Back Again

Sometimes you just have to push through it. Pfizer vaccine and my immune system made peace so the intense pain has finally stopped and I am back in the land of the living.

Oh the pain. It started on day 3 after the shot. I feel like someone is beating me from head to toe every day. They say the pain comes if you have a robust immune system. I must have one hell of an immune system for the pain to continue like this. It was a week on Thursday and the pain is still here. It reminds me of the comedian who told a story about a man who was up in a tree with a raccoon. They were fighting. Shoot the coon, he kept yelling to the group at the base of the tree. They didn't shoot so he told them to "just shoot up here amongst us. One of us needs some relief." I am at that point.

Well, I have done my part. I got the third Pfizer shot on Thursday. Only side effect was massive sweating. My t-shirts looked and felt like I had been standing in the pouring rain. I would put a dry shirt on and it would happen again. And again. And again. So I have been drinking lots of water to avoid dehydration. I even bought some adult Pedialyte to replace the electrolytes I am losing.

Ping shops at H-Mart and 99 Ranch regularly, but when she wants the best thin meats for hot pot, or the best ground pork (select a pork shoulder or a pork butt and watch them grind it), or the best pork ribs cut in half with a saw, or the best chicken feet, or the best pig feet, she shops where other Chinese people shop in Houston. At a store on Bellaire Blvd in Chinatown called Welcome. It was very difficult to get in Welcome to shop until H-Mart and 99 Ranch opened. Now Welcome has widened its aisles and organized everything to make it easier to shop there.

Ping and I were without electricity for 56 hours with outside temps from 14-29 degrees. We live in Fulshear, which is immediately West of Katy in Ft Bend County. Our power was turned back on for about 6 hours and then turned off again for about six hours before it was turned back on and left on. A new law requires that no one be left without electricity for more than 12 continuous hours. Ping used candles for light. Our stove top range is gas so she was able to cook for us. We just layered up with clothes until the power came back on. Our house is well insulated and we had no loss of water. None of our rental properties in Katy had burst pipes or loss of water. But in the entire Houston area I don't believe there is a better place to live than where we live in Cross Creek Ranch. Our house is in the Katy ISD, so the Asian population is higher here.

Texas opened eligibility to everyone over age 16 on Monday, so our daughter got her first dose of Moderna on Saturday. Her boyfriend was also able to get an appointment and got his shot on Saturday. Also Moderna.

In Texas they opened a Phase 1C, which is open for ages 50 and over. A few counties had extra doses and opened their counties for all adults until the extra doses were used. Ping and I both had Pfizer and neither of us had any side effects.

Another encouraging note is that Ping was able to make an appointment today to get her first shot tomorrow. She is just 50 years old, so things are opening up more and more for everyone.

The VA sent an email to me months ago asking if I wanted to sign up to receive the vaccination. If so, they would schedule an appointment for me when they received the vaccine. I checked the "Yes" box and sent it back. Someone from the VA called me at the end of January and left a message and phone number to call so they could schedule my appointment. I called the number and without even asking for my name the lady said I could come to an open vaccination session and she gave me the date. I told her no thank you. I am not driving 70 miles just to stand around in a crowd and hope I get vaccinated before they run out of the vaccine. The next day, on Feb 1, I received a text message from Methodist Hospital not far from our home. Your name and info are in our system and you are eligible to receive the vaccine. Use your phone and select a date and time and also electronically sign the consent documents. About 5 minutes later I had an appointment scheduled for Feb 7, which they confirmed back to me. They sent reminder texts with instructions on how to park. They were incredibly well organized and Ping and I walked from one station to the next and never had to wait. I got the shot, and had no side effects, but they sent a text the next day asking if I was feeling well, and asking if I wanted to speak with a Nurse about any problems. When we were there they scheduled my next shot for Feb 28, three weeks later. We returned to the same organized system, and they were doing only 2d shots that day. I didn't even feel the needle when the nurse gave me the shot. Again no side effects, but a follow up text inquiring if I was having any problems. I have always felt it is better to be lucky than good, and maybe this helps prove that belief. This is also why I use Medicare and not the VA for my health problems, even though I am 100% covered for everything at the VA. I would rather have the higher quality of care, and Methodist Hospital consistently ranks as the best. If you guys are in the system at a hospital it may be easier to schedule an appointment with that hospital to receive the vaccine. Good luck with it.

Ping became a U.S. Citizen yesterday. The weather was eerily similar to the day we went to her visa interview in Guangzhou, with thunderstorms and rain. But no more green card to worry about. So far 30 people have indicated they will attend the party to celebrate Ping's citizenship.

We received the Notice from USCIS today, and the oath ceremony will be on Wednesday, October 16. Then we will celebrate with our neighbors (23 houses on our cul-de-sac)on Sunday, Oct 20 by hosting a party at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Then we will apply for a U.S. passport, change Ping's status to U. S. citizen with social security, and register to vote.

I had forgotten I wrote this post back when we first started the N-400 process. The waiting time that USCIS posted kept getting longer after we filed the N-400, with the range extending out almost 2 years. But as I indicated in another post, we unexpectedly received Ping's interview notice just 7.5 months after we filed the N-400, and her interview was yesterday, which was just shy of 9 months after we filed the N-400. The short end of the range posted by USCIS was 14.5 months so we were lucky to even beat that shorter end of the range. Ping passed her tests and the interview and we are waiting for the notice to attend the oath ceremony.

Well, Ping aced the civics test and passed the English reading and writing test. She also charmed the officer who conducted her interview and was in and out in just 20 minutes. The officer was admiring Ping's Kate Spade necklace and her engagement and wedding rings. We ate Mexican food for lunch and shared a flan for dessert instead of eating moon cake for the Autumn Festival. Now we are just waiting for the Notice about the date of the oath ceremony. We already know we have to be there at 7:00 a.m., and it will take us more than an hour to drive to the location of the ceremony, so it will like the day we went to the interview at 7:00 a.m. in Guangzhou in 2008.

That is nice of you to say, Dennis, though I know it was said in jest. I hope you and your wife are doing well. Tomorrow is the day for Ping. We have to get up to leave at 0'dark thirty to get there in time for the interview. It will be Friday the 13th with a full moon. Yesterday Ping answered 99 of 100 questions correctly for the civics exam, so she should be ready. This evening she prepared with an hour of Tai Chi using the YouTube video she likes to follow. I enjoy the music but I walk for exercise, and Ping still walks with me, holding hands. There are 22 houses on our cul-de-sac in Cross Creek Ranch and we have a private Face Book group, so Ping has a lot of supporters rooting for her. Assuming all goes well, Ping and I will host a party to celebrate at a nearby Mexican restaurant for all of our neighborhood after Ping is sworn in as a new U.S. Citizen.

According to a lengthy article in the Houston Chronicle this week, the Houston District Office is the slowest in the Nation in the processing of N-400 cases, so I guess it is even more remarkable that Ping's case was scheduled for an interview in less than 9 months from when it was filed.

Randy, the Back Family has started pop quizzes on the 100 questions. Now Ping understands the pressure that Angela felt when she was in high school and college.

Ping's N-400 Receipt Date is December 19, 2018. The current processing time in Houston for N-400 is 14 to 25.5 months, so between Feb 19 and around mid-August 2020. Plenty of time to study and prepare for the interview, right? But her interview notice just arrived today, and her interview date is Sep 13, 2019, less than 9 months from her Receipt Date. She must have a great lawyer!

Well it turns out that the Chinese plants with the fragrant flowers that Ping planted in the garden she created in our yard are more than just for looks and smell. Yesterday Ping made some Pu'er tea to which she added some of those fragrant flowers, and the flowers brought a more mellow taste to the tea.

LOL Randy. I bet she still carries paper everywhere she goes in China even if the toilet revolution were to change things there.

Congratulations Corey and Xu. Ping waited to file until now because she will turn 50 next year and will file for medical care in China while she is still a Chinese citizen. Her thinking is that even though she will live in the U.S., if there comes a time when she is in China and needs medical care, it would be nice to be covered by medical care there. She is covered by CHAMPVA in the U.S. for the rest of her life with no premiums, a $50 annual deductible, and a co-pay that is capped at $3,000 annually. When she turns 65 and adds Medicare, the combination will be even better for her.

It is crazy slow these days. I can remember when it was only 3 months, but those days are long gone. But we are together, so it isn't difficult to wait like it was when we were going through the K-1 visa process.

So this forum is where the old-timers hang out. I guess that makes sense, given the passage of time. I see a lot of familiar names on this forum. Ping has been a permanent resident for 10 years now. We filed her N-400 with a Receipt Date of December 19, 2018 and we went to have her biometrics done on January 18, 2019. One of the first places I took Ping and Angela after they arrived in Houston was Costco, and I have not forgotten how Ping whispered a question in my ear when she said she was going to the restroom. "Will they have paper there? Well, ten years later she asked the question again when we were at the Application Support Center on Friday. I guess that concern becomes engrained after you live in China for many years. The processing time in Houston for an N-400 is rather slow these days, with an estimated time range of 17 to 20.5 months the last time I checked. So we are looking at May to September 2020 before she can expect an interview. We live in Fulshear, Texas now, about 20 miles West of where we lived in Houston. We bought a four bedroom home in Cross Creek Ranch in late October and we are almost settled in here. We prepped our home in Houston for sale and the listing just went live on the Internet yesterday. Our new home is a beautiful one-story home in a beautiful neighborhood and we enjoy everything about it. We have more than 20 lakes and some 15 miles of walking trails here, and we walk around the lake nearest our home pretty much every day, often more than once. And we still hold hands everywhere we walk. One of Ping's desires was to live in a home where we can walk our grandchildren (when they arrive and are old enough) to elementary school every day. Our new home meets that desire in a great way. It is just a 10 minute walk along the lake to the elementary school, and many children from our neighborhood walk or ride their bikes to school every day. Another of Ping's desires was to have a home that faces West so that the morning sunshine can flood our bedroom windows. We also met that desire in a big way. We have a wall of windows in our master bedroom, a wall of windows in the living room that adjoins our bedroom, and a wall of windows in Angela's bedroom that adjoins the living room on the other side. Every morning when I get up I open the plantation shutters on our bedroom windows so the morning sunshine can awaken Ping as it floods into our bedroom. There is a 12 foot ceiling in our bedroom and the windows go almost to the top, so that is a lot of sunshine. I open the wooden blinds in the living room so I can enjoy the morning sunshine, and there we have a 16 foot ceiling, and again the windows go to the top. The windows in Angela's bedroom are the same as in our bedroom, but she is usually up and gone to work before the morning sunshine arrives, except on weekends when she sleeps late and enjoys that morning sunshine. Our home is on a cul-de-sac corner, so no through traffic to deal with and no neighbors on the South side except across the street. It is an extended cul-de-sac with about 20 homes on it. Our neighbors directly across the street are a young Chinese couple with two young children. The man's parent's are visiting from China, and to our surprise, his parents are from Shandong Province, just like Ping and Angela. What are the odds of that happening. The little boy's name is Edward, and he is very outgoing, always wanting to talk to us and come in to see our home. The little girl is less than a year old and the grandfather dotes on her, pulling her through the neighborhood in her baby carriage. Ping has been arranging a Chinese New Year's party to be held at our home on February 2. The decorating she has done in our home is exquisitely beautiful, and I know she wants to share it with her friends. I love my home office with French Doors and a wall of windows that face North, and Ping also has a home office at the front of our home, also with French Doors, and her wall of windows face to the West. In my home office I have my partner's desk, leather chairs, and hand-carved mahogany breakfront from my law firm office. In Ping's office we have a gold and black Rosewood desk shaped like a U with paintings of Storks on it, with a matching table and matching cube, and Rosewood chairs, with Angela's Gu Zheng (21 string Chinese zither), that give it the feel of a Chinese Tea Room. I have a wall-mounted flat-screen TV in my home office, and in the living room we have a wall-mounted flat-screen TV with two matching leather recliner/rocking chairs facing it so Ping and I can spend our rocking years together. She and Angela use You Tube to watch their Chinese movies, and I use my TV to keep up with the news and sports. Ping has created a garden in our backyard, complete with many plants and flowers, including some Chinese plants with fragrant flowers, all which we can enjoy from our patio that receives that morning sunshine. We are looking for matching rocking chairs for the patio so we can spend many hours there, just sitting and talking and enjoying the great outdoors in our back yard. But for now I need to stop and enjoy the congee that Ping just placed on my desk. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect that my marriage to and life with Ping would be the best thing that ever happened to me, but it is true. We feel very lucky to be together, and Angela is a fantastic daughter as well.

Thanks Dennis. Seeing you and the other Old-Timers on this forum also brings back a lot of memories. The ups and downs of the immigration process and the wonder of a new relationship with a Chinese lady coupled with the fear that it would not last. We walked some lonely roads and some crowded streets together during those tumultuous times, but it all paid off in the end.

This morning when I read Randy's post on my There was a Time thread, this thread about Angela's high school graduation appeared beneath the other thread. I was able to go back in time and relive her graduation from high school because I had inserted a link in her graduation thread that took me to the video of her graduation speech that a Chinese friend put together following her graduation. It brought tears to my eyes, just as it did when I watched her give that speech on her graduation day. It also reinforced my belief that she is a very beautiful young lady, and I was reminded again how lucky I am to be her father. I could never have imagined on her graduation day, however, that she would excel as she did in college and graduate school. Sure, during high school we talked about one of her goals in life, which was to get her bachelors and masters degrees and end up working for one of the Big Four accounting firms. I have to admit I seriously doubted that she could achieve that goal, but now I am happy to admit how wrong I was to doubt her. She graduated with honors from Texas A&M with her bachelors and masters degrees, just as she had dreamed of doing. And she ended up being hired by the biggest accounting firm of all, Deloitte, where she now works on one of its audit teams. And she did that while enjoying her college experience, playing the flute in the Concert Band, going to football games in cowboy boots, founding a new student organization at Texas A&M that she named "Beyond English" because its purpose was to encourage and help students become multi-lingual. She is fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, plus English, and took 3 years of Spanish and a year of Japanese so she is conversant in those two languages. She also learned some Korean from some of her high school friends and she taught them some Chinese. She even studied abroad in Japan one semester to use her Japanese language skills. So while I am proud of my son who was high school valedictorian and became an investment banker with UBS, and who is now attending Harvard Law School, and who is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, I am even more proud of Angela, because English is her third language, and English is his first language. In any event, I am glad this thread still exists with the link to her high school graduation salutatorian speech. It helped me relive those memories.