Blowing my own trumpet (and 10 other peoples!)

In the second and final part of my reflective expat blog posts, I thought it would be a good time to recap some history of my British expat blog and give some of the positives that have occurred over this time.  Despite having blogged extensively in the past on sites such as Myspace, I wasn’t actually sure what or where I would go with this blog when I started out.  I did want it to have some sort of definite theme that I could hang my experiences around, rather than just writing a general blog about whatever random thoughts came into my head.  I flapped around in some of the early posts, looking for a style and plan.  

For instance, I tried writing about my experience of the K1 fiance visa process as posts, but after a while I decided that they were too dry for a general consumption (unless you have gone through, or are going through the process, you really don’t want to know about the relationship proof requirements for the I-129 Petition, or the financial support documents needed to support an I-485 Green Card application).  In the end, I put my visa experiences in in their own separate blog which I imaginatively named: My K1 Fiance Visa Experience.

Titles were also something that I toyed around with.  The “From Sheep to Alligators” name was actually the third title I tried, but I felt happy with it enough to make up a unique banner header using an old alligator picture and Adobe Photoshop.

Features and Blog Award

My expat blog about living in Florida has featured online in various websites and online publications, including 'The smart-insegors Daily', the online publication of the expat website for professionals, Insego, which I would heartily recommend as a friendly place to visit if you want an intelligent debate, information and advice or just a place to fraternize with other expats.

Australian blogger, Robynne from Robynne's Nest gave me a versatile blogger award, which I will display here below (I guess the term ‘versatile’ maybe fits, as I tend to mix up my blog with humour, trivia and serious discussions).  I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do with the award, but I do appreciate it.  Do I award it to someone else after I’ve finished with it, or just leave it to gather dust on my virtual mantelpiece?

Reddit

Early on, I got into putting links to some of my posts on the Social Bookmarking site, Reddit.  Two of my humorous posts got voted up the rankings and each received over 3,000 straight after they were posted.  I enjoyed the rush of 4 digit viewing figures, but I must admit that I felt a pang of relief when the party was over and my blog stats returned to their normal 15-50 visitors per day!

Google Traffic

I must admit that, unlike blogs that I have written in the past, I have deliberately courted Google traffic with this one, picking my keywords and tags carefully.  The nice thing about Google traffic is that people come to your blog even when you haven’t written anything new for a while (if I was ever to cease writing, I would probably continue to get 20-30 views a day from Googlers). 

The Blogger stats tell me how people have reached me.  It is amazing how many people want to know about Lake Alice, brown sauce and bacon butties!  There are also some strange ones.  Because I have written about the different names for underwear in Britain and the USA and my blog is called From Sheep to Alligators, I get visitors coming to my blog who have typed in Google searches for “sheep knickers” and “alligator underpants”, which strikes me as a little, urm, unusual.

The Google searchers are usually casual strangers, however.  So they crop up in viewer stats, but don’t tend to write comments.  I still like my loyal followers, the ones who like to comment and make some online banter, some of whom I know or have known in person, but many of whom have come from cyberspace and the blogosphere.

Pimping: Top 10 Best British Expat Blogs in USA

Last but not least, I pimped some of the other British expat bloggers in my Hubpages article: Top 10 Best BritishExpat Blogs in USA.  Keep on writing folks!

Seeking permanent residence - my adjustment of status application and other epic tales of woe

You might have thought that getting my K-1 finance visa was the end of the story, as far as my entanglement with bureaucracy goes, but you’d be wrong.  Now that I’m here in the USA, I’ve got to apply for a status adjustment in order to get permanent residence and my green card.  Seeking permanent residence means filing an adjustment of status application, booking a USCIS biometrics appointment and possibly having to attend an adjustment of status interview too!

It’s actually the collection of evidence that’s the major pain, however rather than the adjustment of status application itself.  As well as the proof that we were are married, Abby has to present proof that she is financially solvent and can support me.  That means piles of tax returns that have to be sorted through and copied, as well as letters from her boss and months and months of bank statements, amongst other things.  As well as the green card application, I’ve also had to apply for temporary travel documents and temporary employment permission, so that I have the option of traveling and working while we wait for the adjustment of status application to be processed.  The whole package of five application forms and status adjustment evidence that I needed for seeking permanent residence was so big and heavy it cost $14 for the postage!  (That’s on top of the $980 we had to pay for the processing of the application!)

As we were married in February, we could have applied for my permanent residence earlier, in theory, but getting a joint bank account to use as evidence of our partnership turned out to be more trouble than we anticipated and stalled us.  Plus, it’s especially tough for Abby having to spend what little spare time that she has in the evenings and weekends on collecting and sorting all the financial documents for my status adjustment.

Anyway, the forms are all in and we’re there now hopefully.  I will have to go for a USCIS biometrics appointment at some point, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem hopefully (though I wish they could just use the existing collection of iris scans and fingerprints that have been collected from me at customs on my regular trips to the USA, rather than me going through it all again).  The USCIS adjustment of status interview is discretionary, so I hope they won’t call us in for one of those.

It will be such a relief when my permanent residence is finally granted (assuming it is!) and I get my green card!

Gator and snake update

I am still seeing the gator in the pond on my daily runs.  No snakes in the past week, though.  I wonder how long it will take before I stop finding the idea of having large, dangerous reptiles living in the neighbourhood surreal?

Sunshine, lightning, an alligator and snake

Today was another sunny day here in Florida, but then pretty much every day is sunny, that’s why they call it the Sunshine State, I guess?  The weather is very different from my home town in the North of England, but so far, I am adapting well to the lack of dark, cold, grey, rainy days that go on and on and leave you feeling melancholy, grim and forlorn.

As well as the sunshine, they do have hurricanes here, of course, though I’ve yet to experience one of those.  I’ve endured a few serious electrical storms, however.  They are certainly dramatic and I am reminded why this area of the world is known as “Lightning Alley”.  The rumble of the accompanying thunder can be very loud too, though interestingly because Florida is as flat as a pancake, it never has that echoing-through-the-valley sound effect that you get in the Yorkshire Dales and Cumbria.



My running shoes

With no job to sap my time and energy and needing to keep fit, I have been going out running every day.  This past week I’ve been encountering some of the neighbourhood wildlife at what the locals call the “small pond”.  A pond is generally a rather tiny ornamental thing in England, but this stretch of water is about the size of a running track with brush and a stagnant stream running along its far side.

Anyway, for the past few days I’ve been seeing a small alligator in the pond.  It’s only about 4 foot long which makes it very much a youngster in gator terms.  They are remarkably good at camouflage, having perfected the art of making themselves look like pieces of partially submerged driftwood and vegetation, whilst they wait for their prey to come to the water’s edge.  But as this gator hangs out in almost exactly the same spot every day, it’s not been too difficult to locate, once I’ve trained my eyes.  He’s scared of me though, and when I get too near, he panics and splashes off under the water and away from the pond side.



I'm only a few yards away but he's not easy to see!



Let's zoom in a little and catch him lurking.

 After two days of good sightings, the gator wasn’t there when I went past today.  Maybe he’s moved on to greener pastures (or swampier waters), or maybe because today’s been cooler and he’s cold-blooded, he’s decided not to venture out?  Whilst I was looking for him, however, my eye was drawn to what I believed to be a bicyle inner tube that somebody had dumped by the water’s edge.  The way it was curled up looked funny somehow.  As I moved in closer, I noticed that the “inner tube” had a head – it was a large grey snake looking straight at me!



(When I described the incident to my wife later, she informed me that I needed to watch out for poisonous snakes when going near the pond.  “They won’t harm you unless you approach them quickly, or step on or over them,” she told me.  Which is not exactly reassuring advice for a runner, who is by nature, approaching everything pretty swiftly and stepping on or over things, as a matter of course!)



I guess I’m in two minds about the “exotic” local animal life that you find here.  On the one hand, I find it exciting and amazing that some creatures that I would only have been able to see in a zoo back in the UK are running around freely over here.  On the other, I really don’t fancy the idea of being bitten, or having some huge spider drop on my head when I’m in the woods, or suchlike, that would be Nature getting too close-up for my liking!

It’s a dichotomy I could ponder for some time.  But all in all, I guess the alligator and snake were here first (the gators have been around since prehistoric times) and there’s enough sunshine around in Florida for everbody, man or beast, to share.





All I want is a non US citizen bank account!

You’d think it would be easy!  Having jumped through all the hoops presented to me by the USCIS in order to get my immigration visa, I rather naively expected it wouldn’t be too much of a problem getting a non US citizen bank account.  Especially as all I wanted was to be added to my wife, Abby’s account as a joint account holder.  But when Abby rang up her branch’s information hotline to ask them what I.D. we should take along to our local branch, the people at the other end seemed bewildered.  Yes, I was a resident but not a citizen, she told them.  No, I didn’t have a social security number, but I could prove my identity and legal entry to the country with my passport and visa stamp.  Yes, we had a marriage licence to prove that we had recently been married in the US (Florida).

After a conversation that went on for nearly thirty minutes, with Abby being passed around five different departments, she was finally told that provided we took along my passport and visa, plus our marriage certificate and my wife’s social security card, the branch would add me to her bank account.  As Abby works fulltime, the only time we could make it to the bank was Saturday morning.  We got there, with all our documents and information not foreseeing any problems, but the young woman who served us seemed completely confused and uncomfortable.  We went through the same questions that my wife had answered during her 30 minute phone call with our young server getting more and more uneasy.  You’ve heard of the expression, “rabbit in the headlamps”?  Anyway, eventually she disappeared for ten minutes.  When she came back she told us that she’d spoken to the deputy manager and I couldn’t have a bank account unless I had both a US Social Security Card and a US green card, because of the Patriot Act.  That was it.

I looked it up when I got home, using the expats.com website, which is my bible on immigration matters.  Rather than going into the ins and outs of the Patriot Act, I’ll quote from britishexpats.com: “Under the Patriot Act, banks are required to 'know their customers' as part of anti-money laundering provisions. Most banks have adopted policies that require at least a Social Security Number before you can open a bank account IF YOU ARE A US CITIZEN, along with some other forms of identification and proof of residence. Citizens of other countries have different procedures, such as passport numbers or drivers licenses or other things to prove they are who they are.”  According to Britishexpats.com the problem of immigrants wrongly being turned down for accounts is really common, with lots of American bank workers not knowing their own rules!

Me with my British bank card.  I naively expected that getting an American one wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

There is no direct equivalent of a social security number in the UK (where I’m from).  The nearest equivalent is probably our National Insurance number, but we only really use that for when we get a job, pay tax, or claim benefits.  The US social security number (SSN) is used much more extensively.  As well as being used for jobs and benefits and tax, the US Social Security Card is also used as proof of ID for many, many things, including opening a bank account, if you’re an American citizen.  I decided to go about getting one.

The Social Security office was pretty similar to a British one in most respects, with an atmosphere of dowdiness, boredom and despair hanging over it.  The only two differences were that firstly you are checked over for guns before you entered (I am beginning to realise that this is a regular occurrence in USA, they even made us go through airport-style security before we were married!) and secondly, the overwhelming proportion of claimants were Afro-Americans (which maybe says something about the general structure of the US socio-economically?).  Anyway, after a long wait, they called my number and all went well.  I received my social security card 10 days later.  Yippee.  But what I really wanted was a bank account!

Three weeks after our first attempt to get a joint account and armed with the same I.D. as last time plus my brand new social security card, we set off to Abby’s bank.  Following our treatment the last time, however, we elected to go to a different branch on this occasion.  The difference in our experience was remarkable.  Our server this time was a friendly chap called Marcus.  He was relaxed and seemed to know what he was doing.  He photocopied our forms, got us to sign some printouts and that was it.  Apparently, I will be sent a bank card very soon.  I won’t believe it until I’m holding it in my hands though!