Vanishing Van!

Right now my family should be in Japan. After all, that's why my brother and I drove 1900 miles in 2 days. We wanted to see them before they boarded a plane and flew away.

They haven't left yet.

Reason why:

Someone stole the van. SERIOUSLY, who thinks it's a good idea to steal a red, 15-passenger van with Alaskan licence plates? But I guess we're in the northwest.

Here are some things we lost:

My older sister lost her credit card and the person has charged several things already.

Stacia's (youngest sister) little teddy bear :(

Jared's and I's portfolios for school, proofing we'd done a year the past year of work. We're working that out pretty well with the charter school.

And last and most important, the passports and birth certificates for those of us leaving for Japan.

Those last items are the most crippling. Without mentioning identity theft, it will give the family a lot of headaches because it takes about 3-12 weeks to get new birth certificates, which are required for passports.

It's looking like my dad will leave for Japan (he is required to report at his new station by a certain date) and my mom and younger siblings will be stuck state-side waiting for certificates and passports.

MEAN WHILE, my older brother and I will have to go back to Texas. There's no way in the world we can stay with them, nor could we do anything if we did...except form a posse and go after the dude who stole the van.

So right now we're pretty much Sleepless in Seattle.

We've gotten a lot of attention from the media in Seattle, but I'll talk about that in my next post.