Lost in Translation

We're finding that some documents are easier to come by than others...and some of those others are virtually impossible to get our hands on. For some, all we've had to do is make a quick phone call or send a brief email explaining what we need and why we need it, and voilá! This week, however, that good fortune seemed to run out. For anyone who's seen the movie Lost in Translation with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, you'll know what I mean when I say that that sums up our experience this week. I'm not sure what we were thinking going after all the documents from the US, Canada, Lithuania, Latvia, and Peru first and leaving the documents from Japan for last. Actually, I do know what we were thinking - since we no longer live in any of those other places, all of this hunting and gathering of documents from a distance would surely take a lot of time and careful negotiations. And since we're here in Japan, and can visit the necessary offices in person, those documents, certainly, will be much easier to obtain. Apparently, that's where we went wrong. The documents from outside Japan are starting to trickle in at a steady pace, and those that are here in Japan, well, they're going to remain lost in translation for a while longer it seems. Bill Murray's character Bob says, "It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids." Is this what he meant?!