Thank you for your condolences and wishes - they mean a lot to me. I was able to get a week's extension from the visa office on Friday. I arranged for him to go see the notary again and resend everything - properly. He was meant to do it today but I have had no email so I don't know whether this happened. However, I also received an SMS message today saying to ring the visa office. The message they gave me was that they'd ring me if that had any further queries. What?? This may have been the visa officer acknowledging the extension I asked for, but it was a weird message. However, it did enable me to ask questions about the postage and apparently they *can* receive post that requires a signature. So there is hope that the initial letter will arrive (although this info contradicts the website and I've learnt the hard way that what these people say is not always the case). I will still need to change my daughter's ticket back to NZ for Christmas, which will cost several hundred, and may not be the end of it because I may need to change it again. And there is still the possibility that this all goes really really wrong (especially as we are going into Christmas) in which case I'm in a situation I can't even begin to think how to solve (no passports, no visa, tickets to the UK that would cost 1000+ to change, a job I'm meant to start on 1st Jan, a deposit on a rental property etc etc ... it would take thousands of dollars and too much time to fix everything). All I can do is hope at this stage. It's an understatement to say that I had no idea that moving to the UK would be this hard. I was offered the job in May, and here I am in December still not sure that everything is going to work out ...
