Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

Today, the new year began in Russia and the celebration begins for the holiday season.
In Russia, they celebrate Christmas and New Years day beginning January 1.
Anna, the children and the entire country of Russia will celebrate during the next 9 days. Tomorrow the children will open gifts from Santa Claus beneath a fur tree just as we do here. Tonight the whole country welcomed in the new year. This time occurred at 1:00 P.M. Mountain time. Anna had to close her windows in fear that a rogue firework would enter her home. It is common that they light off fireworks to celebrate the new year.
We hope that this will be the last New Years Celebration that we will experience apart. In fact we hope we will all be together in a few months. The average time it takes to get and approval on our petition is 5 months and we have already waited over 2 months so we think we are halfway there.
Anna and I have discussed how we will celebrate the future holidays and we have agreed that we will begin the celebration on New Years day as they are accustomed to in Russia. We may celebrate Christmas on the American Holiday but we will also celebrate the Russian Holiday as well.
So today, Anna and I wish everyone a Happy New Year and Merry Christmas.
We will see you next year!

Hurry up and Wait!

I have hesitated to make a new blog entry over the past month because there is nothing new to report. We are still waiting for the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to approve our petition for the alien fiance (Form I-129F).
They sent me a notice informing me they received the request on the 22nd of October.
Unfortunately we must continue to wait until we receive an approval letter from the USCIS. I must admit though that every day seems like an eternity as we wait for the approval of our petition. Unfortunately the approval process takes an average 5 months. There is not much we can do until the time it is approved so we can only sit and wait.
Anna has been busy trying to sell some property she owns in southern Russia as well as trying to get the necessary papers that will allow her to take her daughter out of Russia. It seems her lawyer has found a document that indicates that her ex-husband is dead. So we hope when our petition is finally approved, she will have no difficulty taking her daughter here.
She is also trying to find the time to learn English as I am also finding some time to learn Russian.
We have now exceeded 2400 pages of written correspondence. Interestingly enough, every word we ever spoke (not including the words we spoke while I was in Russia) is in a 2400+ page document with almost 1,000,000 words. We find it interesting to refer back to our correspondence from over a year ago and read the words we spoke to each other and discover how much our relationship has developed over the past year.
We are also working on writing our individual stories to include in our future book. We hope to focus on writing the book over the next year. In fact I interviewed an author who is very interested in helping us write the book. But as in any story, it will need an ending before we can finish it. We hope that the end will be "and they lived happily ever after." but none of us can predict the uncertain future. Especially since it is assumed that the end of the world will occur in 4 days (12-21-2012). It seems even in Russia they consider this a possibility.
But if the world doesn't end on that day and we have to wait for the 3 more months, we can expect we will have over 3000 pages to edit and publish in our future book.