Boxes and visas ... still the visa!

I hoped I would have news of Joseph's visa but alas - nothing!  There's a flight booked for today (Oct 28th) but with no visa as of late Friday (25th) we rescheduled for Nov 5th!  I forgot to sign one of the papers (sent via FedEx to T.O.) that we need to submit for the Spousal Visa so we decided to hold off with that submission and just apply for a simple visitor's visa. At this stage we would happily take three months but are hoping for twelve ... so we wait some more!

Meantime …

Joseph has been busy driving between Toronto and Ottawa, visiting and saying goodbye (again) and shoving more of our wordily possessions into our tiny warehouse as he makes room for the new tenant (as of Nov 1st)… who will be sleeping in our bedroom!!  I haven't met her but I'm pretty sure she expects to be sleeping there alone so that visa had better come through!!!

I've managed to fill my days ...

Jasper's 2nd birthday - He's still adorable even at two (I know it's early days still) and It was lots of fun watching him trying to hold up two fingers and how he quickly came to understand the "present" thing and now Grandpa Joe is going to be so impressed with how well he knows his dinosaurs. A tube of small ones with the names on the bottom in size 2 font so I'm no help but he now knows most of them.

 

Being kind to his birthday guests!

The local "Port Festival" - another excuse for a party here on the dock! Make-your-own sandwich with champagne. Not quite the tall ships but fun none-the-less.This time I did NOT invite the crew from the prawn trawler outside the front door in for a shower!

More night murals!

Mum and the flamingos - all pretty in pink!

Our Chilean friend Sylvia and her vases in one of the galleries for the festival.

Great use of a container!... a walk-through gallery

The dolphins were performing for the crowds on the dock -right outside my front door.

A sailing regatta

It was quite hairy there for a while - we were on our feet thinking they would crash!

There was our friend Patricio (Villaroel)'s 75th party where i thought I would be able to show off my spanish with all of their friends (from Chile) but sadly nobody took my lead so I it was English all afternoon.

Some movies: I liked Diana (I know a million won't), I really liked About Time and (a weird one for me) I enjoyed Rush, and last night I really enjoyed Captain Thomas and later I heard somebody else talk about the scene at the end, that I flashed back to at home, and thought about what it must have taken for him to do it, and I think that might win him an academy award! It's nice to have a some good movies to chose from for a change.

In the hills on the windy roads and this is what I saw as I rounded the corner!
It's a koala with a baby on her back!

A trip to IKEA (of course) - this time to buy for Cassia because there isn't an IKEA store within a million miles of where she is living. These will be added to their boxes that have been shipped from Spain and she'll use her relocation allowance to have them all sent to Esperance.  Brilliant.

The $5ea lamps!

 It was fun shopping with somebody else's money except that I also managed to spend $100+ of my own! I picked up a couple of lamps ($5 ea)in As Is and I just don't know how but it ended up being that much so apparently there are still items we need!

Then Cassia & Pablo's 14 boxes of personal effects (the official name) arrived -  sadly addressed to Pablo who wasn't here to pick them up, so there was a bit of paperwork involved to hand over to me and then off to customs to have them cleared and find out it required my passport for identification (huh - nothing else would do!) that for the first time in over a year I didn't have with me (different purse) and then once we had them satisfied there was a drive to the other side of town to be approved by Quarantine. Why you would have customs send you to "Quarantine" and even give you a map to show you how to get there and then have the building not have the word Quarantine visible anywhere - just the official government name DOFF (Dept. of Forest and Fisheries)!! is beyond me. So while I was waiting for clearance I filled in the feedback form to explain that to them and then luckily (for me) their system was down due to the ridiculously windy weather, so the officer took pity on me (I think) and gave approval without an inspection!!  Yippee yippee!  because an inspection would have required; only ONE person and the quarantine officer attending the inspection, and me (as if I could ask anybody else to do it) having to remove the boxes from the pallet, open them (with my own tools I took with me) and then repack and re-tape them (with my own tape I took with me) fourteen times and with my fingers crossed that the officer wouldn't notice there were feathers in the quilt and sleeping bag that I had answered "NO" to the question "are there any feathers, shells…" etc. on the form because Pablo forgot to answer that one (pourquoi?)!!

Anyway, thank goodness for computers and system failures that there was no need for the inspection and today I took all of my siblings (&Jen's husband Michael) (5 of us) and each of our cars (4) (well they are tiny cars and there were 14 boxes) off to the dusty container terminal, that is within spittin' distance of my house, and where for the first (and last) time I wore one of those orange-glow-safety vests and didn't wear my thongs (they said I couldn't) to find out that I probably could have done it all by myself because the 14 boxes, while heavy, weren't nearly as intimidating as one would think 14 boxes would be.

With all that help, it took longer to sign in at reception, than it did to pack and unpack the cars into my garage and what a weird and crazy thing to do with your brothers and sister that was really only possible on this one day in our lives … John was on holidays, Jen works three days a week and this wasn't one of them, David was days away from starting his new fancy job and me, well here I am after all these years. Crazy for sure!

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These are "luggage tags" from the Port Festival where they asked students "what would you pack if you were going on a trip".  There were hundreds of these but I couldn't get over how many said my iPod or iPad !

 

 

 

 

I think Apple should use them... well except for this one!

Australia/Canada!

I haven't posted anything lately because other than my cancelled flight back from Perth, that added copious hours and a red-eye with stopover (Melb!!) and of course copious amounts of pills, life has been rather ordinary since leaving Cassia in Esperance, and that made it difficult to find anything remotely interesting and/or funny to write about.

So last week Joseph's brother Tom and wife Elizabeth came to stay for a few days before driving off into the sunset in our van.  They are gone for a couple of months - north, then east and down the coast all the way back to Adelaide.  They are seasoned campers/travellers/combie-vaners so they will have fun and hopefully the hot/humid weather up north won't bother them.  It was great to have them visit and take my mind off the saga that is Joseph's return to Australia. As of today (Tues Oct 8th) we have been officially notified that his application for a Resident Return Visa has been denied.  

BUT … before we start picketing outside of the Australian Immigration office in whatever country you live in, here's some background … read on if you really want to know - or skip to the last paragraph ... 

Back in 1976, a year after we were married in Ottawa, we decided we should go to Australia so that Joseph could meet my family and get to know Australia (then finally, we would have something to talk about!).    He was poked and prodded and finger printed by the RCMP and finally received a Resident Visa - a permanent one (we thought!).  Then we did what anybody who is leaving N.A. and travelling to Australia to live (forever?) would do - we went to DisneyLand.   (Somehow Joseph managed to add another column (Disneyland) to our saving's plan for Australia, that mean we could rent a car, with unlimited mileage, and drive from Ottawa to Orlando Florida with a side trip to Kennebunkport Maine (to say goodbye to Alexander) in 10 days because back then, when you lived in Australia, Disneyland was just a dream.)

You should know that we didn't have a lot of money - so we packed our teenie tiny possessions into 15 million small boxes and shipped them to Australia at "book rate" (Joseph worked at the Nature Canada Bookstore) and drove to Toronto and (as part of the very cheap plane ticket) took a van to Buffalo N.Y. with some other poor sods, and flew to HongKong with a two-hour stopover in Anchorage Alaska in the middle of the night (on this flight I learned that Kosher meals are served first!) and spent a week in HongKong buying a stereo and having clothes made for Joseph and then after being off-loaded (I don't think they can do this anymore) in Singapore for two nights and a day, (where Joseph went birdwatching and I bought paper under garments because our luggage was NOT off-loaded), we finally landed in Australia.  We whizzed through customs (if your luggage arrives a day before you it sure speeds up the process) and they stamped his passport and let him into the country without blinking an eye.

There's seven years worth of stories in between when we arrived and when we left in March 1984… We built a house in the hills, Mischa was born, there was a bushfire and the house in the hills nearly burned down so we took my parent's only grandchild back to Canada, is the short version.   There's a whole chapter on the trip back from Adelaide on planes, trains and automobiles, via Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Kennebunkport, Montreal to Ottawa to live for the next 28 years. There's a whole book about those 28 years; we had another baby, we had jobs, we lost jobs,  we lived in four different homes, we started a business, we retired and along the way we made friends to die for, met people you only dream about and of course Joseph's family and Mrs. Dafoe turning 100.  But I'll skip all that except to mention that on that fateful day in March when they stamped Joseph's passport, if we had known what we know now, we should have mentioned that we MIGHT be back (to Aus.) to live and it would have been a different stamp and maybe just maybe we wouldn't be in the predicament we are in now.

Here's the predicament: 

Having decided that, with both children, a grandchild, an ageing mother and all of my family here in Adelaide, we would turn our holiday into an extended stay. We knew Joseph would need more than his one-year visitor's visa so we did what anybody who wanted to know about visas would do, we went to the Immigration Department to find out the correct visa to use.  

We mentioned to the Immigration person - I have no idea what they are called because they are NOT Immigration Agents (you pay them) - that Joseph had lived and worked here for seven years as a Permanent Resident. We told the person we knew Joseph was 'in the system" because Medicare could see his name and yes after much searching he (with some help) found some kind of record of Joseph's name in their (Immigration) system so we were advised to fill out a Resident Return Visa. More discussion with the person giving us the forms about whether he should apply within Australia or in Canada, but given that all of the supporting documents needed were in Canada (and Joseph had to do his (oops our) taxes anyway) we decided he would go back to Canada as planned, submit the Visa request and come back at the end of October on a one-way ticket with Visa in hand because really … it is pretty obvious where he should be.

Alas!  It's the Spousal Visa, along with $3,000.00 and FIVE more months that we should have submitted!!! We've wasted FOUR months on the wrong visa!!  Cassia, who declared it the wrong visa in the first place, will help us submit the new one (she has to her credit , successfully applied and received Pablo's PERMANENT Resident Visa) and we hope that once the application is in the works, he can come out on a visitor's visa while the big one is being processed.

  Then of course life will go back to being mundane and there will be nothing to "blog" about…