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 5th or the 10th 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 7th or July 6th? Only after the 13th 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:

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!