The Case of the Empty Mailbox
Nothing in the mail yet from immigration. We're hoping that tomorrow will be the day. Thanks to everyone who have given both Nadia and I support. 
Over the weekend my wonderful wife gave me an early Christmas gift (due to mail-in rebate deadlines, haha). It was 2GB of RAM for my computer. She had snooped inside my computer to see what memory I had, and got me the same kind. I don't want to sound as excited as I was due to fears that I may sound as nerdy as I actually am, so we'll just say that I was really, really happy with it! My excitement led to me taking the leap into installing Windows Vista x64. I had been running XP x86, but with 4GB of RAM, it would only recognize 3.5GB. I figure if I upgrade to an x64 OS, I might as well make the leap to Vista as well - so I did.
I (cough) acquired it (cough) on Sunday and was able to install it Sunday night with no issues whatsoever. One of the main reasons I waited to make the jump to Vista was because of its well-documented issues at launch. I'm convinced it was released without being even 90% completed, and was the product of a deadline, not of quality. Now that SP1 (Service Pack 1) has been out for quite some time, and SP2 is currently in beta, I felt (and have now confirmed) that all of the kinks must have been worked out. User Account Control (UAC for short) was still extremely annoying in giving popup notifications asking you to Allow or Deny permission for almost any program you run. A neat little tool called TweakUAC fixed that right up by putting UAC into "Quiet Mode." A great example of the annoying UAC was when I attempted to delete a shortcut in my Start Menu > All Programs menu. It had to ask me 3 separate times if I was sure I wanted to delete this measly shortcut. YES, DEAR GOD YES JUST DELETE IT.
Anyway, I have all of my normal everyday programs installed again, and everything is running very smoothly. I really love the new UI, all of the Aero effects, etc. etc. It's a breath of fresh air from the stagnant fruitiness of Windows XP (although we said the same thing about Windows XP when it came out regarding Windows 2000/ME).
I had a somewhat awful night's sleep last night, I've been somewhat hazy all day, and I just finished a session of karate tonight. Needless to say, I could probably qualify as a pile of mush at the moment. Time to hit the hay and hope for a great tomorrow.
Cheers.