Past Shifting Gears, into Holding Pattern

I don’t have any more excus­es for the fact that I haven’t made many entries since we arrived. We’ve got inter­net, I now have the time, and there’s cer­tain­ly a lot going on. I have a desk, a lap­top (not very pow­er­ful, but I should be able to type and maybe even get the odd pho­to posted).

How to get start­ed? I’ll start with some ran­dom impres­sions of how life is these days.

If I were to give this time of my life a name, it would be Hold­ing Pat­tern. We have already made some adjust­ments to liv­ing here. We know where to shop for food, and where some of the busses go (learn­ing where they all go will take a lot longer). We’ve got some fur­ni­ture, although the fur­ni­ture and belong­ings we had in Cam­bridge is still MIA (last we heard, it was await­ing anoth­er dri­ver to take it here from Ram­sayville, Ontario).

On the job front, I should have a job, once the paper­work is done that would get me a Work Per­mit. It will take a lit­tle while (prob­a­bly a month or so), but I should have a full-time job, and we can stop spend­ing our savings.

I’ve made some friends, and we’ve begun to meet our neigh­bors and spend some time with them. We are a bit of an odd­i­ty, although I have heard of oth­er Amer­i­cans who have fled here. In fact, there is a new term, Brain Gain, which is the oppo­site of the tra­di­tion­al Brain Drain that Cana­da had to the US.

I’m still watch­ing the occa­sion­al TV pro­gram from the US (we get all 3 of the major net­works plus a smat­ter­ing of oth­er cable ones like CNN and Fox — which I now refer to as Ameri-Prav­da). I still fol­low some of the polit­i­cal blogs like Dai­lyKos and Escha­ton. How­ev­er, there’s a new lev­el of detach­ment as I learn of all the awful things going on there: Bush refus­ing to meet with Cindy Shee­han (despi­ca­ble of him, as always), the con­tin­ued rise of reli­gious blind­ness toward the teach­ing of Evo­lu­tion and Sci­ence in gen­er­al, the destruc­tion of their econ­o­my by hand­ing it over to Cor­po­ra­tions and worst of all, the con­tin­u­ing awful quag­mire of Iraq. I’m still con­cerned, but now it’s kind of that strange calm you have in the back seat of a cab as the dri­ver careens like a mani­ac through the streets. “That guy is dri­ving pret­ty reck­less­ly!” you say to your­self, not real­iz­ing that if he has an acci­dent, you’ll prob­a­bly end up hurt as well.

So we are wait­ing for our fur­ni­ture, wait­ing for the job, wait­ing for ‘nor­mal’ life to start, but also enjoy­ing the superb weath­er and the plea­sures of dis­cov­er­ing a new city, neigh­bor­hood by neighborhood.