One month later

 Forgive me Father it's been 1 month since my last post. a lot has happened and I'm not exactly sure where I was at when I made the last post but I assume I was waiting for the visa to depart Vietnam. That sounds about right.

Since then I've left Vietnam and arrived in Cambodia. I still have another week before my initial visa here runs out and I’ve renewed for another month so I’ll be here until April. then I believe I will be headed back to Vietnam but to be honest, I'm not making long-term plans at the moment. 

I don't know whether I'll need to fly or take a bus or whether there’ll be another surge in covid cases as there is currently a new Omicron variant. This isn't Omicron. This is the new Omicron. Who knows where that's going to be at.

Since I've been here we've been doing a really good job of doing regular streams and we've gotten two friends watching most of them. 

Before I leave we'll do a couple of weeks at three episodes per week. Scott has agreed to that, so that's great. I feel really good about the channel right now but not so good about my visa and financial situation. I'm still waiting on a work visa from China. The paperwork has many stages to go through. I guess I'll start you guys off by telling you about that. I've done it before and it took 5 months. I'm hoping and praying that it doesn't take five months this time because I have no clue how I would make it in the meantime. I'm not sure how I'm going to make it in the coming month but that's a month away so why worry about it now? To start the paperwork, I need a criminal background check.

There's always a question of where you get it from and how you do it. It never changes but there always has to be many weeks of back and forth, trying to figure out the right one to get because if you get the wrong one and submit it, then you have a lot of time and money invested in something that has resulted in nothing. You’d think that you need to get one from the FBI because it should cover the entire United States. However, the CYA policy of the federal government means that they write on the document ‘not valid for employment.’ The Chinese government looks at that and says ‘oh we can't use this. it's not valid for employment.’ The federal criminal background check in the US is useless because they won't give you one that does not have printed on it, ‘not valid for employment.’ The only option is to get one from your local police station. the local police station will do a computer check that will be valid for every Police Department in that state. The problem, of course, is that you could have murdered and eaten a family in Tennessee and as long as you get the criminal background check done in Georgia you are just fine. don't worry about it. But whatever. I’ve gotten the Georgia check done.

It's now at the state department in Washington. when they put their stamps and official signatures and everything on it, it will come back to Atlanta, and then they will send the thing off to Houston where the Chinese Consulate is, and they will put stamps and signatures and official mess all over it and it will be sent back to the Atlanta. Then they'll send digital photos back to China and start the paperwork process there. Atlanta will physically mail the stuff to China and when the school in China gets the paperwork back I will be able to apply for the Visa where I'm at. wherever I am. unfortunately, I have no idea where I will be. In April I’ll head back to Vietnam on a 3-month visa and that should cover the whole time. I can just stay in Vietnam and substitute teach.

As far as the channel, I am planning to keep doing episodes if we cannot find any alternate funding will just go with the two shows a week that I've been doing since I've been here and stretch that out while we're in Ho Chi Minh City. if we can find alternate funding we will 

try to increase the number of episodes per week. It’s partially up to Scott. I don't want to do any episodes without him. I think they're much better when he's in the episode but if I get more funding and he isn't willing to do more…

 

we're going to do a live stream to edit into a video and the video is going to talk about a Kickstarter Campaign that we're going to use to raise a little cash for the series in Ho Chi Minh City. 

If we can get the Kickstarter funding then I think it's going to be worth it to do 5 episodes a week. we'll see how that goes. another source of funding that will probably take more time is a program where YouTube provides loans to new channels. Not sure what they're willing to give or any of the details but I'm going to look into that.

 so anyway that's what's going on with the channel. it's mostly about my struggle to find somewhere to hang out while I wait for paperwork to be completed. if I had started this paperwork 6 months ago I’d already been there this has been 2 years of constant surprises. the good news is I feel much better about the channel than I have since I started it.

I feel confident that I'm going to say this at the end of every post but I'm going to try and post more frequently. a lot of action this time between the last post and this one. that's why I want to post more frequently. I'm going to try to do it again next week. I'm going to post a link to the blog on the channel so that people can keep up with the behind-the-scenes goings-on.