Syndicate this site's blogIt’s not even green
So there was something good in the mail today, when we came back from lunch at Counter Culture, the locals’ haunt.
From Mesquite, Texas came my Green Card. I’m now a permanent US resident for the next two years, if that makes any sense.
(It’s actually a conditional green card, the condition being that Buendia still says she’ll support me in two years’ time. 90 days before it expires, we send away to get it turned into an unconditional green card.)
The first thing to note about it is that it’s not green.
It is a card, though, and there’s a flash of green on the back, next to a weird panel that looks like undeveloped film, but has my name and photo and other stuff sublimated in it somehow. The front is white and pretty straightforward, though - photo, fingerprint and the like.
So that’s me converted from my spousal visa to the heady status of green card holder. If I were younger, this would mean I’d have to register to be called up if there was ever a draft (weird how legal aliens can’t vote in the US, but they can die for their adoptive country). Fortunately, being older and a family man and all that, they’re not going to ask me any time soon. (Although Buendia and I met a guy from Limerick in The Palace in Dublin who had come over to work in the US and ended up serving in Vietnam. He then returned to Ireland, and must have been the only student ever to go through the University of Limerick on the GI Bill).
Now if it would only stop being ridiculously hot here. The monsoon rains are over two weeks late, and it’s been in the 90s for longer than that (that’s 30-something in Euro temps).
