight. The packing is going fairly well, though I never realized before just how many books we own. Too many. Add to that the random drawer-stuff, and you have a fairly good picture of my life at the moment.

We were very pleased in the last couple of days to host my college roommate Sara and her baby girl Evelyn, who has got to be the cutest and smartest little girl in the world. Evelyn, 18 months, has enjoyed spinning my spinning wheel, playing with the air mattress pump, and going to the dog beach to throw rocks into the water and sit down in the waves. A good time was had by all.

I’ve just found this image of Barra de Tijuca, the neighborhood where we’re going to be living & working. The school is on the property of a church, which you can see in the upper right quadrant. It’s the funny looking white thing jutting out onto the lake. I think that the high rise just down and to the right is where we’re going to be living–near there, anyway.

In other news, or lack thereof, we still haven’t heard anything about our visas…

The good news is that we have our plane tickets purchased, and that we’re not planning to fly into this airport.

The bad news is that there’s still no word on our visas…

The guitar problem may be solved. I had the idea of finding a smaller guitar case, one which would fall within the airline’s requirements. I figured that buying a new case would be considerably less expensive than paying the $100 to get it down to Brazil, only to have to pay another $100 to get it back again next summer, then $100 to get it down next fall, then $100 to get it back here the following spring.

So I spent most of this morning driving around Lynnwood to our two local music shops, Guitar Center and Kennelly Keys, measuring guitar cases with my pocket tape measure, looking for that magic number of 62″.

None of them were 62″, but I got close. I found a beautiful, used, leather-bound Esteve hardsided case from Spain at Guitar Center, which was 63.5″.

In hope, I came home and called another nice lady at United Airlines, who told me that, with such a small discrepancy, they probably wouldn’t charge me the oversize fee. She also said that “we ship thousands of guitars every day, and very few of them are ever measured.” On the strength of this statement, and the belief that God wants us (and hopefully my guitar) to get to Brazil, I went back to Guitar Center and bought the used case. It fits my little cherry-red Jay Turser like a glove, and it’s nice and sturdy. Now, we just need to pray that the ticket agent at Seatac won’t mind the extra 1.5 inches.