It's hard to know quite how to go about starting up again. Should I acknowledge that I went dormant for three months? Do I need to apologize to my (few) regular readers for abandoning this site? The page views stayed relative high for a while but dropped off quickly after two months of silence. (I imagine it will take a while before views pick up again.) I hope it (going dormant) doesn't happen again, but I can't promise, as the same time pressures are still very active in my life. All I can say is that I think almost every day about something I wanted to blog about, and there is a huge backlog of ideas I still think worthy of getting up on the blog and out there into the ether. I guess I am just trying to get back on track in blogging and other things. One small trick is to blog when I am in a bit of a upswing in my moods. I generally find that I do feel better (about myself and the state of the world) when I have been more altruistic. As it happens, I did give to quite a few charities on Giving Tuesday, and I am doing a small amount of volunteering through Hart House, which is all to the good.
I will probably try to stick to shorter form updates and "quick takes," at least for a while. So for example, I'm certainly sorry the House barely slipped from the Democrats' grasp, but I am pleased that the Democrats outdid historic trends and outperformed expectations and actually held the Senate. (And my congratulations to Sen. Warnock who beat that fool Hershel Walker, not that it should have been remotely that close it in the first place!) I'm of course devastated that Roe was overturned, but this was probably a large part of why the Democrats did better than expected, combined with the GOP openly supporting cranks, racists and fascists...
I'll push the reading list updates to a second post. Instead I will close on a positive achievement. It has taken many months (and certainly many more months than it should have due to the lingering impacts of Covid), but next week I will finally take the oath at a Canadian citizenship ceremony. It's still a virtual ceremony, which is unfortunate. However, if I requested an in-person ceremony, it sounds like it would add several months to the process... If all goes as planned, the kids will become citizens at the same time. So that's very exciting, though it makes me just a little sick to my stomach that I need to cut up my PR card as the ceremony concludes. Then there is a gap while waiting on the certificates in the mail, and then we need to go apply for our new passports. So there is probably a 2 month window where it would be a challenge to go to the States, though I still have my US passport. (It's mostly that Canada strongly prefers its citizens to return to Canada on a Canadian passport.) As it happens, that is when TRB takes place in DC, though I am not scheduled to be going there this year. I think the crazy backlogs have died down to some extent, and I can go apply for a passport at the Gerrard Square mall, which is just so much more convenient than dealing with the U.S. Consulate. One other thing to mention is that I was able to jump through all the hoops for permanent residence and citizenship on my own without an immigration lawyer (though my employer in Vancouver helped me get the original work visa). This is all but impossible in the States, where you really do need to lawyer up for almost everything!
Ciao for now, amigos...
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