mam521

Glad to hear you guys came through that one unscathed! We did too. My friend and boss, not so much. He and his family live in The Heights and had a fair bit of damage. Pine trees downed on the neighbor’s car. Other neighbor’s pecan tree through the fence into their yard and no power for who knows how long. The silver lining is at least the trees didn’t smash into the house. The convoys of linemen and picker trucks have been fairly steady, so that’s at least something positive. I spoke to my brother who’s an industrial electrician, curious about how long it takes to put the new transmission pylons in place since so many were damaged. He said good crews who work together can probably get 2 to 3 of them up in a day. I was honestly impressed. Hopefully that’s true because that transmission line that came down on 290 is apparently responsible for energizing around 100,000 homes. Interestingly, the kids had their Oath ceremony scheduled for today and despite there having been a bunch of power outages around Gears Rd, USCIS was open and the ceremony went on as planned. It was a majority kids ceremony, which was kind of cool. We’re doing a little victory dance because we’re FINALLY finished dealing with USCIS!

Please fill out your timeline: https://www.visajourney.com/timeline/profile.php?id=455743 What is CGFNS?

Kids had their oath ceremony today. It would appear that Houston will do ceremonies that group under 18’s together, which was what happened today. The bulk of the group were kids with a handful or so of outliers. Pretty typical Gears Road ceremony. Enter the building, go through security. Check in with the agent, show the invite letter, be assigned a table number. Sit, and wait. Watch the room fill. They then called the kids by assigned table numbers where their certificates would be picked up and sat them in order. Once the tables were in and seated, parents filed to the back of the room. Everyone stood for the oath, with those taking it raising their right hand. After they agreed to the oath, they were called to their assigned table to sign the necessary paperwork and received their certificate. Kid2 turned 14 last week, so we let the agent know upon arrival and check in. Normally, they would have had Kid2 see an agent to pick up the certificate due to the under 14 thing. Since that changed from the ceremony invite to the actual ceremony, Kid2 was required to participate in the oath, so the agent had to pull the certificate and add it to a “secondary” pile. Kid2 wasn’t alone. There were 2 or 3 other kids who’d “aged up” in that letter to oath timeframe. Of note, only one parent per child allowed in. If you only have one child, only one parent will be allowed in. The security person was very pleasant and just paired a kid with each of us and sent us on our way. Celebratory lunch followed. NO MORE USCIS REQUIRED!!!

I think the bulk of what you want to know is here: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/fact-sheets/DO_FactSheet_NatzForVAWALawfulPermResidents_V3_508.pdf

There's more than one location that does oath ceremonies in Houston and they happen more frequently than once a month.

Take a deep breath...nothing about immigration is fast. You still have some steps here before you get to the interview. Ask your practitioner to do a Titres test. This will give indication of any of the diseases you show immunity for. After that, you can head to the travel clinic and get anything that is missing. I believe you stated you lived in the UK previously. Was it after the age of 16 and was it for more than 6mo? If so, you will need a CRC from the UK. You can schedule your RCMP CRC with a third party like the Commissionares. The RCMP do not offer this service directly. You still need to get your DS-260 approved before the rest happens. You will need an address history from the time you were 16, so I highly recommend creating a spreadsheet now with this information before you begin filling it out. The CEAC website is dreadful. Being able to copy and paste in lessens the pain ever so slightly.

Which consulate are you dealing with? You should fill out your timeline: https://www.visajourney.com/timeline/profile.php?id=471560

No worries. It's a bit strange because the US is the only country that does this and it's not everywhere. The nice thing is that K1 is activated in Dublin, so when you get on that plane, your journey begins. When you land in Cleveland, you just grab your bags and go...no clearing Customs.

Do you know if your bags will be checked all the way through? If so, that should be fine.

You will likely preclear in Dublin. What's your connection time?

Usually it's pretty fast and painless! Good luck and best wishes!

You should be ok with the London Consulate. If it were Montreal, nope, entirely different story. Lots of moving parts when it comes to immigration! Do you have a joint sponsor in the US?

Have you filed US income taxes and did you file I-130's for the kids?

Yep, that will work although it's highly unlikely you'll even be asked about it.

People stopped following the instructions to be added to the tracking spreadsheet, so the data is sparse. For a while there, it was about 4-6mo from DQ to interview.

Because it is!

Kyle is sooooo disgusting. Oh my word...I can guarantee my husband wouldn't be my husband if all he did was adjust his junk and worry about sperm count all damned day long! His "work out" was laughable. Dude, you're wandering around in bad shorts with a dad bod...Ani is NOT going to stay with you. You're cringy. I do feel for Shawn. He is a gay man and thought he was in a relationship with Douglas. I can see why he's having a hard time with the transition to Alliya. It's still weird and like a grooming relationship, though, with their age difference. Alex needs to run, run the other direction. Adriano just wants to be a player and she's a pawn in his game. Luke. Washed up with a 19 year old who's ridiculous. Nuff said.

Any interview letters for the people on here?

Was it a 221g or a DS-5535? Did you check your junk mail? You might want to pop onto the following thread because I think someone else had the same issue with needing to e-mail something related to the 221g.

I'm highly entertained by this. Most native Houstonians have no clue when it comes to "winter". Scraping windows is the least of the worries. Properly inflated tires with tread are an issue. Having windshield washer fluid that isn't frozen solid is an issue. Having skills to drive in slick conditions is many, many million percent an issue! Thursday was dramatic for us. Left for the gym at 6:20am, things were fine. Left the gym at 7:30am and things were not fine. Stopped at the stoplight and texted hubs that the skies were tornado skies - green in color and that the lightning was too intense for Kid2 to go stand at the bus stop for skool. By the time I got a couple of blocks from home, the skies opened up. I had a hard time backing into the driveway because I couldn't see due to the rain. Amazingly, the trash guys had already been through and picked up the trash. Regardless, I couldn't go rescue the trash can because the rain was ridiculous. Got drenched coming the 10ft into the house. Then, we had a downburst, but I thought it might have been a tornado as things came hurling at the window and heard the low thud of a giant branch coming down from one of the oak trees. 7:48am the power went out. We have a whole home generator, which was good because it was out for 10 hours. We have another house in the neighborhood and the power was out there for 2 days... . Needless to say, Kid2 did not go to school. Kid1 was stranded at school with no power. It was raining too much and the streets were too flooded to go and rescue said child. They apparently did classes by phone flashlight. Eventually, we were able to go on a rescue mission, but there was still a lot of high water that required the truck's clearance. The rain was intense all day. Between bands, we went to investigate. The trash can I failed to rescue somehow landed between the next door neighbor's cars in their driveway. The neighbor across the street had a section of fence come down. Neighbors 3 doors down had a pine tree collapse part of the garage roof and land on the elderly next door neighbors house (where my trash can landed) and the ones 2 doors down from them had big oaks land on the house. The branch from our tree was a large one (about 14" in diameter where it broke from the main trunk) and luckily didn't hit the neighbor's house behind us. It did damage the fence, but we planned to replace the fence already and had been rained out the weekend we were going to do it a few weeks back. Once the rain finally died down in the later afternoon, we got out and cut the whole thing up, loaded it into the neighbor's trailer and cleaned up the rest of the mess. At one point, a tree had downed across the main boulevard that took out the basketball net at the main POA park. The fire department had to come remove it to clear the road. Lots of downed trees and damaged houses. More storms came Friday night/early morning. Skool had already been cancelled because tons of areas were flooded out. we went out and cleaned up 2 reasonably sized branches in the elderly neighbor's yard. They had to wait for the other neighbor's insurance to help get the pine tree off of the house. Saturday was fine. We finished taking the whole fence between us and the neighbors down and extended the temporary fencing. We had to go help some friends out who live in the same neighborhood after they had a lightning strike VERY close to the house and it fried some low voltage electronics and killed one of the kitchen GFCI's. The GFCI saved the all important coffee maker, though! Hubs will head out today to grab the posts and concrete we need to start the new fence. It's supposed to be reasonable for the next couple of days, so we'll pick away at it with the neighbor. He's a fairly skilled firefighter but says he's never built a fence before. We told him it's pretty easy so he's all game.

Here's an update for you guys. I applied for Kid1 and Kid2's certificates on March 31 so I could avoid the fee increase. Both kids already have their US passports, applied for and received in December. My original concern was that their father and I don't have a court ordered custody agreement. Further research indicated that if the jurisdiction that our parenting agreement was written in doesn't require it to be court ordered and we can demonstrate that, then it would be accepted with a letter of explanation. I included that Letter of Explanation as well as an Affidavit of Support from their father and it was accepted. I suspect him having already signed the DS-3053 for their passports helped, as well. Both kids had to go for biometrics, even though Kid1 had them done within the last 3 years when they turned 14. Kid2 isn't yet 14, so it was a bit of a waste of time because all they did was take a photograph, no fingerprints. Applications were approved April 26th. Notices of Oath Ceremony issued on May 2. Oath Ceremony is May 17th for both. Kid2 will turn 14 a week before the ceremony so will be required to participate. The kids' USCIS accounts originally indicated 6 months for a decision to be made. Considering how quickly N-400's have been flying through here, I anticipated their N-600's to follow a similar timeline and assumed it would be much less than 6mo. My assumption was correct. So, after May 17, or 5 years, 11 months and 6 days, we will FINALLY be finished with USCIS. @springguy If you haven't applied for your kiddos yet, this info might be of interest.

Why would you waste your time (and money) filling out a "one shot" form if you didn't have required evidence to support the issuance of the document? I had another thread where there was a whole discussion about the importance of being able to provide the evidence required to obtain the certificate of citizenship. The conclusion was the "t's" better be crossed and the "i's" dotted because it's one chance and that's it. You mess it up and don't have the evidence straight out of the gate, you don't get a "do over".

You can ask, but Montreal typically doesn't expedite anything. The circumstances for which you require an expedite have to essentially be dire.

100% THIS!!! I love it: "Americans are from the New World" 🤣 I couldn't do MILF Manor. Maybe because I have teenagers? I dunno but that's pushing it too far...

You should fill out your timeline: https://www.visajourney.com/timeline/profile.php?id=402571 Have you had your interview yet? The address can be updated then and verified with CBP. If it's changed between the interview and entering the US for the first time, verify with CBP. Your MyUSCIS account is your account for forever essentially. If you choose to naturalize in the future, you can fill out the online petition, utilizing it.