My Absentee Ballot, and What's That Date?

A cou­ple of days ago I sent my absen­tee bal­lot in for the 2006 Mid-term elec­tions. It’s not as my vote is going to make a big dif­fer­ence, but I am intrigued with the prospect of Deval Patrick becom­ing the next Gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts. What’s more there was even a State Bal­lot Ques­tion that would pave the way for the sale of wine in Gro­cery stores in my for­mer state. If that one passes, I think that Hell is not freez­ing over, but there prob­a­bly is a chill in the air.

It felt strange to fill out this piece of paper, because it reminded me that for what it’s worth, I still am an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. When we finally do get our Cana­dian cit­i­zen­ship (that hope­fully will hap­pen some time in the next 3–4 years, although I wouldn’t be sur­prised if it were 5 or 6 at the rate we’ve been going), I don’t intend to renounce my Amer­i­can cit­i­zen­ship, if for no other rea­son than the con­ve­nience of mov­ing back and forth over a soon-to-be mil­i­ta­rized and walled-off bor­der. Along with show­ing my navy blue US Pass­port at that time, this ges­ture is one of the few ways that I’ll assert that iden­tity. Will I iden­tify myself as an Amer­i­can, Cana­dian, or hav­ing dual cit­i­zen­ship when asked by some­one in another coun­try? These days, appar­ently many Amer­i­cans are claim­ing to be Cana­di­ans when they travel.

On Thurs­day night we went to a com­edy show at the Orpheum The­atre (that’s where the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony, and most of the high-class acts per­form when they’re in town). One of the come­di­ans said that when he was asked what the dif­fer­ence was between a Cana­dian and an Amer­i­can by an Eng­lish­man while he was in Lon­don, he said “Well, con­fus­ing me with an Amer­i­can — that would be like me con­fus­ing you, an Eng­lish­man, with say…a retarded per­son!” The audi­ence roared their approval. “Any Amer­i­cans here?” the come­dian asked some­what sheep­ishly. We didn’t feel like rais­ing our hands.

Is that Octo­ber 5^th or the 10^th of May?
There are sev­eral ways that the close­ness of the US (and its over­whelm­ing cul­ture and ways of doing things) can be a real pain in the neck. For instance, Canada finds it nec­es­sary to alter our sched­ul­ing of Day­light Sav­ings Time so that we can remain in synch with the US, who is doing it ear­lier next year than today’s date (to save energy, some­thing another ter­ri­bly pop­u­lar pres­i­dent, Jimmy Carter, also did dur­ing his time in office). So we can look for­ward to per­haps 4 extra weeks of get­ting up in dark­ness and also return­ing home from work in dark­ness, rather than get­ting at least a last hour of sun before dinnertime.

Some­times hav­ing the US influ­ence is handy, like being able to have both a US and Cana­dian dol­lar account at the bank. It also has meant that most of our cul­ture shock has been pretty min­i­mal, although you do occa­sion­ally have to try to remem­ber if it was a US ad or a Cana­dian ad for a new prod­uct that you saw on TV. If it appeared on a US sta­tion, it could very well be some­thing you won’t find here, at least not right away.

How­ever, an extremely annoy­ing way that Canada fol­lows the US (at least some­times) is in the way that we fill in our dates on forms here. Some­times the form fol­lows the US for­mat (month-day-year), but occa­sion­ally it fol­lows the Euro­pean for­mat (day-month-year). There seems to be lit­tle warn­ing whether its going to be one way or the other. It can cause a lot of con­fu­sion when you get some­thing that says “Due 6/7/06″. Was that June 7^th or July 6^th? Only after the 13^th of the month is one sure, and 13 days is a long time to be treat­ing any date as if it could go either way. You’d think that a coun­try that insists upon the Eng­lish style postal code would resist this prob­lem. Maybe Canada should come up with its own date for­mat. Per­haps some­thing that no one else wants, like day-year-month!

My Childhood Friend is Interviewed in St. John (with Audio)

When­ever we talk about an old friend, neigh­bor or acquain­tance, Pam hopes they can come and visit us here. She fig­ures that they’ll take a look around, get hooked and move here as well. I guess her rea­son­ing is ‘What bet­ter way to enhance your neigh­bor­hood by mov­ing peo­ple you know into it’?

This also brings up the ques­tion of how big the neigh­bor­hood is that we want to con­sider. Is it the Down­town Van­cou­ver Area, or per­haps the province of British Colum­bia? Why not the entire coun­try of Canada? If that’s the case, then Pam can rest assured that one of my best friends from child­hood (about age 9 until I went away to col­lege), Cyn­thia Abram­son (now Cyn­thia Nikitin), has spent a good deal of time in our newly adopted coun­try and has been com­ing here to Canada for sev­eral years before we even moved here.

Cyn­thia is a Vice Pres­i­dent of the New York-based Non-Profit Orga­ni­za­tion, the Project for Pub­lic Spaces, who are “ded­i­cated to cre­at­ing and sus­tatain­ing pub­lic places that build com­mu­ni­ties.” As I could see from her impres­sive bio on their site, she’s been busy in the past 15 years or so.

Not only has my friend Cyn­thia been spend­ing a lot of time in Canada, but she was inter­viewed last week by the CBC in St. John, New Brunswick, and we caught the inter­view on the Inter­net. Not only that, I saved the stream to my disk and with her per­mis­sion, post it here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This also serves to demon­strate the very easy-to-install and use audio player plu­gin for Word­Press. If I get a lit­tle more ambi­tious, I’ll use the same plu­gin to include some record­ings of my music on the About page.

Our Orchid Helps Fulfill our Fall Colour Quota

Our Orchid

We don’t usu­ally have great luck with plants, although we inher­ited quite a few that sit on the ter­race from the pre­vi­ous owner of our condo. Pam has lost 1 to an infes­ta­tion, and added 1. So far, so good.

We were pleased to get this orchid as a gift from our neigh­bor a lit­tle less than a year ago. After it lost it’s blooms, we fig­ured that it would at best be alive, but that would be it. Sur­pris­ingly, it has bloomed again. Maybe liv­ing in this exceed­ingly mild cli­mate means that more exotic plants, like orchids, have a chance here.

I know these blooms will be over by next month, but they cer­tainly are a nice splash of colour for now, and are much appre­ci­ated, since we left behind the spec­tac­u­lar fall foliage of New Eng­land.

Prints Charming

When we started the process of immi­grat­ing to Canada, I knew we’d prob­a­bly be lucky in some ways, and unlucky in oth­ers. Our expe­ri­ences so far have been mostly lucky. We found a beau­ti­ful place to live, both of us have had suc­cesses with employ­ment, we got a good lawyer, and of course, we speak the lan­guage and brought enough funds to begin with. We’ve filled out the forms, got­ten a clean bill of health and have gen­er­ally been able to jump through all of the hoops that the bureau­cra­cies of the US and Canada have put before us.

Until now.

The prob­lem is my wife’s fin­ger­prints, or rather, lack of them. It seems that a small per­cent­age of the world’s pop­u­la­tion can’t pro­duce a read­able fin­ger­print. Besides the obvi­ous ones with­out hands or arms, there are oth­ers, like my wife, who sim­ply have dry skin and don’t have much in the way of ridges on their fin­ger­tips. While this char­ac­ter­is­tic might come in handy if you were a mur­derer or bur­glar, it does pose a sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle if you want to immi­grate. After three con­sec­u­tive sets of prints sent to the FBI and three sets sub­se­quently rejected, the FBI has finally flat-out refused to say that she isn’t in their data­base. Reach­ing this dead end has taken about 4 months and a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars in fees and postage.

All is not lost, though. Our lawyer was able to deter­mine that we could in fact get around this seem­ingly impass­able obsta­cle to ever get­ting Landed Immi­grant sta­tus by obtain­ing a Police Cer­tifi­cate (like the one I got from Cam­bridge, Eng­land) from every state that my wife has lived in since she was 16. For­tu­nately, she only lived in 3 of them. If she had moved around a lot, we would really have been out of luck. So we now have yet another obsta­cle, but after another few months, we may finally see the day where we’ll get Landed Immi­grant sta­tus (and hence Per­ma­nent Res­i­dency). That Holy Grail of Per­ma­nent Res­i­dency means that either of us can work where we wish, put down roots and plan for the future far more than day to day. I’m not hold­ing my breath, though. There have been so many times when we thought were were near­ing the fin­ish line, only to have it moved fur­ther into the future again.

I have learned that the one thing that you need to immi­grate, more than money, influ­ence, tal­ent, friends, fam­ily, or any­thing else is patience.

Moving Day

The design is ready, the fonts are in place, the pho­tos are all set, the feed is moved, and all that’s left to do is let every­body know. All right then: from now on, the Loud Mur­murs blog will be located at www.loudmurmurs.com. While blog­ger was good to get started on, I’m going to try and stretch my wings and run the blog myself using Word­Press. Let’s hope I don’t regret this!