"Relax your fingers and don't press down."

I went and got my biometrics taken yesterday.  I went to the local immigration office, which is an immaculately clean and terribly official building near Research Triangle Park.  Also, ruthlessly efficient: I was in and out in fifteen minutes, including the time it took me to run back out to my car to put my digital camera away (NO CAMERAS ALLOWED).  A very nice lady scanned all ten of my fingerprints and took my picture, they stamped my appointment print-out to prove that I'd been there and done that, and I was done.

Then I drove back to work and got caught in a torrential downpour on the way from the parking lot to my building, and had to spend the rest of the afternoon in wet clothes.

This morning I went to my bank to talk about transferring funds to a foreign bank, and possibly getting a loan.  As far as transferring funds goes, it looks like I'm going to have to carry a cashier's check and/or large amount of cash with me on the airplane, because a wire transfer can only be accomplished if I am physically at the bank in the US.  Looks like that money-belt I used on my backpacking trip two years ago will be put to use again!

Then I went to my parents' bank to try to get the last piece of documentation I need for my visa: a bank statement.  This has not been as easy as it sounds.  The most recent online statement is from the beginning of June, which is not recent enough.  Based on the dates of the previous statements, the July statement should be there, but it's not.  So I went to the bank to get them to print me one, and what they printed me looks...not quite right.  It's got the account numbers and the amounts and such, but it doesn't really show the transaction history, which is the critical bit.  So I'm very nervous about sending it off, because if it's not right, I don't get a polite phone call from the immigration office saying, "Could you please send us such-and-such, kthxbye," I get a big old REJECTED stamp and then have to start over. 

The long and short of it is that I'm going to wait a few more days for the online statement to appear (or the paper statement to come in the mail), and then send everything.  This is just incredibly annoying because I wanted to get it done today, and every delay in sending the stuff means a delay in me actually getting the visa.  Besides which, now that I've enrolled my biometrics, I have an actual deadline by which my documents must be in New York: July 22.

Everything is ready to go except this one last piece, and it's aggravating.