Welcome to the room. Did U apply in Oct? App recvd at Sydney? dates? timelines? thnx
Thank you. Good to be here. As in, it was mailed out on October the 7th, and the application was received in Sydney, Nova Scotia on October the 16th. By the way, do not use Canada Post as I did, for they are at risk of strike right now.
An enormous amount of work went into our application. By the time it was finished, it almost looked easy to make. It is quite eloquent. But in reality, we've been working on it for 5 years. Simple things like backing up Facebook 5 years ago ended up being crucial. There were several incidents of data loss, some of it the fault of the wife, others the fault of mine, related to the terrible design flaws of some of Facebook's apps. But I was very good at making sure to save and create multiple backups of all this data.
Really a lot of the work got done in a filthy coffee shop, face to face, surrounded by cockroaches, on the other side of the world where my wife lives. We spent many days fighting and bickering over details, and that is a process that lasted for months. But eventually we were able to get to a point where we had enough content, that I could put it into a project manager "Trello". I utilized "ShareX", a desktop screenshot program, to take cropped screenshots from Adobe Reader (full page view), and we'd have lists for each relevant set of forms, each card in the list would have the screenshot from each page of the forms, up to date with everything we'd filled out. I mean up to date as in, if one small thing was changed, I would update the card with an up to date image to reflect the state of progress we were at. I paid a good bit of money (over 200 bucks for 8 months) for me and my wife to be able to use this Trello, even if she used less than I, I felt it important for us to be on the same page and fully informed. All this paperwork is so ambiguous to deal with over a large distance, visual learner type people would have trouble without some sort of system. Not to mention the tensions are so high, with so much work to do, negativity can set in easily and make it hard to get anything done. So it was a lifesaver for us and gave us much hope.
And we'd have a "to do, doing, and done" section (3 sections), every time we read over the complete guide or check list and found some small error or something that needed adjusting, we'd put it into that to do list. There were also sections for social media, photos, tickets and passport stamps. These too would have images. We also utilized Microsoft Publisher and even Microsoft Paint, to just efficiently display our information. Every item would be printed on a piece of paper, so it would also have a screenshot to represent that piece of paper, in the project manager. We could go through all the forms faster, in that program, with them being more up to date, than you could shift around physical papers, which are cumbersome to keep up to date and looking clean.
This is how we got through the huge undertaking and made an application that was so eloquent that it looked easy to make. I hope our efforts paid off and everything is processed expediently and without much nuisance. But I guess you never know. I had gone onto Youtube and saw an application that a man made back in 2016, and I mean I guess the rules might have been different then, but he was sending in 100's of pages of bank records, social media, etc etc. We operated within the stipulations of the check list, which meant we needed to be a little more concise. But at the end, along with the exhaustive detail we went into via the forms, the work we did displaying the tickets and passport stamps seems to me to be very nice, and I think that they'll have a pleasure going through an application that has been so well tailored to their expectations.
But again we're only human so we'll see. I figure it would be useful to others to give them an idea of the type of efforts we've gone to, and how that will translate as far as processing times go. I've yet to list this stuff in the tracker yet but I'll get around to it shortly. Either way, we've wanted to live together for over 5 years and much of that time has been time we spent married, so we certainly are at least glad to have this "passed in" and have the ball on their side of the basketball court for a change, it's been a miserable time trying to seal the deal and mail it in for us.