I just updated the Top 10 Photoblogs and made it all about Rannie.  He has a big show opening tomorrow, Joey and I are very much looking forward to it.

I will be attending my college reunion. 

Last night I paid the fees, signed up for lobster for Joey, chicken for me (yes, I was born in Maine and don't particularly love lobster); it's expensive, a splurge for one weekend's entertainment, but one's ten-year college reunion only happens once.  Plus, lots of my classmates have become very fancy, and I'd like to see it for myself.  Wellesley is the top women's college in the US, and generally hovers around the 4th best liberal arts college in the country.  I may not have had the typical fabulous four years - in fact, my best semester was my semester away - but I certainly had some good professors, and some good friends.

Plus, I miss the campus.  I first lived there in the summer of 1988, at Explo.   I spent five summers at Explo as a student and three as staff (if you are reading this, and went to/worked at Explo, I encourage you to comment, I loved Explo), on top of my actual Wellesley years (the Senior Program didn't move to Yale until maybe 2000), and then when I was working for Princeton Review, I spent a lot of time there for a couple more summers, coordinating the Explo SAT classes.

That's quite a bit of time.

Joey should sit with me on one of the wooden benches that overhang the lake.  If the door's not locked, I'll show him the view from the roof of Alumnae Hall, the building in which I spent more time than in my dorm while I was in school.   My class is based in Pomeroy, which is next to Shafer, where I did sleep sophomore through senior years...there were some good times.

I hope Lisa comes.  I think I'd better find her email address and try to convince her.

We'd planned, from the beginning, to make it a short trip.  I'd fly into Boston on Wednesday, do some work, and get things ready.  Joey would join me on Friday so he could finish his work week, then hang out for the evening.  We'd drive on Saturday, or maybe even Sunday, it didn't really matter.

When it actually happened, Joey's dad was in the hospital, and not in very good shape, so we decided we'd sleep the night at my parents' and go early Saturday morning.

I don't really want to write what happened to Dad.  I'm not sure what the legalities of it all could be.  Let's just say that his ending up in the hospital, this particular time, was a surprise, and a very bad one.  We didn't have the usual clues about what might happen.  So the couple of days before I left we spent a bunch of time in the hospital, and Joey was there while I was working in Boston, and we would get there again as soon as we could.

Meanwhile, I was obsessively checking my immigration paperwork.

When you move, legally, to Canada, you are allowed to bring your possessions - there are regulations on things like alcohol and cars, you can't bring your plants (that was a tough one for me - I had two plants I'd raised from cuttings which I loved) - but for the most part, you can have what's yours.  You have to document everything, and you either have to bring it in when you land or give them a list of what you'll be bringing, bring it within a year, and be able to account for it.

We brought it all.  So I had a list a mile long.  Dollar values, too, that's required.  Even an estimate of what your four-year-old sleeper sofa is worth.

And I had our marriage certificate, pieces of our application, a pile of papers proving anything I could think of which might help.

My parents and I picked Joey up from the airport and had some dinner - barbecue of course - which made me sick, which was entirely unsurprising.  Severe stress makes my stomach act up.  On the way home from dinner, Joey got a call from his sister saying we should get home sooner rather than later.  We decided we'd leave around 7 the next morning.  Should be about 10 hours of driving.  We could be back at the hospital by late evening if the border didn't take too long.

(Let me just interject right here that I am a kickass driver.  I had backed that truck into my parents' driveway, a few feet from the garage door, perfectly.  I was ready to rock and roll that thing right across the state of New York.  Except, of course, that I was paralyzed with fear over the immigration bit.)

Let us also remember that this was February.

We packed the last things and went to bed.  We got up, shoved my old laptops and stuff in the truck.  My parents waved goodbye from the driveway.  It was oddly formal.  We had Wheat Thins, water, fruit (which we planned to eat or throw away before we hit the scary border).  Paper towels.  The knowledge that, if we just drove on 90, we'd get to Buffalo.

So we did.  And it snowed.  And the food on the way was awful, and I was afraid I'd get sick again.  But I didn't, and after a lot of singing along with the radio during the scariest squalls, we were at the Peace Bridge.

We drove in through the Van/RV lane.  A guard came to the window - I was driving at this point.  I gave him my best grin and said, "I'm landing as an immigrant today!"  He looked like he believed I was happy, which really I was though I couldn't quite feel it, and told me to park the truck over by the gate, which I did, and we went inside.

Immigration side first.  They wanted my form, from the guard, which of course he hadn't given me.  The guy thought about it for a few minutes and decided that Customs would deal with that.  Oh boy.  But he asked me about three questions, had me sign a form, stapled it into my passport, and sent me on my way...over to Customs.

While waiting, I prayed that I would get the nice-looking young officer, instead of the older, more jaded looking one.  Of course, a third person came back to the counter and called me over.  A woman in her fifties maybe.  I said, "I'm landing as an immigrant.  The guard didn't give me a form."  She was surprised, and asked which guard.  I hope he didn't get into trouble.

I gave her my itemized list with valuations.

"How much do you think it's worth altogether?"

I briefly calculated.  I gave her a wild-guess sort of number anyway. Brain not working.

"OK."

Some typing.

"Meet me at the cashier window."

She prints something.  She hands me a receipt.  It says "Amount Due: $0," which it is supposed to say.

"That's it?"

"That's it - welcome to Canada."

Now, I am 100% - completely - certain that this is a rare case.  I'm sure that if I hadn't looked dog-tired and terrified, and my dog-tired and somewhat differently terrified husband hadn't been holding onto me, they would have searched the truck, and found the oranges we forgot to throw out, and opened some boxes and whatnot.

But nope.  Ten minutes at the border and we were done.  I was a legal Canadian resident!  I just had to wait for my Permanent Resident Card before I could travel outside Canada again. 

No time to celebrate, though, and we pushed on for Toronto, about another hour's drive.  We had to get back to the hospital.

To be continued.

If voters don't send Kellie home this week, they are stupid.

I saw the Wayne's World flashback sound written that way once.

I want to tell you about the weeks when we were absent from everything, right before I restarted blogging.

I'm not going to go into tiny detail or anything; some is much too private.  But to not blog the time surrounding Joey's dad's death and my landing as an immigrant seems selfish, because other people will go through these things, and knowing we survived can only help.

The first thing I would like to say is this:

Flirt with the U-Haul guy.

Because of everything that was happening, I ended up picking up a 17' U-Haul alone and driving it the 20 or so miles from the pickup place to my parents' house.  I could have gotten the truck closer, but it didn't happen that way, just because of the order of events.

So I'd been in Harvard Square in the morning, at the Top 10 Sources office, interviewing a couple of really nice guys whom we eventually hired.  I took the T to Davis and got on a Medford Square bus.  The driver knew where I needed to go, and I got off the bus in the rain just a few steps from the U-Haul place.

This is where the flirting came in handy.

A few smiles and jokes about what an excellent driver I am yielded a truck which had been driven only 300 miles, ever.  Shiny and new.  Good shocks.  Clean cab (except for what looked like a Coke spill).  This literally saved our asses on the drive back, across New York State in the snow.

Unfortunately, Medford and Somerville are filled with streets marked No Trucks.  So I wove and dodged and tried not to kill any Tufts students and got a little trapped on campus somehow, but finally I managed to get on 93 and get my butt out of there.

The next day, Gentle Giant stuffed my belongings into about half the truck (who knew) in about 40 minutes.  I love, love love love Gentle Giant.  I cannot say enough about this company, they are the best, I have used them for a bunch of things and I would use them again and again and again.  I'm sure they've made mistakes.  They are humans.  But they have worked so hard and so well for me, for really not that much money when you consider how careful they are.  My mom and I just kind of stood there and marveled at how efficient they were.  And then we took the truck home, met up with my dad, and went to get Joey at the airport.  The drive back to Toronto would begin early the next morning.

And I'll write about that tomorrow, unless some other great post comes along.

(Please forgive me if I use that phrase as a post title repeatedly.  It's especially for Joey.)

We had a mostly lovely, but rather odd weekend in Boston.  We ate barbecue and seafood, which are two things Boston does better than Toronto (yes, even Boston has better bbq than Toronto, which is scary considering what Southerners think of Boston's).  We spent time with friends.  We went to Filene's Basement.  Lots of can't-get-it-here fixes.

But there's never a dull moment, not even at 7 on a Sunday morning at my parents' place in suburbia.

I was sort of awake anyway, hoping to go back to sleep for an hour before getting ready for dim sum.  There were these two high-pitched pings, which I figured were the sounds of a smoke detector losing its battery.

Then the burglar alarm went off.

I went out to the hall to figure out what was going on.  My dad, whose steps are easy to distinguish from my mom's (Joey was still in bed), was running around, and it was just a little too weird for all that to be going on for no reason.

Turns out the carbon monoxide detector was what was chirping.  The other alarm had gone off because my dad, without focusing on turning it off, had started opening windows.

"Put on clothes!  Open more windows, I'm calling the fire department!"

After a few minutes, when I happened to be peeing in preparation for evacuation - hey, one type of evacuation requires another when you've just woken up -

"Shut the windows!  let's get out of here!"

Turns out you are not supposed to open windows - you are just supposed to leave.  If you open the windows, the fire department cannot test the CO levels.

So we went outside.  A cop showed up first.  He was just there to make sure the humans were in decent shape, he couldn't do anything with the house.  So we chatted about some of his retired colleagues who are dads or step-dads of my high school friends.

Then the fire truck came.  In our town, the firefighters are mainly volunteer.  This means we woke them all up.  And it turns out there'd been a house fire overnight in town, so they were exhausted.  But they were all very "professional" and pleasant.  Nice guys.

The reading on the thing had been something like 223 parts per million.  If it had been accurate, probably the first person to have read it would have been the cop...after we'd been reported missing.

The battery had died.

Oopsie.