No, that picture isn't a beach in Russia, although I've heard that the water is lovely in Sochi this time of year. But the image is a pretty fair representation of where many official Russians are right now, especially those who handle the paperwork for accreditations and referrals.

Even President Vladimir Putin was on vacation for a time earlier this month. According to The Moscow Times, the Russian president traveled with Monaco's Prince Albert II to the Republic of Tuva--a distant region in south-central Russia--to go fishing from an island on Lake Tere-Khol. (The ever-irreverent New York Daily News published a photo of a bare-chested Putin fishing and proclaimed him a well-toned head of state.)

While many Americans, according to a New York Times article, are taking four-day mini vacations, much of the world still just shuts down for the month of August. That Daily News piece on Putin noted that France's president had been on vacation since the end of July. I don't know how much vacation Russian government workers get, but when I worked for the French government, every worker got six paid weeks. And almost all of them seemed to take them in August.

I'm not going to begrudge Russian government workers them their vacations--we all need them. I will, however, join in wishing, like many prospective adoptive parents no doubt, that they had staggered their time off a bit this year to keep work rolling on the pending re-accreditations and the referrals that have piled up behind them. There hasn't been a new piece of paperwork to hit the Ministry of Education's Web site site since August 10, though I'm going to note that there are several gaps in the number sequence of the documents posted. Let's all hope that those have been reserved for more adoption agency licenses and that they will be issued soon. There aren't that many days left in August. Barely enough to warrant cracking open Anna Karenina again.