Avoiding an Immigration Pitfall

I suddenly realized today that if my employment terminates on June 30th my H1B status does too. There is no grace period to leave the country for H1Bs though apparently they allow "reasonable time" to allow people to find another H1B sponsor if they are fired. I should be OK statuswise as I have been approved for a green card. The only problem is I want to terminate that process and my lawyer thinks I should do that soon. The last resort would be to travel to Canada and re-enter as a tourist (using my British passport to avoid any border hassle). But I have come up with a creative solution - if my university terminates me at the end of September instead and puts me on unpaid leave from June 30 then there will be no visa issue at all and I won't even have to bother my long-suffering lawyer again. I floated this in an e-mail late today. We will see what the response is tomorrow. Been drafting up my moving plan and resignation letter. The latter will have to wait on a resolution of the timing issue. Snork Maiden finally sent in her formal acceptance to the Australian employer yesterday. It was held up by a slow HR department rewriting the offer letter to change the start date from September 1st to October 1st. She also asked her boss to suggest temporary accommodation - he stayed at the University across the street when he arrived in the city - exactly where I stayed 11 years ago in early October when I first moved to Australia to work at that university. So if we end up staying there at first this time it will be a case of deja vu.

Yesterday I started trading again after getting back from the trip to Massachusetts. I started by just buying 5 QQQQ puts in my Roth IRA account. Then I shorted some NQ contracts and my first trade netted $600 or so. But later today I reshorted after the market had risen a bit. But too early. The market rose a lot more from there. I also shorted too many contracts in total. The Kelly criterion says that I should trade 3 contracts in my IB account but I was short 5. I covered 2 at a 9 point loss after hours. This is my real job now as far as making money goes so I need to be more careful and consistent. Everything else I'm doing will either be career development or for "fun".