organisation slowly occurs

[baratron]

I have slowly been acquiring more organisation for my trip to alt.polycon 16. On Tuesday I went first into Kingston to have some passport photos taken, then to the Passport Office in central London to hand in my form for the Fasttrack service. Although my passport doesn't expire until March, the US is paranoid and likes you to have at least six months left. So I needed to renew the passport. Apparently, it normally takes "about 2 weeks" to renew an adult passport (at a cost of £72, iirc). The Fasttrack service is guaranteed to take no more than 10 days (at a cost of £97). There's also a Premium service which takes a mere 4 hours, but costs £114. In theory, with the trip being on 29th January, I could have just sent it the normal way, but I decided I'd pay a bit more to have it sped up.

Because I am stupid and pressed the wrong button on the passport photo machine, I have two sets of crap passport photos as well as the decent ones. I'm not sure what to do with them. Some of them will be ok for if I need another British Rail photocard or anything like that, but I'm not sure what to do with the mega-hairy ones (where there is BIG HAIR blocking out parts of my face). Perhaps someone would be able to commit art with them? That'd be nice.

I'm in the stage where the trip doesn't feel very real yet. Too many more weeks of work before it... I'm excited, but it seems like it's ages away.

But yay! I'm going to be meeting kshandra!

Comments

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

FWIW (and more or the benefit of others, since you've already spent your £97), you can also do it through the Post Office's "Check and Send", which costs an extra £7 over the standard £72. For this they check that its basically OK (including that the photo should meet the new 'biometric' guidelines) and quarantee it is processed a bit faster. I did this in early December and got my new passport back a week later.