A recap month

A month has gone me by, a dormant time on the blog. The sun has shone, the sky has blued, and the world outside has beckoned. It's been an active month in the McDelta household - a month brimming with biking, hiking and tennis. A lot has transpired during this blogatorium, and it seems almost remiss to relegate each memory to a mere line or two. But there you go, such is the nature of the catch-up post following a dormant month on the blog.

Much to our excitement, Delta and I finally procured ourselves our tennis permits for the summer. In a seemingly ridiculous move, tennis permits in the city are available at only two locations - Paragon Sports, and Central Park. And yet, despite how regularly we frequent each, it seems even more ludicrous but it still took us two months to get around to actually procuring our own permits for the summer. But finally, here we are, permits in hand. A whole summer of potential has opened itself before us, and excitement abounds.

And just as our action meter kicked it up a notch, Rohinton and Jeet came to visit last weekend. It was lovely as ever to see them and hear about how happily they had settled into their new home in Bermuda. Delta and I had been hoping to visit them in Bermuda in a couple weeks, but as it turned out, the whole US Citizenship thing has taken longer than I'd anticipated, and I won't have my papers in time. Perhaps August or September now.

Speaking of my US Citizenship, I didn't hear from the USCIS in the longest time after my interview. For the first few weeks, it seemed normal. In about the fourth week, a nagging doubt arose in my mind. What if I hadn't passed that interview at all? What if they had forgotten to update my status in the administrative systems? What if their letter had gotten lost in the mail? And then one of my colleagues told me a story she had read in her local newspaper about a mail man who had been arrested for hoarding bags of undelivered mail for twenty years. And the nagging doubt in the back of my mind instantly flared into outright panic. What if my letter was being hoarded in a mailman's house even right now? When I entered the fifth week of my waiting period, I could take it no longer, and I called the USCIS. After about ten minutes of combating the phone system, ("press 1 for..., press 6 for..."), I reached a recorded message telling me that I should not call unless my letter was delayed by at least eight weeks. So I hung up in discouragement, I still had three more weeks of waiting to go before the USCIS would listen to my concern.

But then, all of a sudden, I received my appointment letter in the mail last week. It lay there nestled in our pile of catalogs and junk mail, glowing with a halo of brightness and purity. I ripped it open in my excitement: July 2. On July 2, folks, I go in for my swearing in ceremony to take the oath of americanism, pizza, apple pie, and all.

I'm sure the day will be upon us before we know it. But there's still a fair amount to keep us occupied between now and then. Next week, I go to Seattle for work. Instead of catching the Thursday night red-eye back as I normally do, Delta will be flying out there to come visit me instead, and we're going to try our hand hiking and camping for a couple nights around Mt Rainier. Finally, after a few urban weeks of tennis and biking, we'll be back out in the mountains again! The week after that, we're taking part in a challenging fifty mile bike ride in Long Island.

There's no denying it, the summer is fully here!