Stuffness
I got my ALDL cable from Poland yesterday. It looks like a good quality unit. I did not much feel like testing it out, though, so I don’t know how it works yet. After getting out of work late, I wasn’t much in the mood to drive up to my parents’ house, pick up my laptop, bring it home, install the diagnostic software, then try the interface. Perhaps tonight, if I get out of here at a decent hour.
I did download the TTS PowerSystems Datamaster software, though, and gave it a try. It sure is cool. You can actually record (at a rate of 10 samples per second) all of the inputs from every sensor, bit and flag that the PCM monitors, and save it to a file on your computer for playback later, at any rate of speed. It even graphs the RPM, spark retard, knock counts and speed. This is some very cool software. Too bad you only get to run it 20 times before it shuts down and requires you pay $119 for a license.
Bad news: It looks like the INS has completely screwed up the I-751 application my wife and I filed in late 2002. This is an application to remove the “conditional” word from her status of permanent resident, which provides her with a new green card that’s valid for 10 years. The whole process normally takes a year or more, which is why I wasn’t concerned when it did exactly that. But the temporary extension on her travel & employment periods that she was granted has just expired, and no renewal was sent, so I started to get nervous.
To make a long story short about this INS thing, we came to find out this morning that the INS has somehow fucked up, and now our I-751 application is basically gone. The receipt number no longer exists in the system, so they appear to not be working on her new green card, and Miami confiscated her old one (for the same reasons that you have to surrender your old driver’s license when you get a new one issued). We’re in limbo.
I highly suspect the Miami local office for this cock-up. We filed our I-751 application at the service center in Texas as is normal, and within the customary 30 days, received an official “Notice of Action” from Texas stating that they’d received it, cashed the check and were starting to process it. But then, the gloriously retarded Miami office sent us a letter, telling us to come in for an “in-person” filing which, to be fair, is sometimes required of I-751 applicants. But what I think happened is that they did not properly send our application back to Texas after our in-person appointment, or somehow lost it or misfiled it, so Texas thinks we abandoned it altogether.
This morning, my wife called and started an inquiry as to the status of her case. Within 3-4 weeks, we are supposed to hear back from the Texas office, in writing, with an explanation of where her case is right now. From there, we can figure out what to do. There’s a real good chance whatever the solution is will involve going back to Miami, and there’s also a pretty decent probability that we’ll have to start over and file the I-751 from scratch again.
Wow…I hate that Miami office. They are all such a bunch of douchebags over there. My wife’s Thai friend and her American husband recently had to go there for their own immigration matters, and upon arriving, the officer they met with would only talk to them in Spanish—which neither of them understands. “English, please!” they both kept pleading, but the woman would not or could not comply. Eventually they got somebody to speak to them in a language they could understand, somehow, but shit…I guess Miami’s already been annexed by Cuba, because even half the U.S. government workers there speak nothing but Spanish! So much for “naturalization”, you smacktards. (Of course, the word “Naturalization” is no longer in the organization’s name, now that they call themselves “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services”…)
Anyway, it looks like we’re going to be dealing with the INS for a while longer. I was reminding my wife last night that if she becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen, we can take the INS out of the equation FOREVER, which is certainly looking more and more appealing in light of this recent tard-fest. Woohoo!
Sadly, this pretty much blows our chances for our big trip to Thailand this year, since if my wife left the country now, I guarantee she would have big trouble getting back in. So we’re thinking about trips we can take here in the U.S. One of my wife’s friends is getting married sometime around the end of the summer, probably in Chicago, so we’ll be going to that. We’re considering either spending a few extra days in Chicago, or perhaps going on to California (San Diego, maybe? San Francisco?) and checking out that scene.
Man—just when you think your dealings with the INS are about over, they hit you with the re-up! Ah well…we’ll get it all straightened out. At least we’ve got proof that we filed the I-751 in the first place, so that’s good.
Hmm…Mister Bikini Guy was supposed to drop me a check on my windshield today. Guess I’ll mosey on out to the lot and see if there’s anything there (like before one of the landscape workers takes it).
Categorized as Life