Sorry folks for not updating in such a long time. Lazy excuses abound, but I will not list them here : )
Let me see…well, David passed his medical exam and we finally got an interview date, March 10th. Yesterday I copied a bunch of my financial information and declared officially on the I-134 form that I intend to financially provide for David. When asked the length of time, I wrote “until the death of the beneficiary” haha. It’s true! But I’m sure David will help do some of the providing in the years to come. Legally, it’s for about 10 years and only comes into play if David goes on government welfare assistance. Tomorrow I will be getting a notarized statement saying that I still intend to marry him and then will send everything off in the mail.
David has the rest of his forms in order, his official birth certificate, police certificate, U.S. sized passport photos, etc etc and will arrive electronic gadget free to the embassy and wait on tenderhooks for the interview which he’s all but guaranteed to pass since the UK is a very easy consulate in which to get through.
In wedding news, David and I were in Seattle for a week to meet my relatives and friends. We spent the weekend on a Catholic engaged encounter which was good for our relationship, although we didn’t really learn anything new about each other. I guess when you e-mail each other day you learn each other’s lives and points of view fairly quickly : ) My parents had an engagement party for us when we got back and David met approximately 3592037502 people.
Dad took us snowshoe hiking up at Mt. Rainier, in which I told David, “Now THIS is hiking, dear. Not those scrawny little hills you dragged me along.” Don’t get me wrong, England has beautiful natural scenery with charming villages and hilarious wild goats that run amok along the trail…but being a child of the Pacific Northwest, it’s not hiking to me. It’s…um. Some other term that won’t offend any of David’s relatives or other UK citizens that is escaping my mind right now.
During the rest of the week we spent the days doing wedding plans and the evenings for whichever relatives/friends claimed our time. It got to a point that we were supposed to meet 5 different sets of people all in one night and it just became too much. We ended up seeing 3/5 and finally told everyone else that we’ll have to see them at the wedding. Don’t get me wrong, we loved seeing everyone and would have if we had the time, but alas, we were exhausted and I wanted to spend some alone time with my immediate family.
Wedding plans: We picked out a cake from Affairs Chocolate in University Place, David tried on tuxes (going for the tail coat look), created our table decorations, and bought 15 fake trees about 7 feet in height. HAHA. You cannot imagine how much fun it was to go to Michael’s (a craft store) and line up the trees at the cash register so that one might have been in their own mini-forest. My parents weren’t thrilled about the placement of them into their garage, but Lauren put a few of them in her room and we might convince a relative to store more of them because David and I would love to have another 20 of them at the reception hall. We’re nuts…but you already knew that, didn’t you?
Is it not hiking if you’re going through a desert? How about a tropical rainforest? Those places are different to the NW as well.
Hike: ‘a long walk usually for exercise or pleasure; “she enjoys a hike in her spare time.”‘
It’s hiking whether you like it or not dear. It could be through the city and still be hiking :p
I’d also add something that I’ve realised after giving it some thought… England is misleading. When we were hiking near Mt Raineer, it seemed to me that there wasn’t much going up and down. Most of the trails were either uphill, downhill or pretty flat. The thing about the UK is that we have “rolling hills”, which means you go up a bit, down a bit, up a bit, back and forth, which is not only tiring but pretty demoralising. The hike we did together in the UK wasn’t really very much like that, but a lot of hikes are. I was on a trail like that at the weekend, and any 4 mile stretch of it would have been harder than what we did near Mt Raineer, even though I wasn’t walking on snow. In the end, unless you’re an ultra-fit mountaineer, the UK has more than enough hills for anyone.
I don’t think you can call them “scrawny little hills” when you’d struggle to get to the top of a lot of them. :p