The Immigration people called me on my honeymoon. We had, they said, overpaid a fee and would I like to use the overpayment to now apply for an open work permit or have it refunded? I can’t work right now regardless of status because my daughter is only in school half-days and though there is daycare, I had to put her in d/c when she was 7weeks old because I was the primary breadwinner in my former marriage and I just can’t put her back in it. She had so little of me during her early years mainly because her dad was so sick and I had too many boats to keep afloat. But I decided if they wanted to grant me a permit, why not? Keep your options open, as Rob told me. Today I returned home to a phone message saying that they were sorry but there wasn’t an overpaid fee after all and they would keep the OWP application on file should I want to send them a check to process it in the future. Just an FYI, when Immigration tells you that you can have the OWP this means you have got first approval on your permanent resident application. That was the second part of today’s message – first approval. The third part was that they would be requesting additional details from me/us and that would be detailed in the letter that was being sent this week, which means I will get it next week some time – and you Americans think the Postal Service down there is slow. The letter I am now waiting for is being sent from a town about 45 minutes away from where I live. So what do I do? I jump online, baby, and google to try and figure out what the heck this all means. Turns out that it could mean just about anything. Good. Routine. You’re fucked. It’s like playing Zelda or some other idiot video game where your character wanders from locale to locale searching under and over and between every freakin’ movable object and chatting up anything that looks like it might talk and provide you with a clue as to what/where/how. Rob, my solid Virgian rock, says – don’t get your panties in a twist. Wait for the letter. And isn’t that what I tell people? Don’t panic until you are told? But I am not panicking, I am just weary of non-information. Immigration (and my homeland is a primo example) should not be as mysterious a process as becoming a member of the Skull and Bones. It shouldn’t be grueling, the mental/emotional equivalent of water-boarding. Straight answers should greet simple questions. There seems to be an awful lot of creative interpreting going on by those in the know and those of us out here in the dark could use a little less of that and a lot more information.