Blah Un-Christmasy Legal Document Blahness Gah, I thought we had this whole Italian citizenship thing more sorted out than we do.→[More:]

It turns out that various documents needed for my Italian citizenship application need apostilles - statements from a state/country that the notary which notarized your signature that the document is real is him/herself actually authorized to notarize stuff (!) - and translations. Fine - this is easy enough, and the translator we've chosen is awesome and gave us a discount for basically no reason, so yay!

But the apostilles! OMG, the apostilles. I thought we could get California apostilles on California-notarized documents regardless of their states of origin, given that I got a Cambridge University-issued certificate notarized/apostilled in California for use in Latvia. This is a same-day, walk-in, easy easy thing to do in LA. Over the counter, in-and-out!

But nooooooo. We need apostilles from the states *which issued the documents*. This means mailing basically priceless (in terms of time/effort spent obtaining them from various relatives!) documents to random offices in Providence and Albany and Carson City and hoping they get a) processed soonish (I'm home for the appointment at the end of February) and b) returned at all! I'm so, so paranoid that the one envelope that gets accidentally thrown out with the casual-Friday donut box at the Secretary of State's office in Nevada or whatever is going to be MY envelope.

Anyway, a big ugly paranoid paperwork thing that I can't just do myself, or solve from 6000 miles away. Blah!