new passport

Ok, I'm finally back to 100% - now I have energy to work, cook dinner, and have time for blogging!

So, I just got my new, renewed passport. Out of curiosity, I pulled out my old passports (I'm so glad they send them back!) and compared them. Boy, is my face puffier in my new one compared to my old one! Then again, the last passport is a fair bit older than 10 years old, so changes are inevitable. So how do all of them compare?

I got my first passport when I was a kid, when my father was traveling quite a bit for work and my parents had a reasonable expectation that he would be going overseas. That didn't happen, and in fact, he was laid off shortly after I got the passport. No stamps.

I got the second passport when I was in high school before I got braces. Holy buckteeth, batman! I actually did some international traveling on this passport, but unfortunately not all countries stamp passports (much to my chagrin at the time). Four stamps.

I got the third passport in college. I ended up with two visas, one of which was in order to live in another country. That visa got a constellation of overlapping stamps because I kept leaving that country for various reasons, and customs insisted on stamping the visa itself and not the 10 blank pages behind it. Sixteen stamps.

I put in for an opportunity to do more international traveling for work. We'll see if that pans out - although I don't want to have an entire career abroad, I wouldn't mind it for temporary postings. My goal is to have a minimum of 16 stamps... let's see how I do over the next ten years.