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.
Canada
Is it game? Or match? Or maybe meet? I have no idea. It was Fan Appreciation Night at Rexall Place, which is where the Edmonton Oilers play their home games. It is games, I think. We did not see them. We watched a WHL junior game. The Oil Kings versus the Rebels, who are from Red Deer. Both teams are just about dead last in their division and when we left, after the second period (it’s period, right?) because Katy was getting tired and it was late, the Oil Kings were winning 4 to 1. That’s goals. I do know that. But not much more.
My husband, Rob, has played hockey nearly all his life, and my late husband, Will, was nearly as interested in hockey as he was in NFL football, but even with their combined instruction so far – I still can’t make heads or tails of the game. Why is some body slamming against the wall (or is it boards?) okay and other times it elicits a time-out (that’s a penalty and you sit in a box for it)? I don’t know and neither does anyone else because when I ask, I get the “it all depends” speech, which leaves me as unenlightened as ever.
Katy thoroughly enjoyed herself. She got to have popcorn and a Coke. She is almost never allowed pop (it’s pop up here not soda) and that in itself is noteworthy. There was plenty of extraneous activity to keep even the marginally interested spectator engaged. Things like the usual t-shirt giveaway every 10 minutes or so, and some blond toothy twenty-something who kept popping up on the big screen above the ice to yammer at the crowd about prizes and giveaways and contests whenever eager young people in the employ of the arena were not hurling things at the spectators. I asked Rob if he recognized the young man. Was he a local celebrity? TV or radio? Only to be reminded by my husband that we don’t watch TV. Right. Hard to keep up on the local talking heads when you listen to XM exclusively and read the newspaper to find things out about the world – mostly beyond Alberta because if you only watched the local TV stations for news, you might wonder if the rest of the world had been destroyed in some geological disaster or nuclear accident that we didn’t hear about here because, well, it didn’t happen in Alberta.
Unlike the last hockey….thing….I attended with Will about eight or nine years ago this one flew by, but mainly because I was sitting next to Katy. She had many questions about the goings on. Most of them I couldn’t answer with any degree of accuracy, but she appeared to be fine with that. She was very concerned about the officials’ safety and well being. Probably something to do with their decided lack of protective gear. She also seemed a bit worried about the players who jumped over the wall onto the ice instead of using the door. She wondered about the coaches and decided that she didn’t want to be a hockey player herself because I mistakenly referred to the intermissions between periods, as “time-outs” and she didn’t like to be timed out.
As we were leaving, I became aware that my boots were glued to the floor by some congealed liquid. Pop, no doubt but aside from this, the arena was remarkably clean. Even the washroom. If you know me, you know that I have an aversion to public washrooms due to their general state of disgustingness. The washrooms at Rexall Place have that worn out look that much of Canada’s public areas do but it was clean. There was even a washroom attendant to mop up the sink area which, if you watch Oprah at all, you know is just a cesspool of germs that makes sitting on the toilet seat about the cleanest thing a person can do in a washroom.
Katy acquired an Oil Kings flag in the gift shop on the way out and wheedled unsuccessfully for a jersey (I would have liked a t-shirt myself), and we emerged from the arena to find it was still snowing as hard as it had been when we arrived. Winter is cruel. Parking lots and sidewalks have been snow free and dry since early in the week and spring threatened. And so, it follows that snow must fall. It is only mid-March and this is Canada – as I am reminded often when I read about the warming and melting back in Iowa.
Katy is excited about her next hockey game. She has a flag to wave now and knows that if she wants something free thrown at her, she must stand up and wave or dance for the webcam like the little boy that the perky talking head spoke to at one point in his give-away madness. The boy looked about eight or nine and would dance suggestively on demand much to the delight of the crowd. Rob remarked that the kid would be much in demand by the ladies someday, provided that he was playing on that team.
I think a hockey game here and there would make a nice family outing. Like hiking and camping, it is a Canadian thing to do and we are fast forgetting our American ways in favor of our new home.
Shopping in Canada is almost an oxymoron. Though I am months past my American consumerism cold-turkey stint, I still am sometimes caught off guard by what Canadians call “shopping”. Take today for example, we ran down to South Edmonton Common which is an area on the south side of the city that is and continues to be consumed by big box outlets. Between the road layout and the parking the area is nearly as bad a driving experience as Yellowhead during rush hour, but the truly maddening part about going there to shop is that there is little in merchandise to actually buy. Clothing stores in particular seem to suffer from empty shelf syndrome. Do you remember the Reagan Era news reports of Russians lining up for hours to get into stores with virtually nothing on their shelves to purchase? That is almost what a person finds in many of the more popular clothing stores here. The other thing a shopper discovers is that in addition to the dearth of consumer goods there is an almost equally chilling lack of service. I wonder what the growing hordes of jobless Americans would make of Alberta with its “help us please – come in and apply of job!” signs in nearly every retail and service establishment window? There might be a flood of legal U.S. citizens willing to risk deportation for a job north of their own border, eh? I popped in to Old Navy today to check out a few items I saw in their most recent advertisement. It was no real surprise to find that the items were mostly sold out or sold to the point of only the uber-large or the insanely small left. And there were lines. Lines that snaked around the interior of the store for the fitting room and again at the check-out registers. Standing in queue is one of those unique experiences I have come to expect as the norm up here. A combination of really sincere but inept help and employees who know they can do nothing awful enough to get fired in such a workers market. After a frustrating half-hour, I decided to put shopping on hold until I vacation to the States in a few weeks. Between the three of us, we are allowed about $2100 in duty free spending down there and with the Loonie doing so well against the ever-sagging U.S. dollar, I think I will take advantage of the discount and the much better service and selection in my old consumer heaven home. Last I read, retail was way down so there has to be merchandise and sales galore for an ex-pat like me to scoop up and bring home at the end of the month. Oddly though, on my last trip to the States, I didn’t find shopping as much fun as I had when I lived there. Perhaps “fun” is not the word. I didn’t find it interesting and indeed found that I had much better things to do with my time even though so much of life down there seems built around spending and acquiring. I guess I needed to get away from it to really see it. Empty people filling empty lives with stuff.
anniegirl1138 