Another Thing to Check Off the List

Our new I-171H came in the mail today. It's good for 18 more months and the fingerprints are good for another 15. I really hope that we don't have to go through that process for a third time. The thought of it alone makes me want to curl up into a fetal position and drool.

I did some amateur number crunching yesterday and came up with the following scenarios for when we may see a referral. With a LID of March 10, 2006, that leaves 106 LIDs ahead of us. The best case that I am willing to hope for at this point is for the CCAA to get through November and start issuing 15 days worth of referrals at a time next month. If they can pull it off, we might see a referral in April. If they can only get through 9 days per month, then we might see a referral in October of 2008. That's the worst case I'm willing to even think about at this point. If reality falls somewhere in the middle and the CCAA is only able to get through 12 days per month, then we are looking at a referral in June and travel in August. That would put us smack dab in the middle of Olympic sized chaos. If Murphy's law prevails as it almost always does in this household, we are probably going to be affected in some way by the Beijing Olympics. My latest survival technique is to tell myself that I just need to hold on until April. By then, if we don't have a referral yet we should at least have a pretty good idea about when we can expect it. This could be completely flawed but right now it's all I've got...