Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?

Well, yes, down to London, but not, in fact, to see her Maj. Instead, josephine_myles and I went down to the US Embassy, to see if we could get ourselves some of those new-fangled US tax numbers all the cool kids are wearing these days.

We could, it has to be said, have picked our day better. First, we had to negotiate airport-style security (josephine_myles being forced to drink out of her almost-empty water bottle to prove that it wasn't a highly volatile explosive cunningly masquerading as Highland Spring; josephine_myles having to remove her deadly ninja hair clip before being allowed through; me standing there smugly going "there's always one"). I particularly appreciated the cartoon-style "No bombs" illustration on the door, for the benefit of those persons who might have thought the US embassy positively welcomed explosives. Then, we had to wait around 2 hours to see the IRS guy, the embassy apparently being short-staffed today. On the other hand, we could have picked our day worse: yesterday, they weren't even open, a fact I don't recall having been mentioned on the website...

Still, we had plenty of time to chat (what the other people waiting thought of our talk of m/m romance and fandom I can't imagine) and eventually reached the head of the queue, to have IRS guy scribble on our forms in impenetrable scrawl and regale us with tales of his youthful sci-fi writing exploits (I probably imagined the implication that he'd grown out of it).

So now we just sit back and wait for a few months, and hopefully become official persons in the eyes of the US tax authorities!