Oddball Update

Hard to believe it’s only Tuesday, after how taxing this week has already been. It seems like everything I’ve done so far this week has been met with an inordinate amount of complication and frustration. Even the simplest stuff…even stuff I’ve done time and time again. Everywhere I’ve turned in the last couple days, it seems that a spanner has been invariably thrown into the works.

I haven’t had too much serious trouble with my job, at least, although my work has had its own fair share of “why isn’t this working how it’s supposed to?” instances. Most of the complication has been related to bureaucratic, governmental and paperwork related headaches. We’re working through it, slowly but surely, but it’s frustrating when you just seem to keep running into a new roadblock every five minutes.

As I’ve described on this site before, Apple and I are still in the process of trying to have kids. This has proved difficult for us, so we’re going to need the intervention of In-Vitro Fertilization procedures. IVF isn’t such a big deal in this day and age, except that the process isn’t guaranteed to work the first time, is insanely expensive and isn’t covered by most American health insurance companies. In Thailand you can get the same quality care for a lot less money, so that’s where we’re going — but you still have to be prepared for the possibility that you’ll need to try several times before it works. Because there’s a two-month “cool-down” period between tries, success could come right off the bat, or take the better part of a year.

Because of this uncertainty, we’re going to need legal permission to stay in Thailand for as long as possible. For myself, I’m applying for a multiple-entry non-immigrant O class visa, which is perfect for foreign spouses of Thai nationals who want to visit their families. It gives you a 90-day stay for each entry over the course of a year, but if your last entry is one day before the year is up, you get a “bonus” 90 days. That makes it really more like 15 months total, if you play it right. Since you can only stay in 90-day increments, you have to make what’s colloquially called a “visa run” every 3 months. This involves crossing the border into a neighboring country, then turning around and coming back into Thailand, starting the clock over again at another 90 days. It’s been done time and time again by foreigners.

For Apple, though, things were a little bit more complicated. She’s still a Thai national, because Thailand tacitly allows dual citizenship, and many people in our situation take advantage of this. However, her Thai passport expires in January, and she’s unable to renew it because the Thai government has gone to a new “E-Passport” system. Much like the new U.S. passports, this involves her profile data being programmed onto an RFID chip. And in our case, applying for an E-Passport is extra complicated.

The reason is because we never officially changed Apple’s last name (when she took my name after our marriage) on her house registration in Thailand. In Thailand, each family has an official “house book” which is the government-accepted record of birth and residency. Your name has to be in a house book for you to be considered a Thai national. Apple’s name is still in her family’s book, of course, but only under her maiden name. Thus, as it stands now, she can only apply for an E-Passport under her maiden name. This is a problem because her U.S. passport has her married name on it, so there would be a mismatch when we travel, causing all sorts of potential surprise headaches.

The next thought, naturally, is that we should just update her name in the house book. When we investigated the process behind that, a whole bunch more roadblocks popped up. Thailand recognizes marriages from the U.S., but only if you follow a special procedure. Because Thailand is not a member nation of Hague Convention, they require that a Certificate of Marriage be authenticated by the Secretary of State in the state where the marriage took place (in our case, Michigan). Then, the authenticated certificate must be sent to the U.S. State Department for additional authentication. Then, all of this authenticated information must be sent to the Thai embassy in D.C. for official verification of some kind. Only then can you go to Thailand, armed with all of this data, and change your name in the house book.

So because of all this uncertainty, we’re thinking that Apple probably shouldn’t enter Thailand on her Thai passport. It’s going to expire in January, when we’ll probably still be overseas. And you can’t exit a country on a different passport than the one you came in on. So if she has any problem getting the name change done and a new passport issued before we leave Thailand, we’ll be in serious trouble. It’s too big of a risk. So we think she’ll have to get the same 15-month visa that I’m getting, and enter as a U.S. citizen. This should be fine, so long as she doesn’t stay longer than 15 months — and even if that becomes necessary, with luck, she’ll have her new Thai E-Passport by then…which means she could just cross the border, exiting on her U.S. passport, and then re-enter on her new Thai passport.

Confused yet?

Anyway, we’ve been doing some research today to see how complicated it’ll be to get the Michigan Secretary of State to authenticate our marriage certificate. The Michigan SoS website has a special section on document authentication, so at least we knew we wouldn’t be faced with blank stares when we contacted them about it. Unfortunately, we don’t have a certified copy of our marriage certificate — I spoke to the Michigan Office of the Great Seal this afternoon and they said the marriage certificate I have, the one that was handed to us after we got married, isn’t eligible. We have to request a new certified copy from the Michigan records office.

The good news is, the records office accepts these orders over the Internet. Even better, if you need an authenticated copy (as we do), they’ll send it to the Michigan Secretary of State for you, get the authentication required by Thailand, and then send it to us already done. After that, we can send it to the U.S. State Department for their authentication, and then to the Thai consulate. With luck, we can get all of this completed before we embark on our trip, which we’re currently hoping to do in October. If so, then Apple can presumably change her name in the house book when we get there. That would make the process of getting and maintaining her Thai passport a piece of cake from now on.

Anyway, that’s our current boondoggle. As I said, we’re working through it, and it looks like everything is going to work out fine — it’ll just take a bit more head-scratching and red tape before we get to the end of the line.

Meanwhile, the roof situation continued without a solution yesterday, when I called the roofing company again and asked where the hell my written proposal was. And no, they said, I could not schedule the work to be done before they prepared the proposal, because I need to provide my signature of authorization before they can schedule the work. Makes sense, to protect the consumer of course. But why is it so hard for them to write up the damned proposal?

After being told yesterday that I would receive the proposal by the end of business hours, and then having nothing show up, I called them yet again this morning to demand an explanation. The woman I spoke to actually recognized my voice because I’ve been calling them so much. She said she had my case open right that moment and was working on it, and that I’d get the proposal in just a few minutes. I told her that I’d be calling her back in the next hour if I did not receive it by then.

Miraculously, I received the proposal in my email box a short time later. So now I can finally authorize them to start working. I had to laugh when I saw the proposal, because it’s such a simple little piece of information, there’s no way it could have taken longer than 10 or 15 minutes to prepare. The girl on the phone at the roofing company sounded like she had a cold, so maybe she’d been out sick and there was a backlog of these things for her to get done. Whatever the reason for the delay, at least it looks like we can move forward now.

Anyway, all this paperwork and confusion, preparing documentation for visa applications, translating instructions between Thai and English, trying to interpret the meaning of all the legalese, yada yada yada…it’s been pretty tiring for both of us. At least we’ve been making some progress, and it’s been a quiet week for me at work in the meantime. Our dev team is a little behind on the next product launch, so nothing of critical importance is happening over the next few days. I’m basically catching up with some long-term, back-burner projects that have been simmering for a while, which has been good because I’ve been fairly distracted this week with all the “life stuff.”

A little bit of personally exciting technology news: I ordered a 1 terabyte (TB) hard drive for our TiVo HD, so it will have plenty of room to record all the TV shows we’ll miss while we’re away on our extended trip. The hard drive upgrade procedure for our old TiVo Series 2 was easy enough, but things have gotten even easier now — they have a Windows utility called WinMFS that does it all for you. The 1TB drive should deliver a new capacity of 144 hours of high definition recordings, or about 1300 hours of standard def.

Now all we need is one of these, so we can watch our stuff from overseas, too!

Tagged as home repair, Life, Thailand, TiVo + Categorized as Life