Odd two days and final 1-800A letter

A little delay, but yesterday was SO odd. First, I received sad news that our 84 year-old neighbor Pete passed away Sunday. Sadly, it was not due to natural causes. He unfortunately lost his life in a car accident caused by a speeding 26 year-old driver. It was, and still is, really hard not to think about that. I'm a little disappointed in myself because I saw him doing yard work on Saturday and didn't walk over and say hello. So sad! Anyway, this made the start of work week pretty bad. Poor, sweet, Pete.

As the day went on I was able to experience an extreme emotion in the other direction. Jason called to say that we had mail! He told me that I received my letter from USCIS but that his was still M.I.A. I emailed Yu Ping to tell her that it arrived but that we were waiting on Jason's. I also asked if this needed to be mailed to her and if it would need to be verified and authenticated before mailing the dossier. The answer was "yes" it needed to be verified and authenticated but that all I needed to do was fax it over to her, no need to mail it. Yu Ping also stated that we shouldn't have separate letters and that we should look more closely for Jason's information. I called Jason and told him to come to my work. We learned that his info was present and were able to fax it right over to Yu Ping.

She let us know that she received it immediately. We were informed that this part of the process could take up to 4 weeks. We were elated to have everything completed for the dossier and just crossed our fingers that maybe, just maybe, this would take a little less than 4 weeks to accomplish.

Cut to today...

Yu Ping emailed me with the subject of "options." Of course I thought "wow, things have been moving along so well, we FINALLY have our hiccup." NOT! She was actually emailing me to say that a colleague was heading to the Secretary of State today and my document was in her possession to get verified. I'm beginning to think Hillary has "people" or is not busy enough, to be able to stop and verify my paperwork. LOL

Yu Ping continued to tell me that we could also rush the authentication process by using a courier to hand deliver our paperwork to the consulate. HECK YA! I was down with that! For the value price of $108 we were able to cut down the wait time to a week and a half (at most). Then it got even better...Yu Ping said we'd have it by Friday or Monday at the latest. That's potentially less than a week and it means our dossier could go out next week. So, if you get Yu Ping's weekly update emails from me, next week it may say "one dossier sent out this week" and it may be referring to ours!

Just to recap...once our dossier is logged in China we will be able to have Yu Ping look for a match for us. Hopefully the quick matching for the year keeps up. I'm really starting to have hope that this WILL occur in 2010. I couldn't imagine a better a Christmas/Hanukkah present!!

Thanks for looking after us Pete!