A VERY Productive Day

Good Afternoon Friends!

Amy and I are relaxing at home for a few hours while Lucy is at doggie day-care and befoe we head out to trivia tonight. More importantly, here's our day so far...

6:15 am wake up

7:15 out the door heading to the Immigration offices in Atlanta to be fingerprinted for our I-171. It was an efficient and painless task, using no ink they now use digital scanners and a lot of Windex. While we were there we chatted with another couple who are adopting their second child from Kazihkstan. They had their 4 year old daughter Alma with them and it turns out the husband is a teacher at a school very close to my restaurant. The only weird thing is they have a rule that you cannot have a cell phone on your body in the building. They don't frisk you or anything, they just ask, and if you say yes you have to go back out to your car and come back in.

8:45 We were at immigration for about 45 minutes total and on the way out we hit a Chick-fil-a for some breakfast and headed up to the CCAI offices to talk with the dossier advisor. We cleared up a few questions and found a change we need to have made to my medical form. Jamie notarized all of our current documents and we found out we need to send my birth certificate back to Washington D.C. after it comes back from Maryland, and it will be done. I figured it was a null element considering I was born on Federal Government property, but since my birth certificate is from Anne Arundel County, MD, we have to play this game where we sent to MD to get it, they sent it to us, we had to send it back to MD to do something extra to it and now it will return to us so we can send it to the Chinese consulate up there.
The good news is there is a county court office and car tag office about a mile south of our old apartment and we were able to take everything Jamie notarized to that office to be certified. We'll take some time next Wednesday to go to the Georgia Secretary of State's office to have the county certification done and we'll be set for all documents except for the I-171!

10:45 Being done at the county clerk's office, we drove home to get Lucy and take her to doggie day-care. We continued back to Sandy Springs for our Valentine's lunch at Carro de Bois, our favorite Brazillian restaurant. It is one of the type where you serve yourself at a hot and cold food bar and return to your seat where servers come around with many, many wonderful meats including lamb, roast pork with parmesean, garlic pork tenderloin, chicken, sausage, and about 4 or 5 types of steak. It's the kind of place where you eat very little before and after your trip. We chose to do lunch there to avoid the dinner rush for Valentine's evening and we are going to trivia tonight.

12:45 We finished lunch and headed back to the house for a pit stop before heading out again for Amy's 2:00 appointment at the post ofice for her passport. That took til about 2:45 but Amy shold have her new passport with her correctedname in time to make a copy for the dossier and she'll be set to travel next year as well. We stopped at Walgreen's on the way home and got our extra passport photos for the dossier as we needed 3 sets each.

So now it's about 4:30 and we're back at the house watching "Little Miss Sunshine" before we have to pick up Lucy, our own little miss sunshine and we'll go play trivia tonight with Peter at Winston's. So we accomplished a lot today and we are happy.

This report brought to you by Michael