The Long Hot Summer – 1999
I couldn’t work. I did not have a valid drivers license. I couldn’t go to school. I ceased to be a legal person. My first summer in the desert was one of the oddest times of my life. If getting used to living in a new country wasn’t already hard enough, the situation that I found myself in did not make me feel all that more welcome.
This was our biggest mistake in the Adjustment Process. So many of the timelines we had seen online, and stories we had read in forums from other K1’ers was that adjusting your status was pretty much automatic after we were married. What we did not realize, and we seemed to miss this point constantly, that the timelines and processes in Phoenix were totally different than in other parts of the country. The Phoenix INS office is just plainly overwhelmed. We knew that getting myself adjusted to permanent resident would take longer, what we failed to realize was that EVERYTHING in the Phoenix office takes so much longer.
You pretty much have to give yourself at minimum three months cushion to get anything done from that office. So in reality my official arrival should have been just a few days before the wedding. In hindsight I should have moved down here on tourist visa, then the day before the wedding, drive down to Mexico, and come back across the border on the K1.
Well it was what it was. I had to wait ‘til September to become human again. At least I had some time to work on my