Back to USCIS. We have been here once in 2009 and surprisingly, our fingerprints expire! Not sure exactly what happens to them, but US immigration wants them again! The US government is a stickler for rules and fairly unhelpful when you need to look into bending them.
We knew our immigration stuff would expire in April, so we got our homestudy update in March and sent it in along with new paperwork to USCIS. Since we weren't planning to get a referral until the end of the year there didn't seem to be a sense of urgency to this. Well, now there is! We received an appointment notice for today. Now Brad has clinical in West Virginia and his schedule was already made up when he got there this past Monday. I was doubtful that he would be able to make the appt. today so I called USCIS multiple times to see if he could go to another office for a walk-in appt. One person said "Yes, just take his appt. notice with him". Someone else said "We don't take walk-in's anymore". A 3rd person stated "We only take walk-in's on Wednesdays". Great. Brad's schedule is so regimented that if he was going to try and alter it to get this done we had to be guaranteed that it would get done. Ugh!
When Brad arrived at clinicals this past Monday his schedule was handed to him and there was really no wiggle room to get today off. At the end of the day they came to him and said that they had to make a schedule change and could he be off on Friday May 7th? Um, yeah!!!
Brad and I left the house at 5:45 to get to Alexandria, VA for our 9am appt. You never know how traffic will be. We make good time and got there early at 8:30. There was no line snaking out the door like last time so we walked right in. Unfortunately, Brad decided to move a bunch of mulch this past weekend and ended up with a large blister on his palm and one on his thumb. Standard routine when you walk in to USCIS is that they ask to look at your hands before they even start the paperwork. People are turned away at this point if they think that your prints won't work. The woman at the counter checked the person's hands in front of me, looked at mine, but never asked to look at Brad's! Divine intervention? We'll see!
According to the computer all of our prints "passed"! We will see if the FBI or whoever comes back and says that Brad's won't work. Here's to keeping all of our fingers - blistered or not - crossed! If everything goes smoothly we should have renewed immigration paperwork back in 2-6 weeks that can then be passed on so we can start the next steps.
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