Day 4.262: Healthy enough?

This morning we had our physical examinations - the last step in a process to get a federally-approved doctor to approve our application for 'green cards' so that we can, hopefully, eventually, be free from the cycle of visa renewals and the spectre of being thrown out of the country at short notice.

The rest of the application is also coming together - including a new set of attractively cheerful photographs.

One of my colleagues pointed out that we are going through the successor of the immigration formalities at Ellis Island a hundred years ago. Of course in those days, the process took between two and five hours. Let's just say it's a bit slower than that these days (we started the process in October - and ours is going quickly!)  However, many things are the same. The main aims being to ensure we have money (by landing a medical bill for $2500 on us and seeing if we flinch) and do not have any communicable diseases (syphilis and TB seem to be top of the list these days).

It could be argued that if we had any of these diseases we would have been a threat to the fabric of American society for the last four and half years too - but what place does logic have in these processes?