Yes, it's time to open the "immigration" tag again. Hooray.

Part of why America and I have never got on is because as a complete entity it seems to resent me, either by dragging more and more money out of me with surprise fees like some sort of Nigerian scam or by trying to reject me altogether. And I'm one of the luckier ones that comes from a country that you'd think they got on with at the moment, being one of the few that doesn't actively hate them these days. It's now two months away from our second anniversary, meaning by extension four months until my not-so-permanent-after-all resident card expires, so we have to make contact with the unmatched incompetence of the Customs and Immigration Services again or they'll initiate "removal proceedings" with pointy sticks.

I am hoping against all previous evidence that we can do this in Massachusetts like any normal sane humans would do rather than booking a round-trip flight over to California to have a photograph taken as before, because it's the start of a different process and we can choose the office we want to deal with again instead of sticking with the same one despite our location. The process is said to take 120 days, and apparently involves paying them the modest fee of $465 (plus $80 "biometrics", whatever those are) for them to take a look at a two-page form with a mountain of documents that are supposed to prove we're still married, followed by an interview to make sure I'm not a Russian mail-order bride, and possibly something else (depending on whether we have a Quality Control Check) to begin the Naturalization process. Doesn't this sound slightly like I'm a carton of milk?

We do, of course, still have the immigration lawyer from last time we had to go through all this - the last I heard of her we paid $3000 to her to help me finally get conditional permanent residence, and the government office then decided that as I had gone through the fiancee visa process I could get one at increased speed anyway. So I think we may still have some of that fee left over to pay for the form I mentioned above and any other nonsense we have to submit just so I can stay here.

But I wouldn't be too hopeful.