The visa is in!

Ok so here's the news that people have been waiting to hear
We finally have our visa into the consulate -- or mostly anyways.
It was a bit of a saga i must admit:

Last wednesday Mac travelled down to the US consulate office in Toronto to hand in our visa application. When he got there he found out 1) they don't accept Visa applications on a walk-in basis, they must be mailed in, and, 2) on top of everything listed on the visa application that we have to do there is a Toronto-specific list of things that visa applicants must do.

So he brought home the list and the application to finish it up. He had called me at work on Wednesday to tell me that i needed a copy of my birth certificate (which i took care of). But then, later in the evening upon closer inspection, we realized that the little wallet card that most people have is not sufficient. Nope. We needed the long for, i.e. the form my father filled out on Oct. 29, 1979 to submit. So after a bunch of phone calls to nail down a guarantor (can't just apply for your birth certificate, you need someone to prove who you are) $35 for the form and another $30 for speedy service (we didn't want to wait the 3 weeks to get it otherwise) we had the form ordered, and it arrived on friday. So we picked it up yesterday, and then walked to the post office to send everything off registered mail -- can't be too careful these days with all those identity theft folks out there.

So here's where "we go next" as far as we understand the process.
At some point we will get a phone call asking us to come down to the consulate office and present the originals of the identification stuff that we handed in copies of. While we are hoping it'll happen before US thanksgiving, there's a good chance we won't make it down to the consulate for this interview until January due to our travels south for Thanksgiving US-style and then our trip out west to see people and then travel back east with Jen and Tim (Tim and Mac are driving, Jen and I are flying).

Then, at some point, we'll be heading (we think) to Montreal for a second interview. We don't know when this will be.

After that... we think we get a visa, but we could be mistaken by that. There could be more steps, we're not sure.

How long should the whole thing take from this point? Officially, 6-12 months. But we've heard from an immigration lawyer acquaintance of Mac's that it could be as little as 4-6 months.

One way or another we'll get down south, we know it'll happen, we're just not sure exactly when.
until then, we'll keep enjoying married life in Toronto and Virginia Beach and finding jobs as God provides them!