One More Thing About the First Tuesday in November

Today is also an Anniver­sary of sorts.

Depend­ing on how you count it, one year ago, either today or in 2 days (date rather than day), George Bush, through what­ever means were employed, won the elec­tion. I remem­ber arriv­ing home exhausted after work­ing to get out the vote in New Hamp­shire (which we won back, damnit! ). I called and left word with my brother in Seat­tle to call if the news was good. When I awoke the next morn­ing to the clock radio, I knew even before the NPR announcer got to the end of his first sen­tence how the elec­tion had gone. Pam and I turned to each other, and before we’d even opened our eyes, we knew what we had to do: Plan B. Our lives had taken the turn that ended up with us here, on a dif­fer­ent coast, in a dif­fer­ent coun­try. Every­thing was put into motion a year ago, in that moment.

Just thought I’d take notice.

Another Day, Another Setback

The plumber arrived this morn­ing and peered under the sink. Yes, the prob­lem was indeed the peanut shells that we had put in the drain instead of the garbage can. As the say­ing goes, hind­sight is 20–20. The plumber said “This isn’t the first time there’s been a prob­lem here.”, not­ing that some of the pipes had been replaced, and the ‘repairs’ had omit­ted an eas­ier route to clear­ing the clog, requir­ing him to do some extra labor. So, there goes $185 for 1/2 a bag of peanuts and we are a bit wiser about what goes down the disposal.

After that, we wrapped up the G5 in a tarp, and wheeled it up a cou­ple of blocks to West­world com­put­ers (a local Apple Dealer — not an Apple Store, as the only one of those in Canada is in Toronto) on the dolly we got a month or so ago. The ser­vice guy said it would be a day or 2. Good thing I had a backup from a cou­ple of weeks ago, as there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll lose all the data on the hard disk. There were a cou­ple of soft­ware updates, and quite a few MP3s that I had recently ripped from CDs, but noth­ing cat­a­strophic. I’m back on the old Tibook today, which should get a medal for con­tin­u­ing to hold up, no mat­ter how slow and beat-up it gets.
Then, I got a call-back from our immi­gra­tion lawyer. I had called him yes­ter­day because we hadn’t heard any­thing regard­ing my mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions for a work per­mit; one to the Province of British Colum­bia (the Provin­cial Nom­i­nee Pro­gram), and one to the Gov­ern­ment of Canada in Ottawa (in this case, an HRSDC Assess­ment for Labour Mar­ket Opin­ion). I had got­ten a form let­ter from the BC Nom­i­nee pro­gram a few weeks ago and they promptly charged my credit card for the $500 appli­ca­tion fee, but noth­ing more. As for Ottawa, I’d heard noth­ing at all.
Our lawyer did not have good news. Appar­ently, he had met with BC Nom­i­nee Pro­gram staff last week, and found out that they were mov­ing their offices from the bor­der to Down­town Van­cou­ver and get­ting rid of staff through attri­tion. That means that those who didn’t want to com­mute to Van­cou­ver (prob­a­bly a 45–60 minute trip dur­ing rush hour if they lived near the old offices) would lose their jobs. The upshot of this is that the BC Nom­i­nee Pro­gram has ground to a vir­tual halt. Instead of expect­ing any­thing from them within 4 weeks as we had orig­i­nally thought, they won’t be get­ting through any appli­ca­tions until early 2006 (Jan­u­ary, to be more spe­cific, if our lawyer’s fore­cast is accu­rate). At this rate, we’ll prob­a­bly hear from the National Gov­ern­ment first, and that should be a cou­ple of weeks from now. That’s also a bit scarier. If the paper­work for the nom­i­nee pro­gram went through OK, it was to have been a quick trip to the bor­der to pick up the work per­mit and all would be done. The HRSDC process involves a call to the com­pany from Ottawa and some ques­tions regard­ing the posi­tion, which could go badly if they didn’t give the right answers.

I was dis­ap­pointed to hear all of this, to say the least. While we can make it until Jan­u­ary on our sav­ings, it’s still a drag wait­ing, and so much more rides on that work per­mit: health care with­out hav­ing to pay for our exor­bi­tant US Cobra insur­ance, a BC driver’s license, a BC Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card, which would make reen­ter­ing the coun­try much eas­ier if we have to go south of the bor­der, and a lot of other minor items.

I take some solace in the fact that if we had tried to sell our town­house in Cam­bridge today, we would now be in, as the Boston Globe said last week, “a buyer’s mar­ket”, and prob­a­bly wouldn’t get what we asked for. Accord­ing to the same arti­cle, a house in Jamaica Plain roughly our size and price had to drop their price by $70k and still no tak­ers. So much for the ‘no hous­ing bub­ble’ reas­sur­ances from the US gov­ern­ment and press. That’s on top of the US dollar’s plunge, which took place shortly after we arrived. So, you win some, you lose some. Maybe if we had come ear­lier or I had got­ten the spon­sor­ing com­pany lined up sooner we could have beaten the Provin­cial Nom­i­nee Pro­gram office shake-up, the way we squeaked our phone install in a day before the Telus strike that’s still going on to this day. Once again, hind­sight is 20–20.