It's been a long time since I've made a posting on here. That's mostly because I spent a nice long vacation in Japan visiting my wife. After the trip I spent a nice long time recovering from jet lag. I was hoping while I was gone, that progress would have been made on my wife's visa application. We submitted her I-130 (Petition for Alien Relative) on October 12 of last year. The application went to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service Center in Vermont where it sat for months, then went to Chicago for check cashing and initial data entry, and then went back to Vermont and has been untouched since February 24th. During the summer, I have contacted both of my senators, my representative, the current director of USCIS and even the head of USCIS's parent agency, Department of Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff. I've gotten the same response from everyone, that the massive delays resulting from the huge surge in applications have kept my paperwork from being processed. But by going to the website www.visajourney.com, where lots of people like me come together and share our frustrations in bringing our loved ones here, I have learned that a lot of people who have submitted their paperwork this year have already been processed and approved. So it would seem that USCIS is not going in order of when they recieved their paperwork, but rather just randomly approving cases so they can make their average processing time appear shorter than what it really is. I've also found out that many people who submitted their paperwork last year to the Vermont Service Center are having their cases forwarded to the California Service Center for processing. My case is still waiting in Vermont, but I am prepared to hear any day now that my application has been sent to California, which would mean that my application will have been to more places in the US than I have.

A lot of people have asked why haven't I moved to Japan already and just work there. The biggest reason so far is that I would pretty much have to give up my career in television. While there is a huge amount of media in Tokyo, there are very few foreign bureau's to work at, and even if I was fluent in Japanese, a Japanese media company wouldn't hire since I am not Japanese. And if I was actually Japanese, many jobs have age limits, so I would still be ineligible to work since I am 34 years old, an age considered to be too old. I could of course work in another field with a western company, or teach English to Japanese students. Those are options we are still exploring. Until then we will just hope that we will hear good news soon.