Before I start, I'd just like to mention that for the last week and a half there's been a newspaper on the desk next to mine with the most depressing front page headline ever. "3 die as plane carrying cancer patient crashes". You'd half expect the subtitle to be something like "...into the local orphanage, with one hundred puppies on board". If it doesn't vanish soon I'm going to take it out to the recycle bins myself.

But in better news, we received yet another package from the USCIS today, and instead of being all our evidence back with a rejection notice as per usual, this time it was a notice telling me of an appointment time for my interview. The most unusual thing about this latest in a long line of cross-examinations is that it's convenient to get to - for the interview at the embassy in Britain I had to go to the other end of the country, and as if that wasn't bad enough, for the American biometrics appointment I also had to go to the other end of the quite considerably larger country. In a break from this surely willful idiocy, this time it's not only in reasonably the same part of the world as the one I live in, it's actually at a place that's just over a bridge from where I work. It's in the middle of the day early in September, not even before normal human people get up in the morning like the previous two were.

I have very little idea of what this appointment is for or what it's supposed to tell them that they don't know already, but the letter details that I just need to bring my acceptance notice and identification (which it worryingly refers to as an Alien Registration Card even though I have a Permanent Resident Card), and no recording equipment or mobile phones are allowed inside the building - in case you've hidden a Mooninite in either of them, presumably. Despite the usual huge forbidding paranoia, I have to quietly say that I'm now feeling as optimistic as could be expected about this.