We are getting down to the last couple of weeks in the Pacific Northwest. It has been a very strange summer here – and not just because of the strangeness of wrapping up our life here. The weather has been cold and rainy, which is very unusual for August. It has made Paul and me long for Mazatlan even more, as if that was possible!

On the urging of a friend in Puerto Vallarta, we decided to go ahead and check into how difficult it would be to get our FM3’s up here. We had been planning on getting them in Mazatlan.

So, yesterday we headed to Seattle and were told that we needed a notarized “good conduct letter” from the State Patrol. The State Patrol here in Washington are the recordkeepers for all criminal records for all jurisdictions. So, we headed south to Olympia to the State Patrol headquarters, and an hour later had our notarized letters!

Then I made a bunch of calls to our bank trying to find out how to get a notarized letter stating that our income is sufficient ($1,500/month for both of us.) We got refusal after refusal from everyone we spoke to. So, I decided to call the woman at the bank who had helped me out with our wire transfer hassles when we bought the house in Mazatlan. She’s a career banker (as opposed to some of the people we had dealt with who were younger and probably less committed to their careers – and also less willing to try to help…) and she said she would do what she could for me. So I jumped in the car and gave her the sample letter from the Consulate. An hour later she had a notarized letter ready for me that was everything I could have hoped for! YAY!

Today we are spending the day at home, pulling weeds and generally taking care of things that we couldn’t do over the last week of almost incessant rain. Tomorrow we head back to Seattle to submit for the FM3. The fellow at the Consulate said it would be ready the same day! We will probably head back there on Friday to pick it up since we will be out anyway going to the escrow signing on our house!

So, we are making progress. Next week we head to Bellingham for a nice visit with our son and his family. I’m looking forward to taking the kids school shopping and having a nice relaxed visit since it will be a while before we see them again.