Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Moving right along...

I've just sent some paperwork to Ray from MAG-ANAK (http://www.mag-anak.org) for review. Once he's got that along with some paperwork that Rizza will be completing shortly, he'll forward everything to the USCIS.

MAG-ANAK is the Filipino term for family. Ray has the web site along with both a Yahoo group and a web forum related to Fil-Am families. All of them are definitely good resources for information when comes to Fil-Am relationships. Hopefully all goes well with the paperwork and we see a NOA (notice of action) from the USCIS in about a month or so after he submits everything.

A gift from the dog (ugh)

Some gifts are good, some aren't so good. Especially, the unexpected ones that end up being people problems when they were initially pet problems. It looks like the dog Rizza and the kids adopted had ringworm. Now she and I both have it. Ringworm causes quite an itchy rash and is fairly contagious. The doc here gave me some cream to put on it. Hopefully the rash will be gone for good after about two weeks. I told Rizza to take herself and the dog to get looked at their as well. Hopefully it hasn't found its way to the kids yet.

Another trip to the Philippines

I just got back from the trip to the islands. The first day there, Rizza's son Carlo was in a contest for his school. He and Marlene, Rizza's oldest daughter, put on one heck of a nice act. Carlo took the runner up spot a week later at the coronation ceremony. Way to go, Carlo!

We also spent some time visiting some of Rizza's friends which made it a bit easier for me to associate faces with the people she speaks about in our conversations.

I got a chance to see the new house or at least the rudimentary bits that were already in place at the time. Trails were dug in the ground to set up the walls and the frame was in place. I was told by the development folks that the place was 50% done shortly before leaving for the US. Rizza took a trip up to General Trias later on. She was really pleased. Hopefully, she and the kids will be able to move into the new place in a few months.

We also got the kids all baptized. Rizza spent quite a bit of time getting all the preparations done. She took care of finding folks willing to be sponsors/godparents, making arrangements for a party after the ceremony and all that fun stuff. It was quite an undertaking for her. She did quite well though. Everybody looked like they had a good time.

One other thing I tried to do while there was to meet with one of the city councilors from the the local Mayor's office in Trece Martires. I'd like to try to clean up their web site a bit more to see if it might help their commerce a bit. I have a few good pictures of one of the local schools as well as a government building and a statue to use for an example site. My plan is to put something small together as an example. I was able to spend a few minutes with the councilor, but wasn't really able to spend any quality time meeting with him due to the short trip. Hopefully I can spend a bit more time and give a presentation the next time I'm there. The current web site for Trece Martires is at http://www.tmc.gov.ph.