Waiting for the FBI and the Fireworks Competition

It’s been a longer than we expected wait for any response regard­ing our paper­work for Landed Immi­grant sta­tus. This week, I decided to call the lawyer we’ve dealt with dur­ing the whole process to find out if he knew any­thing more than we did (or per­haps he could find a way to expe­dite mat­ters). After a lit­tle phone tag, I found out yes­ter­day that the hold-up has been Pam’s fin­ger­prints. It’s not that she’s on any watch-list, but that the prints just don’t come out well enough. Appar­ently years of wash­ing dishes, dry hands, and other wear and tear have left her with fin­gers that just don’t offer much in the way of a well-defined print. She’s had them done twice, and the sec­ond time, the fel­low doing the prints looked at the first set (which had come back with the ‘Rejected’ stamp on them) and declared “I could read these!”. He explained that the FBI requires prints that are read­able by a machine rather than a human. So, we find our­selves in limbo, iron­i­cally because the FBI won’t clear Pam’s fin­ger­prints. This is par­tic­u­larly irk­some, as so much of our future deci­sions are on hold because of this (and even the abil­ity for us to stay here). Our lawyer said that there’s really noth­ing we can do, and that we’ll just have to wait while the prints and Pam’s records make their way through the FBI’s labyrinthine bureau­cracy. I’m hop­ing that the wait won’t be much longer, but there’s no telling how much longer this will take. It’s a good thing that my work per­mit didn’t depend on this!

If it’s Sat­ur­day, Then This Must be China
Last year we very much enjoyed watch­ing not one night of fire­works, but 3 of them. Each year, Van­cou­ver hosts a Fire­works com­pe­ti­tion in late July to early August. Last year, 3 coun­tries, includ­ing Canada, China and Swe­den were the par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries (Swe­den won). This year, it’s 4 : Italy, China, the Czech Repub­lic, and Mex­ico. We saw Italy’s per­for­mance last Wednes­day from Vanier Park. Tonight it will be China, who will open their dis­play with the music of ‘The Yel­low River Con­certo’, a piece that has the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of being the only fairly well known piece of con­cert music that was writ­ten by a com­mit­tee, (the Yel­low River Com­posers’ Com­mit­tee, of course), although there is an arti­cle in Wikipedia that attrib­utes it as an arrange­ment of music from The Yel­low River Can­tata by Yin Cheng­zong. The Yel­low River Can­tata is attrib­uted to Xian Xing­hai (1905?1945), so I’m not sure where the Com­mit­tee attri­bu­tion on so many record­ings (includ­ing the one I heard a few times when I was a kid) came from. Next Wednes­day it will be the Czech Repub­lic, and the fol­low­ing Sat­ur­day, Mex­ico fol­lowed by the ‘Grand Finale’. I remem­ber how I was sad that we’d leave the Fourth of July Fire­works behind, but they seem to be replaced nicely with more than enough pyrotech­nics, although with­out all of the kitschy Amer­i­cana we indulged in on the Banks of the Charles.