Visa Stamping from Canada/ Mexico

Russian citizen, SWE at FANG, 2 years in US, first h1b visa expired in July, i797 valid until May 2019
Have an approved i140, but didn't apply for AOS yet for family reasons.

Filled in ds160 on Oct 8th for Vancouver and paid fee

No available appointments when clicked that I will be travelling from another country

I had hard deadline to renew visa before mid-November, so I decided to wait and catch appointments.

Monitored throughout Oct 9th starting 5am PDT, refreshing every 15-60 minutes; caught appointment for Oct 19th in the late evening (throughout the day there were some for mid-late November and one for November 6th which I decided not to schedule).

Thursday, Oct 18th, 11pm: arrived at Vancouver airport, passed the immigration with tourist visa (I've been in Canada once before as a tourist and still have visa), immigration was quite fast and strraightforward, I've honestly said that I'm here to apply for a visa
Friday, Oct 19th
6:55am - arrived at consulate, appointment was for 7:45am, there was a line of maybe 20 people in front of me
7:15am - they started letting in peple with 7:00 and 7:15 appointments
~7:40 - they've let me in. Nice thing about this consulate is, they have lockers for cell phones, iirc they were even letting people in with bags after security check, but I wouldn't bet on that

1st floor, document check, asked for i797 original, fingerprint scanning
20th floor, interview
- name of company
- what do you do for them ('software engineer' was enough)
- please give me old passport with old visa (I was applying with a new one)
- %joke about recent company-related news%
- your visa is approved, you will have to pick up your passport at the consulate due to postal strike on Tuesday, Oct 23rd between 1:15pm and 2:15pm
~8:30am I'm out of the consulate

Oct 19th status changed to 'Administrative processing'
Oct 22nd changed to 'Issued'

Hopefully I'm picking up my passport and flying back tomorrow.