It's all about the paper

Mr. O's permit, dated March 13, arrived yesterday in the mail. It's good for three months, i.e. till June 13, which means we won't have any trouble coming back from our holiday in the States at the beginning of June. (Hey, it's always nice when your country of residence lets you back in.) Now we can direct our energies to the same things you nice people do, like uneducated clients and moody coworkers and TTC troubles. Hooray! Approaching normal!

I have had a hard time keeping my cool over the last little while as all of this has gone on. On one hand I'm as anxious/pissed/frustrated/worried/fed up as Mr. O (we do live together and love each other, after all) and on the other hand, I haven't had the same trouble he's had with things like getting a decent paycheque, getting around the city, etc. etc., and so sometimes I feel like he's exaggerating the problem or focusing only on the negative or simply justifying his desire to go home. I've totally blown it on at least one occasion, and I know overall I could have been more sympathetic. I guess this is a learning process for both of us...

I think I'm giving up my old ideas on why people move here in the first place. It's NOT because they get or think they'll get a better deal than they get at home. That's simply not true. There are a thousand different reasons why people might move here, and one of the biggest ones can be summarized as "other people," be them family or community or what-have-you. In other words, people come here because other people have come here before them.

Interestingly, Mr. O's new permit specifies that he has to leave the country by August, which is based on his original one-year permit. It will be interesting to see what our one-year reassessment will bring. Will we stay? In the meantime, we still have the actual residence permit to deal with. Hopefully it comes and he can apply for his open permit before his current temp permit expires, which would save us another round of papers with his employer (I know, the last one was just so much fun). But I'm not holding my breath.

Oh - another fun thing about moving: taxes! We get to do two sets for 2007 - Canadian and Finnish. I sent in our Cdn returns today after just one phone call to the international tax office, and it seems I will be getting some money back, which will go some way to replenish our "immigration debt" which is primarily owed to ourselves. A weekend trip, maybe? We shall see. The tax forms and process with the big fat guide, etc. made me all nostalgic for our PR application. Canadian bureaucratic jargon is such a rich, multifarious register. So many possibilities, so many interpretations. Sigh.