It’s been a while since I’ve been able to make an update here. Since I got back, I’ve just been working as much as I can, and Heather has been doing the same. But this week, we finally made some progress. We’ve decided exactly how we’re going to orchestrate this Being Together business, and I’ve saved enoguh money to go and visit her again. I’ll start with the latter.

It took a while to find a job here. The recession’s hit Newbury pretty bad, and job opportunities are few and far between, which made it easy to accept a job line picking in a refrigerated warehouse. Not a job I’d ever willingly choose to do, but it was fairly easy, I could pick my shifts, and the pay was better than anything else I’d be likely to find. I’ve also been working a second job editing Marco’s GMSTR. The two combined mean I have enough money to visit Heather again now, so I’ll be doing that as soon as humanly possible. Hopefully while it is still August.

As for our long-term plans, we’ve finalised that too. We dismissed the standard visas as an option early on, since I stand little chance of finding a job that will sponsor me without a degree, so we turned to spousal visas. Which means getting married, something we were both immediately fine with. Long story short, when I visit this month, we’re going to start making plans to get married. Which means I’m getting married some time between August and November. (Yikes!) Then I’m going to leave again, and we’re going to apply for a K-3 visa, which basically gives the US resident (Heather) permission to bring her husband into the country permanently.

There are still ways in which this could all blow up. No visa is a sure thing, but we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure it goes smoothly. It’s going to take about 10 months, as a conservative estimate, and it’s going to be hard, expensive, and complicated, but it’s also going to be so fucking worth it.

I still have a lot of “holy shit” moments when I think about the fact that I’ll have a wife and a new home in a different country a year from now, but it’s the best possible kind of holy shit.