This past Sunday, Little T pulled out this bee that he hadn’t played with in awhile and asked me to replace the batteries so it could work.  Seeing this as a good excuse to stop playing Pirates, (which I am horrible at!),  I quickly agreed.  As I was searching for some batteries in a big stone dish we have on top of our dry sink, I was extremely delighted to come across our back-up camera battery that had been lost for ages. 

Now, this may not seem like a big deal, and it’s not just the high cost of the thing that made it such a treasure to be found. It’s the fact that we have been searching for it for nearly two years.   I had repeatedly emptied out that dish and never spotted it until a few days ago.  Weird? Not really.  For awhile now I have managed to not get overly upset about things that go missing.  I like to think that a spirit (the friendly kind) is just borrowing the item I am missing for whatever reason and will return it when they are finished.  Call me crazy, but to date I have not been let down.  I even found a tiny diamond hoop that was a small piece of a larger earring that I had painfully lost (Hubby had bought me the earrings eons ago).  The day we moved out of our last home, I found it lying in the middle of the floor as if it had been there all along.

Now, if only I could apply this same relaxed approach to some other things that keep me lying awake at night with worry.  Like getting a work permit to work in Germany.  After completing my required German classes at the end of last year, and spending months trying to figure out what I needed to obtain a work permit (now I understand why you can just pay someone thousands of Euros to do it for you) all I Hubby had to do was complete a one page application and get my employer to sign it. When I had my interview in the middle of June to renew my permission to stay, I handed my agent the form and fully expected her to tell me I was crazy to think they would let me work here (cuz, that’s how my mind works!).  Instead, she took the form and offered to just extend my stay until September since I had to wait for the government to approve of the request.  She didn’t even want a copy of my resume! How strange is that.  The only hitch was that I had to wait for about four weeks or more for a decision – she would call me when she received it.

I am not good at waiting.  Every time the phone rang, my heart would beat so fast that I could barely squeak out a “Beier” when answering the call (that’s how they do it here –instead of saying “Hello?” you are expected to announce the last name of the residence the person is calling.  Sometimes I still feel silly saying it, especially since it’s not even my last name, and just blurt out a  hello! instead.)

One day, Hubby had just left the house when the phone rang.  I immediately knew in my gut that it was her.  As I nervously answered “Roth” (and trying to do so the German way with a pronunciation of “Hoe…tttt”), in came Hubby back through the door yelling “Not even gone 2 minutes and you’re already on the phone with your lover!”  The look I shot him shut him up immediately, which is a good thing, as I could barely hear her tell me that my work permit was approved as my heart was pounding so fast in my ears.  I can’t remember the last time I jumped up and down after a phone call!  The only downside was that I had to wait 3 weeks to go to her office to get my documentation as she was off on vacation (like most of Germany is for July and August).

Yesterday was my appointment to get my paperwork.  Even though it was approved, I still had extreme anxiety. To make matters slightly more complicated, Hubby had to leave on business with the car, leaving me to get to my appointment on the bus and bringing Little T with me. Luckily my appointment wasn’t until 11am, but I still planned to leave 2 hours early just to be safe.  And of course, the night before I dreamt of taking the wrong bus and ending up in the opposite end of the city 5 minutes before my appointment.  Why do we do this to ourselves??!

I arrived with 45 minutes to spare and equipped Little T with a new Donald Duck comic book and a big bribe that if he was good, I would take him to McDonald’s after for lunch. Promptly at 11am, she opened the door and in we went, again with my heart beating like crazy. As she shuffled through some paperwork and asked me a few questions that I could barely understand, it became apparent that there may be an issue due to the head office being in a different city than where I live (even though there is an office here). After a few phone calls, she seemed to get thing straightened out, but warned me that next year when I reapply I should make sure there is no confusion.  I nodded my head in agreement, trying to conceal a big smile wanting to escape.

It was only after she pasted my permit into my passport that I had a sense of relief.  And to think about all those months of worry suddenly disappeared in a matter of seconds after I received what I was worrying about. 

Things get lost and are found again.

Things do work out after all.