After a whole lot of crap going wrong (mostly really rude people) I finally have the visa application sent off to the USCIS center in Nebraska. The postal clerk said it should arrive either Saturday or Monday. It cost $7.20 to send (with signature confirmation.)

It was a rough, rough afternoon. I watched the Terri Irwin interview with Ray Martin (Aussie television) and even though I sobbed through the whole thing, I was really uplifted by the love I could feel emanating from it. She is a strong woman who was completely devoted to this man, loved him with all her heart, and will continue to send Steve’s message to the world.

Terri Irwin with Ray Martin: 50 min 47 sec – Sep 27, 2006

Even though awful things happen in this world, love is still the strongest force.

Finally finished assembling the petition. As you might notice, it’s damned thick (3/4″ to be exact.) I didn’t count pages, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere around 75-80. I’ll be sending it off tomorrow morning if all goes well.

It will feel really bizarre and relieving to have that part taken care of and have some free time again. It’s been so long since I’ve done anything but prepare this document…probably going on a month and a half or two by this point. When I wasn’t actually putting it together, I was thinking about it or talking about it, basically living for this petition. It is as thorough as I could be without leaving out anything important. I docked about 20 pages from the original set of papers, but in the end I used all 15 pages of emails. It would have been too much work to go back through them *again* to cut more out. That was the toughest part of all this, deciding what was important enough to include. All of it is important to me. The government officials should be pleased I didn’t include the 3000+ pages of chat logs we have whipped out over the last four years.