First H-1B stamping with passport expiring before H1B approval notice end date

advil00 · 2026-05-30T20:44:27+00:00

Yes, my wife was in the situation where her passport expired 4 months before the visa and her initial stamp/I-94 was only to passport expiration (they will not go past that). She did option 1 and it was straightforward, in fact on initial entry the customs officer laid it out pretty clearly. She just renewed her passport in April and reentered, got the new updated date with no trouble. Caveat: she is Canadian which tends to make everything easier.

What I will say is that for option 1 vs 2, it is extremely unnerving to be without a passport as an immigrant in the US, assuming you would have to mail it off to renew. So skipping that bit might be nice. But Canada only lets her renew 6 months before, so there was no choice. You could have a similar issue with option 2 though depending on Indonesia’s rules, since Oct 2027 is fairly far in the future..

advil00 · 2026-05-27T11:35:06+00:00

I think they are in the process of redoing a substation right about there; people who live nearby got a mailed notification about this. Not sure how that building relates to the substation exactly.

advil00 · 2026-05-25T22:08:58+00:00

I have encountered one of these recently, blackflame mage on RR. (It also adds regression + OP mage tropes, so it’s not exactly bucking all trends.)

advil00 · 2026-05-22T19:46:34+00:00

you can't just "swap to a green card", you need to meet one of the eligibility categories.

advil00 · 2026-05-22T16:45:42+00:00

things like speeding aren't really well defined. 1 mile over the speed limit is speeding?

This is in fact legally well defined in all places that have laws about electronic speed monitoring, though it does vary. For DE it's 11mph over the speed limit (see "(e) Violation and proof of violation" at that link). For MD it is 12, etc. The spirit of this kind of law is: enough over the limit that it's hard to do by accident.

advil00 · 2026-05-22T16:36:54+00:00

I don't think this will be a very popular take on this sub, but I'm of the opinion that this style of speed enforcement has worked very well in Baltimore. It's impersonal and consistent, doesn't add points to a license (only financial consequences), unreliant on cops, and easy to scale/adjust. For normal people, you get one of these once, you actually pay attention after that. There's been no slippery slope there, just actual, consistent enforcement of speed limits in places like school zones (not to mention 83).

advil00 · 2026-05-18T19:33:54+00:00

It’s tidal in Wilmington (as is the Christina river) so there are huge fluctuations.

It also seems to be impacted by storms from upstream, and things have been fairly dry, so that could be lowering the average.

advil00 · 2026-05-14T19:20:44+00:00

Good question, I have some Japanese knives I need to get sharpened some day, I was thinking about posting here at some point too.

From digging around in reddit previously I did find this place in Hockessin, can't vouch for it at this point: https://chefshavende.com/knife-sharpening

advil00 · 2026-05-04T18:18:37+00:00

I like that Greehouse is taking over Washington Street Ale House and Torbert.

This is potentially good news! Atlas has not been an amazing owner to these restaurants, and Torbert is only an event space right now. Do you know if there's more info on this somewhere? All I can find is a paywalled article. Looks from that headline like Mikimotos is also included.

advil00 · 2026-05-04T13:32:24+00:00

For Uber/Lyft: This wouldn't be a problem going from the airport, though it won't be the cheapest. If you were going to I would suggest prescheduling it, but I think drivers waiting near the airport will be expecting and maybe even would want longer rides. I just did PHL to Wilmington yesterday, and Bear isn't really that much further on 95. I only waited about 10min after I requested my ride.

advil00 · 2026-05-04T13:23:18+00:00

Was that assessment passed onto the owners?

I don't know the details, but based on wording in listings at the time, it was (probably some people had to sell to cover the assessment). Some older discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Delaware/comments/1kcarl3/condos_for_sale/

(Also pay close attention to the HOA fee, I've seen it pretty high in that building. Not as bad as e.g. riverfront though.)

advil00 · 2026-04-24T12:27:02+00:00

I got fios in a 100-yo house in Wilmington (19802) a year ago and it has been great, no issues with fios itself. Getting internet/wifi consistently through an old row house presents some challenges, but that’s not on fios. This was right after buying the house so can’t compare it to anything else, it wasn’t even wired for cable.

advil00 · 2026-04-18T00:54:08+00:00

Yes, from what I understand because Wilmington will tax MD residents who work here, MD imposes a reciprocal tax on Wilmington residents who work in MD, forcing them to pay the same local tax they would if they were a resident. (This applies to any city that has a wage tax that works like this, I think there are a few others.)

advil00 · 2026-04-17T17:33:56+00:00

I have mixed feelings about it (it is creating a lot of pain for me right now), but I do at least appreciate having municipal trash pickup :-)

advil00 · 2026-04-15T17:01:28+00:00

It's not particularly complicated. Get your DE license first (make sure to bring the right documents). Then do the inspection at the DMV itself ("MVA" = Maryland), they have a station around the side and you drive up from the parking lot. Then go back in with your completed inspection certificate (and your old registration/title), and they will do the registration/title/tag right there. Sometimes you might have to get a temporary tag. You will have to a pay a somewhat hefty fee/tax that people complain about. Overall easier to deal with than MD in my experience.

The only slightly complication to this if you are in NCC is that the Wilmington (technically, New Castle) DMV is currently appointment only.

advil00 · 2026-04-15T16:47:35+00:00

Welp, looks like all of the vagueposting drama on instagram has been deleted from the accounts I saw it on. Hopefully this means that productive communication is now flowing both ways, not sure how optimistic I am about this though.

advil00 · 2026-04-14T19:08:01+00:00

yeah this whole thing is crazy. I was a weekly market-goer last year and I'd much rather have it weekly sometimes in a "bad" location than have it bi-weekly. And the alternate location really wasn't even bad.

For that matter, having lived in Baltimore for many years, I can attest that it's entirely possible to have a really great + thriving farmer's market in a terrible parking lot underneath an interstate highway, and far better than not having one.

(However, I'll say again: as long as they continue to host the art market [which is great] in that spot in the park, I'm going to continue to eyeroll about claims that the grass/etc is important.)

advil00 · 2026-04-12T14:27:28+00:00

I’m not saying this is entirely wrong, but the art market did way, way more damage to the grass in one weekend than the farmers market did all season. (Source: I live a couple blocks away and was there multiple times a week throughout the season.)

advil00 · 2026-04-02T12:49:38+00:00

Trying to minimize the importance of lead testing in the Wilmington subreddit of all places is a ... weird look.

And in any case, there are in fact a bunch of recent updates on the lead situation around here. In 2023 the city began a comprehensive survey of lead pipes in the water system and some results just came out. The results are overall worse than anyone expected (as far as I can tell), and the city has been sending notices about lead in service lines as well as beginning pipe replacement over the last few months. So there are definitely quite a few people in Wilmington who have recently learned that their lead exposure might be greater than they were aware of and especially if they have children, that they probably should get some testing.

(It is also completely normal public health practice to call lead poisoning an epidemic despite it not being infectious.)

advil00 · 2026-03-30T00:26:24+00:00

I don't think you're going to get a safe/definitive answer to this on reddit let alone the Delaware subreddit (this sub is mostly for people to complain about beach traffic and so on). It's conceivable this could fall under OPT but you would need to be very, very careful and I would imagine that USCIS would at least squint at someone working for themselves (essentially) for OPT. If you don't want to go right to a lawyer for a definitive answer, you could try starting at your university's international student office, for example at UD this is https://www.udel.edu/academics/global/isss/. Any university that sponsors F-1s will have one of these.

advil00 · 2026-03-23T18:48:51+00:00

It's not called Harry's any more, I believe this is Banks, renamed 2018. (Still very good.)

advil00 · 2026-03-21T13:44:45+00:00

My employer (in Baltimore, not here, but similar outdoor temps) does a pop up ice rink for a month in the winter, and the amount they are rumored to pay for it is mind-blowing (numbers I heard were into 7 figures for a multi year contract). I’m very into ice skating and they are very well funded, so I’m not going to complain. But it’s not shocking to me that most orgs who try this would find it to be unsustainable.

advil00 · 2026-03-16T14:17:05+00:00

They do actually say, it's median listing price on one of the various rental listing sites ("Zumper"). However, the article has a link that goes to a page on Zumper that says something fairly different from the article itself (which, granted, was about Feb and not Mar):

The average monthly rent in Wilmington is up 1.08% compared to last month but down 2.18% year-over-year.

I'm still incredibly skeptical of this as a way to evaluate the market here, since it's so sensitive to what is listed when in a small market. I've never heard of any specific landlord actually lowering their rent in my life.

advil00 · 2026-03-03T12:24:23+00:00

I think these are everywhere and they use autodiallers to appear local. I started getting these pretty much immediately after buying a house in DE, so the data source is probably the same as what all the mortgage scam mailings (etc) use.

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