"Now Serving Number 988..."

Today Xavier and I had the wonderful pleasure of visiting one of the beautiful Immigration offices here in Dallas. To give you a bit of a visual, mentally picture the most decrapit DMV office that you've ever been to and times the crustiness by 2000. We supposedly had an "appointment" for him to get his biometrics taken (a fancy word for fingerprints). We thought this was funny since this would be the 4th time they've taken his fingerprints. As far as we knew, one didn't outgrow their fingerprints... (for those of you wondering if you can outgrow your fingerprints - you can't!).

So we got there 45 minutes early to find ourselves in a nasty room JAM PACKED with about 200 people already. Supposedly our appointment time of 10:00 meant nothing to them. We had to stand in line for about 45 minutes just to get a number so that we could sit in a chair and wait for about 2 hours so that X could go into another room to wait for another 30 minutes so that they could take his fingerprints...one more time. I will gingerly add that I felt we stuck out like two sore thumbs. I think X was the only blond person in there and I'm sure people thought I was the one going through immigration proceedings.

I share this with you so that you will appreciate your U.S. Citizenship today. All I can say about the whole process is that movies lie...you can't just marry a U.S. citizen and become one yourself. The whole reason we had to go there today is because we had to submit an application to prove that we are still married and in fact co-habitating. How do you really prove that?