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It’s not even green

Friday, July 22, 2005

So there was something good in the mail today, when we came back from lunch at Counter Culture, the locals’ haunt.

From Mesquite, Texas came my Green Card. I’m now a permanent US resident for the next two years, if that makes any sense.

(It’s actually a conditional green card, the condition being that Buendia still says she’ll support me in two years’ time. 90 days before it expires, we send away to get it turned into an unconditional green card.)

The first thing to note about it is that it’s not green.

It is a card, though, and there’s a flash of green on the back, next to a weird panel that looks like undeveloped film, but has my name and photo and other stuff sublimated in it somehow. The front is white and pretty straightforward, though – photo, fingerprint and the like.

So that’s me converted from my spousal visa to the heady status of green card holder. If I were younger, this would mean I’d have to register to be called up if there was ever a draft (weird how legal aliens can’t vote in the US, but they can die for their adoptive country). Fortunately, being older and a family man and all that, they’re not going to ask me any time soon. (Although Buendia and I met a guy from Limerick in The Palace in Dublin who had come over to work in the US and ended up serving in Vietnam. He then returned to Ireland, and must have been the only student ever to go through the University of Limerick on the GI Bill).

Now if it would only stop being ridiculously hot here. The monsoon rains are over two weeks late, and it’s been in the 90s for longer than that (that’s 30-something in Euro temps).

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What did you do today?

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Here’s what I did today: walked down the driveway, along the road about 20 yards and collected the mail from the box.

That’s it.

I also changed Fionnuala a few times, and burped her a few times, made lunch and watched some bad daytime TV, but that’s really stretching it.

And with Buendia here too that’s pretty much the sum total of all our efforts, since about 7am this morning.

Change of pace

I’m not entirely sure what happened to all those hours, but for two people so used to be reasonably productive, this is quite a change.

Consider the last three years. In that time, either together or apart, we’ve:

  • met in Italy
  • carried on an intra-continental relationship
  • got engaged
  • published two books and all but written a third
  • cycled 2000 miles down the Mississippi
  • moved to live in another country twice
  • started two businesses
  • got married
  • been pregnant, and had a baby

And now the six-pound mistress of the house thwarts us in our modest plan to all head into town and eat ice-cream on the Plaza.

And the weird thing is, we don’t really care.

Posted by David in • Life

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Tour baby

Monday, July 04, 2005

So the Tour de France has started, and myself and Fionnuala have fallen into a nice early morning routine. Live coverage on TV here starts at 6.30am, and so yesterday and this morning saw myself and Finn on the couch watching Lance go for seven.

It’s not so crucial if I don’t catch the first hour or so of the stages, and with us downstairs Marci gets a chance to snooze on her own, after a night interrupted by feedings (I do the odd change, and hold Finn more or less upright for a while after each feeding to help everything settle down, but it’s not quite as arduous as being the milk provider).

So far Finn’s not shown much interest, scarcely even stirring from sleep when Lance blew past Jan Ullrich in the time trial yesterday, or when O’Grady and McEwan literally butted heads at 60km/h yards from the finish in today’s sprint.

We’ll see if she wakes up for the team time trial tomorrow. And if we both manage to sleep through it, OLN repeats each stage seemingly half a dozen times throughout the day, so we can catch it later. Dunno if they make baby-sized Lance bands though.

Posted by David in • Life

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