Catch 22
Here's a very kafka-esque thing. In support of the application for the fiancee visa, they want me to file a "notice of intended marriage." This NOIM requires me to specify a date within the next 18 months we intend to have our wedding. But the fiancee visa has a minimum processing time of 23 months. So in order to apply for the visa to get married I have to swear we intend to get married sooner than the visa can possibly allow us to. 🤷♂️
(unrelated pictures, from the Geelong Waterfront a few weeks ago)
Also, this visa application has an aspect that's a lot more annoying than the gathering of mountains of obscure information that hte other visas required -- I need to chase around my friends to get them to make "statutory declarations" ("stat decs") attesting that Cristina and my relationship is true and genuine, but this stat dec needs to be done a certain way on a certain form witnessed by one of a certain set of kinds of people, and all done exactly right. So far I've had two friends do it only to have the lawyers say it wasn't done right and another friend who's been telling me she'll do it "definitely tomorrow" for over two weeks. I hate that requires both extensively nagging my friends and also being delayed by other people. ):
Edit edit: another neighbor is willing to sign one for me but her printer is out of ink, so I offered to print it and bring it over but my wifi has been down for four days (I also spent hours with the telecom about this this morning) and apparently my computer won't talk to my printer without the wifi working so I can't print it, at this point I want to scream and throw something out the window.
Update 12 hours later: internet (inexplicably) functional again, printer worked a few hours ago to print out the one copy of the form for the neighbor. Have an appointment in the morning to meet with a registered celebrant to sign the NOIM and.... my printer now inexplicably refuses to print!! I've turned both the computer and printer off and on again, run the troubleshooter (it detects an error but can't identify anything about it), manually checked every setting I could think of. Arrghhh why is EVERYTHING going wrong about this??!??!