I took this photo this morning when Geroy Simon and Paul McCallum stopped by the TEAM 1040 morning show with the Grey Cup that they helped win this past Sunday. It made me think about this professional sport and how I’ve come to appreciate what it is.

Being the American that I am, I have to remember what my parents, as well as many folks south of the border, would say when it comes to this piece of timely sports news.

Most likely, it would be something to the tune of, “Oh, that’s nice.”

When I was back visiting my family in Iowa this past September, I took the opportunity of showing some of them what a CFL football game was like, taking advantage of the NFL Network’s agreement to rebroadcast TSN’s coverage of select Friday and Saturday games. I often send them emails or put out tweets about working these games, so it was nice to finally give them some insight about the technical work I do behind the TEAM 1410 radio broadcasts.

Within a brief minute of turning on a game, one of my nephews had the same reactions that I did when watching my first CFL games.

“How do you score one point? And why are they punting on third down?!”

Those things still trip me up from time to time, but that’s just apart of the game that is played in Canada compared to what I grew up with all my life. The field is bigger, there’s one more player on each team, and multiple players can be in motion towards the line of scrimmage before the ball is snapped rather than only one player being allowed to run parallel as the play starts.

And I really only point that out because Geroy is one of the first guys I picked up on during my early days of working BC Lions games. There’s just something a bit captivating when number 81 is in nearly full sprint as he approaches the line, timing it just perfectly with the snap of the ball as to not be offside, and then wondering if Simon is on a deep route for the end zone to hopefully strike his patented Superman pose when he snags the touchdown.

Not bad for a guy in his mid-thirties and at the top of his game, not to mention sitting in the upper class of several CFL records.

And if you really want to find out all of the differences between the two, there’s a great Wikipedia entry for that.

But what really stands out to me is that this is the 99th time that the Grey Cup has been played for.

An Instagram photo from the 2011 Grey Cup Tweet Up at the Rosedale on Robson

The league that plays for the Grey Cup has changed, reshaped, expanded, retracted, gone up, and gone down over that time, but the cup has remained the same as well as the basic premise that every year, a group of teams battle for the right to get their name engraved for future challengers to see. And that has happened for almost 100 years.

Completely ignoring an all out which league is better debate, that’s a fact the NFL can’t touch.

They also don’t do it for fortune. The highest paid players make six figured salaries with only modest endorsements. The fact that many players have off season jobs to supplement their off-season training speaks to the passion they have to keep playing this brand of football, and it’s something that I have a lot of respect for.

This isn’t a league that you can simply call a “minor league” to the NFL. It’s a league of its own brand of football that has stayed truer, not by much, to football’s divergence from rugby. It’s played and followed by people who have dedication to any other professional sport like golf, tennis, soccer, or baseball.

It’s reality television at its best because I can experience all of the drama at the stadium or on TV, but then I can go to Ricky’s in Surrey for breakfast and catch the players doing the same thing.

My proximity to it all draws me in, and it’s hard to not get into the story lines. Listening into the post-game show after a game one night, a man from Seattle called and said it best.

“You can’t say the NFL is better than the CFL, or that the CFL is better than the NFL and all that. I love my Seahawks, and I love the Lions. It’s like chicken and fish. You just have to love them both.”

Shot with my iPhone from a BC Lions game from now demolished, temporary Empire Field

So true, but if I were forced to choose over watching either or, I’d choose the CFL for the simple fact that 20 second play clocks keeps the action on the field moving and dramatically cuts down on the lull between plays. Even this American boy can get bored with football games spliced with three replay perspectives followed by five minutes of commercials.

A little belated but worth mentioning that yesterday was Canada Day. We spent the day in Cloverdale for the Surrey Canada Day festivities out there, and I shot a lot of photos during our time on the ground.

The main reason we were out there was to cover the celebrations on Miss604.com.

• Canada Day in Surrey 2010 Day Blog
• Dragonette at Surrey Canada Day 2010

Even though it was rainy, it was still a great event. I only wish we could have stayed longer, but Rebecca’s health was waning at the onset of early evening as she’s been battling a head cold over the past few days. Short on time right now, but I’ll post some more of my favorite photos from the day later.

Updated: August 2, 2010: It’s taken me a while, but here are a variety of other shots that I took. Event photography continues to grow on me, but it’s really a fun challenge each time. You have to adapt to the venue, lighting, crowd, staging, and entertainment.

This is a great tradition of Surrey Canada Day celebrations. If you come up, you can get a cupcake for free. And quite honestly, everyone loves cupcakes. People from all walks of life, young to old, line up for these things.

Canada Day will be the time in the lower mainland to bust out all of your 2010 Olympics gear for years.

Rebecca with Diane Watts, Mayor of Surrey, B.C.

Live dancing groups are almost a Surrey staple.

Jessie Farrell with bass player, Ryland Haggis.

I kind of fell in love with the Dragonette when they took the stage.

In the last three years we’ve celebrated Canada Day in Surrey, I have never been let down. Even with the slight bit of rain that fell during the day, it still remains one of the best, free events for families.

Photo credit: blacktryst on Flickr

As someone who still needs to send money back to the U.S. for the occasional bill here and there, I was extremely dissatisfied to find out that Money Mart, who operates mostly as a front for Western Union, no longer issues money orders in U.S. dollars as of today, December 1st. As far as I have been told, this is a nationwide policy in Canada now, and it’s a Western Union decision to no longer offer these types of transactions.

Insert commercial sounding statement here, but when I can’t get home from work in time to visit the bank, Money Mart is within easy reach on my way home. Obviously I’ll take them out of that equation from now on.

Still, there is part of me that wonders what the throngs of Craigslist and eBay buyers and sellers are going to do now that getting money orders have been made just a little less easier. There are alternatives, but if I was unhappy to hear this news, imagine what the average person will do when they are in a last minute rush to get that money they need when they are so desperately trying to get that payment in the mail so they don’t get negative feedback or lose the purchase entirely.

At the same time, Western Union’s current slogan on their website is, “reliable, fast and convenient”. Yeah, not so much anymore.

On our way home from the long weekend in Osoyoos, we made the effort to finally stop at the viewpoint for The Hope Slide. This would mark about the 6th or 8th time that I’ve gone passed it, so we finally followed through on the thought of stopping to get out and take a first hand look at this incredible, natural disaster.

It’s such an impressive sight when you first lay eyes on this scarred side of a mountain. It gets even more confounding when you get more of the details behind this event that happened 43 years ago.

The Hope Slide was one of the largest landslides ever recorded in Canada. It occurred in the morning hours of 9 January 1965. An earlier, small avalanche had forced four people to stop their vehicles a few miles southeast of the town of Hope, British Columbia (150 km east of Vancouver), on a stretch of the Hope-Princeton Highway below Johnson Peak. As those people contemplated waiting for clearing crews or turning around, a small earthquake below the mountain triggered the main slide, which obliterated the mountain’s southwestern slope.

The slide buried the victims and their vehicles under a torrent of 46 million cubic meters of pulverized rock, mud, and debris 85 m thick and 3 km wide, which came down the 2000-metre mountainside . This mass of debris completely displaced the lake below with incredible force, throwing it against the opposite side of the valley, wiping all vegetation and trees down to the bare rock, then ‘splashed back’ up the original (now bare) slope before settling. [...]

Rescue crews only found two of the four bodies—the others have remained entombed in the rock, with their cars, since 1965. [wiki]

Mother nature is forever unpredictable. Awe inspiring and frightening, all at the same time.

Rebecca was contacted by the fine folks at the city of Surrey to be a media co-sponsor for their Canada Day events in Cloverdale. July 1st saw nearly 40,000 people crowd onto the Cloverdale Millennium Amphitheater grounds to play games, see stilt walkers, get their faces painted, and see a jam packed line-up of musical acts on the main stage, including the likes of Rymes With Orange, The Payola$, and Loverboy.

Events like this tend to find me with media access for the both of us, and of course that means I have to take my camera along with. You can read all of Rebecca’s coverage of the event [Surrey Canada Day 2008: The Schedule, Morning Recap, The Music], but the following are some of my favorite shots that I took.

Will is a really amazing musician. See him live if you can because you must.

That’s Mr. Bob Rock[wiki], ladies and gentlemen, in the flesh.

You can see all 104 photos on Flickr. Shooting outdoor events can be a lot of fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s loud in the photo pit, not to mention the sweltering heat on that day. Sometimes I feel intimidated by being surrounded with folks that have larger and much more expensive photo equipment, but the pictures that come out from my endeavors tend to speak for themselves. It’s not what you got that matters. It’s how you use it, and I’m doing my damnedest to learn my camera and get better with every shot.

The folks at the Surrey Canada Day event were amazing in terms of getting us the media access and letting us know the low down on what was going on, where everything was located, and were just generally awesome people. By far, the best treatment I have ever experienced in terms of media access for new media folks.

Three days in Chilliwack, B.C. at Cultus Lake with Rebecca, John, and Duane. Lots and lots of sitting around the campfire, laughing a ton, good drink, good food, and the weather was… good.

The forecast in the days leading up to the trip just got worse and worse. Everyone we knew told us that we were nuts for going camping this weekend. It ended up being awful on Thursday night, Friday was actually really nice, and Saturday was off and on in terms of being cool from winds that would whip up from time to time. Other than that, everything went off great.

I even busted open my right shin a tiny bit when a piece of wood I was chopping got away and clocked me. That’s about par for the course, no other major injuries.

I can still smell the smoke, if not taste it. That’s only the real complaint of the trip, even if the coolness kept us all pretty close to the fire. Couldn’t even fathom jumping into the lake, no matter how inviting or calling it might have been. Fleece under a rain jacket was just right. Bone chilling lake water from ice run off from the mountains in the area, not so much.

Ah yes, we indeed called this drunkcamp02, complete with lanyards. It’s more of a statement of enjoying the time away from laptops and technology and becoming one with nature. Even though there are public washrooms within easy walk and Duane’s family brought us amazing food(perogies, cabbage rolls, and KFC), donuts from Tim Horton’s, and fire wood in three separate trips on Saturday, it’s tough country out there “in the Wack”.

You can see more of my pictures from the trip on Flickr.

It must have been nearly a month ago, and it took me a long time to get the pictures posted from our trip to Osoyoos for a quick weekend getaway, so here’s a delayed recap in photos. Rebecca has some good posts about the trips and various portions of it here, here, here, and here.

Lots of rest and relaxation, but we don’t own a car. It’s nice to take long drives through the countryside, see the land, and listen to music. That’s what makes us happy.

CityTV in Toronto had a great story. Burglar gets caught in the act by home owner, attempts to get away by leaping off balcony, busts his leg, and someone snaps pictures of the poor sap while he lays on the ground as cops are called and arrive to the scene. What avid Flickr user Joel Charlebois did with the photos afterward is the real story.

When CityTV heard him mention that he was going to post the photos to Flickr, they not only checked them out but used them in a news story. Problem is, there was no mention of the person who took the images. This is also known as a violation of copyright. As any good Flickr user and avid photographer will tell you (like Duane did on his blog post on this same topic), you protect the things you love. Yes, you can protect your photos on Flickr with a copyright, and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council agreed with the complaint brought against CityTV.

Charlebois, displeased, took his case to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC), and today, nine months after the complaint was filed, a majority of the National Specialty Services Panel found that City’s broadcast did indeed violate the Association of Electronic Journalists of Canada’s RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics, which states that “Plagiarism is unacceptable. Broadcast journalists will strive to honour the intellectual property of others, including video and audio materials.” (The full decision is here.) The panel took particular issue with the lack of credit to Charlebois, stating that “the broadcaster knew full well the identity of the photographer whose still shots were used in the news report,” an omission that they deemed unfair, for news reporting or otherwise. (They note that the American RTNDA states that “professional electronic journalists should…clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders.”)

As a result, City must issue a rare on-air statement at least twice, during prime time, over the next ten days. That statement will follow a script set by the CBSC, stating that, in part, the news organization breached the aforementioned Code of Ethics and “included three still photographs of the injured burglar without providing any credit to the photographer, whose identity was known to the broadcaster. By failing to provide that accreditation, the broadcaster has failed to honour the intellectual property rights of the photographer.” [torontoist]

What is important to me on this story is that intellectual property was protected as it should be, no matter how it is being utilized. On top of that, it gives comfort to know that mainstream media will be held accountable for violations of copyrighted material. It’s not a full safety net, but that means that even the little guy stands a chance against big media companies when it comes to protecting your content.

Even Charlebois admits in the story that all he was really concerned about was the proper accreditation, not the punishment handed down to CityTV. I think it’s interesting to note that there is very little discussion of fines or compensation.

My good friend Duane Storey has done some amazing coverage of the 2008 Junos this past weekend. He flew out there like a new media ninja and tossed out a lot of blog posts, videos, and photos from the media access he was granted for the whole event.

Photo credit: duanestorey on Flickr

Have to say that I’m very impressed that he was able to do what he did. His level of access was on par to the big name players, and dare I say that it was better than what traditional media usually feeds you. Feel free to check out some of his posts here.

When I moved to B.C. in 2005, I got strep throat. Within a few weeks of settling in on Vancouver being my home, a soreness in my throat grew to proportions that I never knew could exist. It hurt so much that I finally bit the bullet and went to a clinic. It cost me $100 just to see a doc, and the meds cost just a little bit more. At that point, I didn’t care. Just give me something to help make this go away.

Unemployed and unable to work in Canada at that point in my life, it was a relief to have the access to care like that. The cost would have probably been twice as much in the states, and the USD was still a tad stronger than the loony. That didn’t stop the doc I saw from giving me a lecture on the importance of having a B.C. CareCard if this happened again in the future. Kind of a “no shit, Sherlock” moment if you ask me.

After an intense few weeks at work, all of the going-ons of Northern Voice last week, and an excursion with The Crazy Canucks to the Canucks Open Practice, a tickle in the back of my throat grew to the point where gargling with salt water and a variety of over the counter remedies weren’t going to cut it. I was in full blown strep throat yet again, but this time I had that damn medical card, plus benefits.

I still made Rebecca go with me because I had no idea what to expect. Every medical place you go to in the U.S., there is paperwork to fill out. Medical history, etc. At the clinic, however, I gave them my card, they asked me to verify my name, address, phone number, and got my allergy to penicillin in their records.

That was it. No paperwork. Just have a seat and wait for my name to be called. The doc was brief and to the point of giving him the story of what was wrong with me, took one look at my “severely inflamed, very red” throat, and cut me a prescription for antibiotics which cost me $29 that my extended medical coverage will take care of.

20 minutes and I was back home to settle in with some tea, forcing everything down through the pain. So much pain, all on the day of our two year wedding anniversary. Oh happy day…

So there wasn’t anything great and grand about the experience other than it being quick, efficient, and made me better, even though I had to take the slow working meds because the faster way, the penicillian way, could potentially kill me.

Thanks for making me feel better, B.C. That was pretty awesome.

I was able to score a couple tickets to the FIFA U-20 World Cup tournament going on in Canada right now. Rebecca and I had really good seats, practically in the center of the pitch for the last half of the match between Scotland and Costa Rica. We would have seen more of the game, including the first game between Spain and Jordan, but we hit the 1PM showing of Transformers before hand. More about that another time.

When we got there, the score was 0-0, and the crowd was great. There was a great cheering section for the Scots, bag pipes and all. They had some great songs that they were singing as well, complete with kilts and accents. I loved it!

Not to be out done, Costa Rica fans had their fair share of support. What was brilliant was what the Scotland fans would yell in the midst of their cheers.

“COS-ta RI-ca!” clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. Instead of clapping, Scotland fans would yell, “SUCKS!” I was highly entertained.

Even though we only caught forty-five minutes of World Cup futbol, it was incredible. A Scottish player scored a goal on a bicycle kick, a fight broke out between the two teams in the middle of the half, and a streaker busted out onto the pitch with ten minutes left in the game. There was even some amazing snatch and dash of a game ball by one spectator where he casually caught the ball and hauled out of Swangard Stadium like his rear was on fire. The kind thing to do is to return the ball, if not mandatory, but I’m not sure if he was able to hold on to the souvenir.

The streaker, on the other hand, underestimated the width of the pitch and, probably, his blood alcohol level. Two-thirds of the way across, he gave up his all out sprint to walk his way over the to the other side. There was some mutual exchange of greetings between him and the security on the other side, but after pulling his pants up, his arm was pulled behind his back while he was forced out of the stadium.

I was slightly confused as to why I couldn’t get the bottles soda, that we got with our hot dog combos, with the caps left on them. That’s really useful when carrying a lot of food and drink, and I was told by the vendor that it’s against FIFA rules to leave the caps on. Talking about this over the weekend with friends, this made more sense. You can’t throw plastic bottles nearly as far when you don’t have a cap on it. Makes sense, but it caught me a little of guard.

The game was 1-1 going into two minutes of extra time. With just seconds left, Costa Rica was able to score an amazing goal that caught the Scotland goalie out of position. 2-1, final.

On the SkyTrain back home, a couple of Scotland fans, kilts once again, were still in great spirits and feeling pretty good. They asked a girl if she watched the game today. She asked what game they meant. Well, the football game, or soccer game, of course.

“Oh, I usually just pay attention to hockey.”

“What? Hoo-key?!!?”

When Rebecca made her adventure to live blog the Matthew Good show in Las Vegas, I had to drive down to pick her up from Bellingham International Airport in Washington state. Don’t let that name impress you too much. It’s a very nice, worthwhile airport, but it’s proximity to the Canadian border is the only reason it is granted the covenanted “international” label.

The big thing is that this was going to be my first time crossing the border since becoming a landed immigrant in Canada. I’ve got the permanent residence card[cic] that is my ticket for less hassle getting over the border, and the less hassle comes in terms of being kicked out or kept out of the country.

Things like this are no big deal, but I was driving across the border by myself. On top of that, I was in my mother-in-law’s car, so it was a vehicle in which I don’t even own. If they needed proof of ownership at any point, we were prepared for me to be held up a little bit. Plus, we also went over things to say, not say, and any documents I might need to prove my “intentions during your stay in the United States of America.”

Canada Day long weekend, I knew the waits would be a little long, but there was some safety in the thought that this was in between the major travel times. So for a Saturday, the radio said that waits were anywhere from three hours to ninety minutes. When I got there, the signs in the line up lanes said 40 minutes, and that’s pretty much how long it took.

Additionally, I had a little bit of concern with the recent bombings in the U.K. I had already heard that the threat levels at U.S. airports were raised, so there was a thought in my head that it could affect Rebecca’s flight as well as border crossings. Nothing on the radio or signs on display as I crept ahead in the queue, and things panned out in the end.

Getting up to the front of the line, I handed my U.S. passport over with my Canadian PR Card tucked inside, sticking out slightly at the top. I had a print out of Rebecca’s travel itinerary on my lap, ready to go in case he needed proof that I wasn’t a terrorist or drug runner.

He asked three questions. Where do you live? Where are you going? Are you bringing any goods from Canada into the U.S.? In the span of less than a minute, I shot right through.

What gets me is that each car ahead of me took two to five minutes on average when reaching the guy in the booth. I could see passports being passed over, then some conversation, some extra papers were handed over, more conversation, and the people were allowed to pass after getting a handful of documents handed back to them.

Perhaps I was lucky, or maybe the PR Card thing gets you some express treatment in certain situations. Time will tell, but it’s a comforting thing to be able to travel again. It’s even cooler when you get your own PR Card because your picture on the front is also a hologram on the back. Awesome.

The telling of my process of for immigrating to Canada is going to be fairly out of order, and with my appointment to become a landed immigrant[wiki] so fresh in my memory, it’s easier to start out there. Also, it takes a lot longer than an hour to become permanent resident[wiki]. This is a post about the day that I got my status.

It’s been a year and a half waiting process for everything to come together, and I have done everything I can to be patient about it. Rebecca can attest to this, keeping me from not bouncing off the walls, but wanting to punch holes through them. It’s not the waiting as much as those job opportunities that I’ve had to let pass on by for the only reason that it would be illegal for me to have them. At this time, the job situation isn’t much different, but I have a few projects keeping me busy with a slight trickle of income.

Getting my notification of appointment with the lovely folks at CIC came in the middle of this past April. The piece of paper said 1PM on May 2nd and bring a list of necessary documents; my passport, two copies of I.D. photos that will go on my PR card[wiki], and the most recent permit that is allowing me to stay in this country. In my case, this was my work permit.

I was fretting this from the time I woke up because of that nagging thought in my head that I was going to forget something important, and in this case, it was our marriage certificate. I ended up not needing it because they said you had to show it if you wanted your PR card to have a different name than what was on your passport or other identification records. Not a problem for me, but there is still that lingering thought. This deep in the process, the last thing I wanted to do is not have everything I needed. Would they allow you to run home and get it or would you have to reschedule? Even then, would you have to wait a day? Week? Month?

Some horror stories out there about immigrating all tell you one thing; the immigration leg of the Canadian government can often resemble the pace of a sloth, not to mention that they can lose things into black holes that even Stephen Hawking has no explanation for. Plus, it didn’t help that this was a last minute thought to cross my mind before walking out the door, Rebecca unable to be reached to get an exact location of it because I couldn’t find it anywhere.

When I walked into the lobby, I was a sweaty mess, part nervousness, other part being that it was warmer and humid outside than I anticipated when I left the house on foot. The security guard greeted me right away, asked if he could help me, and was on top of the situation when I said that I was there for my appointment. Checking my name off the list, he directed me to a place to take a seat for waiting, but the whole lobby was packed. I was taken to a side room that was probably for consultation, just out of view of the crowded lobby. Crammed in there with about eight other people, my heart kind of sank because they must all be waiting in line for an appointment as well, and I settled in to endure a long afternoon.

About five minutes later, the same guard came into the room and asked us to step outside because they were giving some directions. Back in the lobby, a woman was telling all of us what was about to happen, and I suddenly realized that we were all there for the exact, same thing. Some folks were there alone, others had brought friends and family, cameras in tote. This is when I realized that this is a big deal, if not an extremely important day for some very happy people, and we were all doing this together.

We were directed to walk down a hallway with our letters of appointment in view at all times. Through a door, we were led to a boardroom that had about fifty chairs lined up in rows. Only those that were there for an appointment were to sit in those chairs, and all but one or two were taken. A movable wall separated the room in two, us interviewees on one side, the three interviewers stationed at tables on the other.

As we herded in, the immigration officers were talking to all of us, joking around and busting out some great one liners. However, you could catch the cultural divide because what was hilarious to some, others let the joke pass right over their head. Another round of directions started to be explained, this time they started in French, then the other person took over and spoke in English. Even this process took a comical approach at times, and that really made the whole thing seem less ominous.

One by one, we were to be called up to have a short, three question interview, and the order was already predetermined by our appointment letters. Mine had “#5″ on the top, so I felt pretty lucky. That is until the woman started going around to check everyone’s identification photos for their PR cards.

Tip for those who might be going through this: follow the directions for getting your photos done very closely. If you don’t, then this is the part of the process that will suck for you. The job of this woman was to take a transparent photocopy, lay it over your photos, and check it to be sure that it falls within the requirements. Seems like the first eight people she got to all had it wrong, and they were sent up and around the corner to get new ones right away. They could get them done and get back for their appointment, but that’s going to set you back at least twenty minutes in the whole process, if not more. So plan ahead, and plan carefully.

Sigh of relief, she approved mine. The guy with a Chinese passport sitting next to me said it right, “Thank god, another eighteen bucks I don’t have to spend.” No kidding.

He was #3 on the top of his paper, and #4 got sent out for new photos. My name was called only to have the first interview with the table in complete view and ear shot of the entire group. The other two tables were tucked behind the wall, so only I could see them when I came around the corner.

Three questions, of which I don’t completely recall, but it was purely basic things, essentially verifying that I am who I say I am and intend on going through with this. Then there is that question I always hate; “Have you been convicted of any crimes or misdemeanors during your stay in Canada?” The truth is that I haven’t, but when she asks this, and this is common anytime I’ve run into this question during this whole process, the head comes up, pen gets set down, they look you squarely in the eye, and then they ask the question.

At that point, you hope you don’t flinch or give them any reason to be suspicious. Sure, they can do a background check, but that could take weeks, if not months to do, and here you are, just moments away from getting that document signed and stamped. All you want is for this incessant waiting to be over.

Verification of my personal data, three signatures, the voiding of all other temporary resident permits[wiki], and a handshake later, I’m in. In a room full of people like that, you truly understand that something special just happened, and the people still waiting kinda smile back at you in anticipation of their turn, an unspoken understanding of all the paperwork, fees, waiting, and uncertainty that you’ve gone through together.

This whole time, you’ve been escorted from point to point, but the pathway out of the building is devoid of anyone and anything. The only way is to the exit, so I try to call Rebecca as soon as I’m out the door. 1:32PM? She was busy at work, but I could not believe that just took over a half hour to get my landed immigrant status. When I talked to her fifteen minutes later, she thought something might be wrong. Nope. I’ll be getting my PR card within six weeks of the appointment, but in the meantime, they gave me a copy of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to enjoy until it shows up.

Something I’m going to try and start doing in the next few weeks is to talk more about the process of immigrating to Canada that Rebecca and I have been going through. And it really is a conjoined process for the person who is sponsoring someone to immigrate as well as the person who is immigrating. Basic, simple low down to what that means is that you need time, patience, money, and attention to detail. A good lawyer doesn’t hurt either, but there are those that have done okay without.

I have my appointment this week with immigration to finalize the landed status of my permanent residence process. I won’t have citizenship(because that’s another long, somewhat expensive process), but that means that they can’t kick me out of the country unless I really screw the pooch.

One thing I had to get is my own pictures for the PR card I’ll be getting issued this week. Basically, that’s the same as a green card in the U.S., and London Drugs has been a really good resource for getting any official photography done for this entire process.

However, be aware that with all of the madness going on for Canadians applying for passports (mainly due to the new travel restrictions for going to the U.S.) will cause you to deal with slow processing of getting said photos. London Drugs does the passport photos as well, and there must have been ten people in there today going for the same thing. I held up the place with my little PR card photos because the requirements are slightly different than that of passport photos, and they only had one camera at the location I went to.

At this point, I’ve got everything in place for my appointment. This will be the first time I will meet anyone face to face at Canadian Immigration, so there is a tad bit of apprehension. More so, just that nagging feeling that you want to make sure that you have everything you need. The way that immigration works in Canada, which can feel very lazy at times, it might be a couple weeks to a month before you can make another appointment if you forget something. Here’s hoping!

This is a topic of conversations a lot, and just last night I was saying how I missed being on Verizon back in the states. Sure, it’s a CDMA[wiki] network, but living in Iowa, GSM[wiki] isn’t your best option unless you never travel outside of major population centers or venture away from the interstate highways that crisscross the state.

For me, it was that last point that made Verizon a good deal. The coverage reached where I needed it to, the cost of the package deals were friendly to my income, and the data plans of their “In” network were pretty sweet. There was never hesitation to chat for a long time with friends who were also on Verizon, plus I could send photos to the same people at no charge. They also had a super nice online presence that I could track my account on, all the way down to the last call I received being updated on their website within minutes.

Plans like that simply do not exist here, at least where all of this is included for just $60 a month. In fact, it still boggles my mind that you have to play extra for caller I.D. or voice mail. In fact, I think it’s rare to find the two packaged together. And data plans? It gets worse. Text messaging is just the start.

Below is a chart that Boris made regarding the cost of moving 1 GB of data through the various competitors in the country. This includes things like sending pictures, videos, emails, files, and and anything else you can zip through your wireless phone. Granted that all the data is valid, and I have a lot of faith in Boris that it is, the results are eye opening.

Photo credit: Boris on Flickr

I hate playing the grumpy American role, but the costs for using a cellphone in Canada should hardly be this expensive. I’ve heard someone tell me before that some of the highest costs in the world of owning and operating a cellphone exists in this country, and this certainly rings true now. I thought I was just being picky.