Adoption Update : Cheese-It, The Feds!

Today we got fingerprinted as part of the requirements for the I600-A application which we wrote about earlier. The worst part of the experience was glancing up at the board to see "Now serving : 152" and getting handed number 221. Other than that, it was actually fairly painless. The staff were all courteous and very helpful, even going so far as to fix Wanda's name in the system, as we were told they would when we called ahead to double-check our reservation (yes, a fingerprinting reservation).

The coolest part was the fact that fingerprinting has gone high-tech. They essentially scan your fingers, sort of a high-brow equivalent of putting your ass on the scanner and photo-copying it, only done by people with no senses of humor whatsoever (and you'd have to have the world's smallest ass to scan it on these things - they were 4 inches by 3 inches square). They still roll your finger across the pad, just like you see in all the movies, but instead of messy ink all over the place, you get to watch it scan in on a beautiful (and very hygienic) high-res monitor (hygienic-res?). I have a scar on my ring finger (from what I do not know) that looked incredibly cool when scanned in on this system. Far more fascinating than it should have been.

So, now we really have to behave ourselves, because the feds are only a strand of hair away from knowing everything about us that's possible to know. Probably they collect those surreptitiously as you go in the door.

Also, last night as I tried to fall asleep after having had too much caffeine (we've been off caffeine a long time now, so any amount of it really does a number on me) I started looking at Kiva. I do believe I will be making some micro-loans in my near future - the concept is entirely too brilliant and humanity-serving for me to pass up. When I do this I will post here with updates as to my new status as banker-baron.

Studio Re-do 2008

We started on Friday, January 11 at 6:08pm, working for eight hours that first day, and now have a pretty darn cool studio with room to grow. It's all part of our plan to have the house ready to receive, hopefully, two bundles of joy in a year's time. The next room to undergo change is the baby's room, and that will be easier now that our studio has more storage and logic. Wish I had captured the beforeness, but for those of you who have seen our office/studio previously, I think you'll agree that this is a vast improvement. To see the photos, click here. Please note that you DO NOT have to join Facebook to see the photos. It just manages the pictures well.

Adoption Update : Major Milestone #2

Over the weekend we sent in major mailing #2 of 3, this one to the USCIS, and consisting of the I600-A application and a crapload of ancillary paperwork which will, it is fervently to be hoped, result in our obtaining the all-important I-171H form, which we will then send away in Major Mailing #3 to our China Adoption Agency, past which there is nothing to be done but the waiting. It was an odd experience dropping that package off at the fedex drop location - I was extremely reluctant to hand it to the very nice lady at the counter! I had to check and recheck the contents, the signatures, the cover letter, even though I had checked and re-checked all of it at the house ten times already (not an exaggeration). I was terrified that we'd done something wrong somehow, even though the paperwork is fairly straightforward, and our Adoption Assistant with Great Wall looked over everything and told us it looked great. I wonder what the hell that was all about?

The good news is that we're pretty much all set for Major Mailing #3, so as soon as we get that I-171H form back we can turn it back around almost immediately. It seems almost impossible that we've come so far after so many hurdles, but the end of the chase is in sight! For now we can take a break from worrying about it, as there's not a damn thing we can do any more - one less thing to worry about.

For the time being we are going to replace that energy focus with an almost complete makeover of our studio. I say almost complete because we're not going to repaint or anything - but we have another desk and are going to shelve-ize the hell out of it so that there's much more desk space for everyone, and enough shelf space for everything we need to put in this room. One thing living in Bloomington taught us, it's how to make small spaces work to their maximum capacity. We've been getting by in this studio space for a while - now we're going to really make it a nice place to work.