Hello again.

I thought I'd post a quick note since it's been about 9 months since I've done so, and because for some reason I still open my blog on the computers at work so it gets some traffic.
I am writing this from my house in Canada, where Tim and I, along with our energetic dog have settled in after a few months floundering around waiting to see what would come next. We made it here without too much trouble, immigration paperwork notwithstanding. After living with his folks for a while, we tricked the bank into giving us a tiny mortgage so we could buy a house in a small town. It's nice to still be able to walk to the store and the post office; I didn't think that was still possible in North America.

It's hard to live back in the West. We both took a huge pay cut--for some reason, people here aren't willing to pay big bucks to have white people sing "Shake My Sillies Out" with their 4 year olds all day long. And you have to have 2 cars, complete with all the hassles that entails. The insurance on one car for 6 months is more than we paid to buy both of our scooters in Taiwan. And the winter has been hard for us. It gets pretty cold here, even though all the locals said we got off easy this year. But after living in Taichung, Taiwan, where it was warm enough to go camping on motorcycles in February, we're still building fires and running the furnace here and it's almost May 1.

But on the bright side, I am a permanent resident of a country that's actually glad to have me, instead of a temporary resident of a country (yes, Taiwan is a country--sorry, China) that merely tolerated my presence. And we finally get to own our own land, which we'd be even more excited about if the yard weren't such a bog.

In fact, it's the bright side of things that has kept me from posting to this blog, in part. I have so much less to complain about, and a lot fewer crazy stories. For a job now, I work in a call center as a tech support rep for a major Canadian internet provider. What could be less exciting than that?

But here I am, and life is good, despite the reverse culture shock. To give you some idea of the place I live now: when we go to the town office, they don't ask for any ID, because they know who we are. We're the gay couple who live in the old Gertie Patterson place. How's that for a change?

I may continue to post again, since I'm in front of a computer all day lately, but blogging from work is likely to cause nothing but pain. We'll see.