Spring
Today certainly felt like spring. Sunny and low 60s most of the day, which I was immensely glad to see. I spent a distressing amount of time on the phone and the web today trying to figure out the best way to solve our citizenship crisis with Kate; I was under the impression that the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 covered her even though we'd never applied for a Certificate of Citizenship or any other such thing (and in fact had been discouraged from bothering with it by the consulate). Passports are running at 10 weeks of delay at the moment, and I expect it to get worse as we approach the end of the year deadline for anyone crossing the border to need a passport. Certificates of Citizenship, on the other hand, are currently about 2 years behind. The border patrol is currently hung up because even though Kate clearly met the requirements for citizenship at birth, she was never issued any official paper other than her birth certificate and so, depending on how the border agent feels, either receives a "oh, yeah, no problem; meets all the requirements" or a "this child is missing form N-600 and stamp I-551 and has never made a legal entry into the United States at any time during the last eleven years of crossing the border!! Commence freaking out!!" I was told by one agency that she could apply for passport or Certificate of Citizenship (though they recommend the passport because it is both proof of citizenship and a travel document), but told by another that one of the requirements for a passport is the Certificate of Citizenship. Thankfully, I think we can put together the documents we need (merely a notarized list of everywhere I've lived/worked/gone to school during my life, my marriage license, my divorce decree, my own certified birth certificate, plus the same for her father...) and be able to resolve this without a two year wait and spending hundreds of dollars. Fingers crossed!
Anyway, in between bouts of governmental bureaucracy, I went out to pick up Sammy from the vet. His neutering went fine and he's pretty much his old self again already, though I have some pain meds to feed him for a couple of days. Next week sometime we have the vet's okay to start the process of trying to actually introduce him to Bonnie.
I'd planned to get a lot of other things accomplished this afternoon but after Immigration all morning and traveling hither and yon to get a remote Flexcar so I could pick up Sammy in West Seattle, I'd barely settled down to get some work done when Kate's school called to tell me she had a fever and I had to come get her. Luckily, I had the Flexcar. Unluckily, that meant I couldn't use the Flexcar for the errands I had intended the rental to cover. After bringing Kate home and making a stop at the grocery store for OJ, Tylenol, and Kate's request of sloppy joes for supper, my time was up.
I got back and decided to just call it a day and get some yard work done while the weather was nice, before the HOA decides to start policing my bushes again. Trimmed away a lot of dead and overgrown plant life and came in smelling of blood and dirt (thanks rose bush!) and rosemary and lavender.
Updated my recipe pages a little with this great recipe for some easy Avgolemono (Greek egg-lemon soup) that we just love. Also fixed the link to the excellent Thai-style Ground Beef recipe; I hadn't noticed it was broken until I went to fix it recently and couldn't pull it up from my own recipe page. Finally, for all the Guinness Cake lovers out there, I finally added the Chocolate Guinness Cake to my recipe pages.
Anyway, in between bouts of governmental bureaucracy, I went out to pick up Sammy from the vet. His neutering went fine and he's pretty much his old self again already, though I have some pain meds to feed him for a couple of days. Next week sometime we have the vet's okay to start the process of trying to actually introduce him to Bonnie.
I'd planned to get a lot of other things accomplished this afternoon but after Immigration all morning and traveling hither and yon to get a remote Flexcar so I could pick up Sammy in West Seattle, I'd barely settled down to get some work done when Kate's school called to tell me she had a fever and I had to come get her. Luckily, I had the Flexcar. Unluckily, that meant I couldn't use the Flexcar for the errands I had intended the rental to cover. After bringing Kate home and making a stop at the grocery store for OJ, Tylenol, and Kate's request of sloppy joes for supper, my time was up.
I got back and decided to just call it a day and get some yard work done while the weather was nice, before the HOA decides to start policing my bushes again. Trimmed away a lot of dead and overgrown plant life and came in smelling of blood and dirt (thanks rose bush!) and rosemary and lavender.
Updated my recipe pages a little with this great recipe for some easy Avgolemono (Greek egg-lemon soup) that we just love. Also fixed the link to the excellent Thai-style Ground Beef recipe; I hadn't noticed it was broken until I went to fix it recently and couldn't pull it up from my own recipe page. Finally, for all the Guinness Cake lovers out there, I finally added the Chocolate Guinness Cake to my recipe pages.
Labels: HOA, immigration, Kate, recipes
