Daily Report: Quiet Interval of Perceptible Progress

I woke up feverish this morning at 7:30. My ears were ringing, my head was woozy, and I was freezing. I called for my mommy, but I guess she was still asleep. I went back to sleep and had weird and feverish dreams until noontime: by then the fever was down quite a bit, but still noticeable. At that time, my mother came to wake me up and I asked for some Tylenol and a thermometer. The thermometer showed a temperature of 101½. The Tylenol did the trick and I spent the rest of the day relatively lucid.

Epril has escaped the nattering ninnies of Smallville and moved back to the privacy of the city. It turns out that one of the principal nattering ninnies was our own landlord, so Epril had extra incentive to move. Oh: and after putting 60,000 pisos ($1,500) worth of improvements into her house over the years, the landlady had the cheek to keep our security deposit. Well, if you want to rent a house with only one functioning water spigot, noisy neighbors; and have a landlord who will do no repairs, but will stick her nose in your personal business and keep your security deposit, you've seen the photos on this blog and know where to go.

Anyway, Epril's new house is in CDO. We're keeping the location a secret so that her mentally ill mother can't come to the house and attack, terrorize, and bully everybody there. Unfortunately regarding the new house, the through-thin-air USB dongle internet services don't work... or at least don't work inside the house (Epril has to sit on the front porch to get the weakest of signals). Instead, she is going to have either Parasat cable internet installed, or get one of the roof-antenna-to-modem, through-thin-air internet services.

Today was going to be the day where I had to come here on my blog and admit that once again I had been royally effed by the postal service — this time the American one. I sent out Epril's I-129F visa application on February 5 and since then had neither received the e-mail confirmation that the package had arrived and been opened, nor the NOA-1 receipt that stated the package had been put into the system. I called the USCIS, and they stated that I would have to wait 30 days after mailing before they would consider the package missing.

Wouldn't you know it, at 1:20 a.m. on the morning of the 31st day, the e-mail arrived in my in-box from USCIS stating that they had received my package, and that an NOA-1 (with receipt number xxx) had been mailed out. I went to the USCIS website and entered receipt number xxx into their "Check Your Case Status" box and found out that the NOA-1 receipt was dated February 14: they had apparently forgotten to send either the e-mail or the NOA-1. Good news, but quite discouraging to the future possibility of a seamless, unhindered visa application.

Well, with that caveat lector given, Epril's application should be processed in mid-July, she should have her meeting with the American embassy in Manila some time in August, and she should be here in Florida in September.

Work is going well by the way. My daily average dropped in January and has been climbing back since. I'm back up to 1,300 lines per day. Generally, whatever my line per day average is, my two-week paycheck is the same number of dollars: so a 1,300 line per day average results in a $1,300 biweekly paycheck after taxes. My goal is to get back up to and maintain a 1,500-line-per-day average, which works out to about $60,000 per year before taxes. That, plus a second job that I'm looking at, should put me over The Mark (the 6-figure one), as it were.