Slow News

A heavily-inked sheet covered in swirls and crests and official stamp-like artwork arrived in the post the other day.
It was from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, and it said, 'Welcome To The United States'.

I've been living in the US for about twenty months now, so someone with paper-power loves that sentence. No one who has just arrived in the US gets that letter. People getting that letter have to have been living in the US for months, if only to take the time to familiarize themselves with the paperwork required to get it.

It was a letter telling me that I am now a legal permanent resident of the US, and my Green Card will arrive in the next few weeks...not in late 2007 as Krissa and I expected.

And, as luck would have it, I'd just returned from England, so it did sort of make sense. But they were flukey in that respect.

I suppose the government has sort of been giving me the cold shoulder all this time, like I was sitting on one side of the room and all the suits in Congress and the Senate were huddled on the other side of the room, ignoring me, but NOW I'm welcome.