A Quick Update for our Fans

We're currently 48 hours away from flying to Wellington. We've made a quick stop over in New York city to spend some time with my mother before we go and take in some of the finer things in life (dear god I've eaten so much in the last 2 weeks it's quite incredible).

We got to check out Spamalot on Broadway which was an incredible experience, got to fish on the ocean and checked out some awesome restaurants on top of spending some great time with the family.

Tomorrow we're off to the city to check out some of our favorite museums, make diner for the 'rents then that's pretty much it, we're off.

The next blog post will assuredly be from NZ!

T minus 48 hours...

Its been a crazy last week.

• Thursday was the last day at work. I have a fantastic boss who went all out to celebrate my leaving, including scoring me a part time job with the compan for the next 6 months. That's right! I'll be working from home for the first stint. Now, the hours kind of suck, working 5am to 10am NZ time but its income, it lets me figure out what I want to do and I get to have a day time social life!! We hit a very good restaurant for lunch and there was cake in the afternoon including a card that was signed by at least 50 people (and a nice gift).
• Thursday was also the closing of the house. We ended up meeting the new owner because of a lawyer snafu. Nice guy, really liked the personalized letter we wrote explaining the ins and outs of the house and was very very understanding about our Passport situation...
  
• Which brings us to Friday: chase the passports day. Our passports had been sent back to us with our visas in them, however because of the mail redirection we subscribed to, our passports ended up being lost by Canada Post for the better part of 72 hours. The were sent registered post, marked as Successfully Delivered in the system but never got to us. To say tensions were high would be the understatement of the year, but in the end a very very nice woman by the name of Christine went into the sorting machines and physically pulled out our passports so we could pick them up at the depot. This is unheard of as far as I know and really blew us away.
• Friday night we had diner with our family here in Ottawa, a wonderful little pub called the Wellington Gastropub (strongly recommended). My uncle ended up lending us his convertible for the weekend so we could travel in style to Montreal.
• Saturday Sunday and Monday were spent in Montreal spending time with my Dad and step mother, Christine, Allison and Damian. Lots of wonderful food was eaten, good times were definitely had by all. It was pretty much as perfect a long weekend in Montreal as I could ever imagine, confirming my belief that if we ever make it back to Canada, that's the town for me
• Monday night we went out with all our local friends for one last night out. Hit up Pancho Villa for some fish-bowl sized drinks and tex-mex food (something I've heard is non-existent in New Zealand). Big thanks to Ryan Ryan Jay Wes Caro May Phil Mavourneen Alice Brie Paul Jenni and Robert! We had a great time
• Tonights plans call for a more intimate diner with Marie Pierre and Timo at our favorite Sri Lankan restaurant, Ceylonta.
  

We fly out to New York on Thursday to spend some time with my mom and Bruce, see NYC and mentally prepare for the concept of being immigrants in a new land!

God I can't wait to set foot in Wellington. I'm ready to go now!!!!

It Was Bound to Happen

The first major screw up has now occurred. Our passports are currently in transit from the U.K. They had to go there to get our Permanent Residents visa stamped into them (God only knows why the embassy in Canada can't do that, but that's a rant for another day). The timing on this wasn't stellar, as they would return pretty much during our house sale closing and what not. Of course, given the sensitivity of these documents, they have been shipped Signature Required.

Of course, wouldn't you know it, our passports are still in transit, the mail redirection that we'd set up with Canada Post started a day early. So now we have passports that require our signature to accept somewhere between Ottawa, Mississauga (their last known location) and Montreal (where the mail is being redirected to). A problem. I've contacted my father to make sure someone is home at all times for the next two days because they could sign for them if they are home.

If they aren't home and that lovely little card is put in their mail box, life become... more difficult.

Canada Post requires the person to whom the package is addressed to pick up the parcel, with valid ID that shows their current address. I don't have a current address. I have ID that shows where the parcel was originally destined for as my address and my father has ID that show that he now lives where the parcel is ending up, but really, there's nothing but the better judgment of the person working the parcel pick up area to put those two things together. So I'll be at the mercy of a civil servant. There are worse fates I'm sure.

Unexpected Expenses

We've been cruising a million miles an hour as we get closer to our deadline, so there's been little action on the blog front. That's going to change.

There's been a couple of financial hickups in the last week that I feel I should document for those going through something similar:

• Beware cancelation fees on mortgages. These are fees that you get charged if you cancel your mortgage before the due date (our mortgage was a 5 year mortgage). Typically, this is waived / renegotiated when you sell then buy a new house, so we got screwed.
• Getting out of a car lease: What a right royal pain. There's the transfer fee, the agent fee if you use an agency to find a new taker for the lease, inspection fee, repairs that need to be made.
• General Cancellation fees: Cell phones, certain bills etc.
• Surprise car rentals: if you're getting out of a lease, every km counts so if you have some last minute visits renting is the only way to go.

Overall things are moving well so far, other then the passport debacle (that'll be the subject of a post in and of itself) we hope to be out of the house tonight and out of the country on the 4th of September with a quick stop over in NYC.

Shove me off the continent i'm ready to go

The silent partner here. It seems that on such a momentous point in the process i should at least post a few words...something meaningful...something grand.......
...
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HOLY SMOKES ITS HAPPENED, WE CAN FLY AWAY NOW!

but seriously. this has been a long (sometimes stressful time) for us. We started this way back in February/March but had been thinking about it so long before that. Some things went so smoothly for us: selling our house and finding a place to store all our stuff (thanks to an awesome family member for that one). Some stuff was really painful: having to struggle and worry about our two cats. I'd like to thank Aynn for taking them both in to her country home; if i was a cat i'd love living there. Some stuff is just bittersweet: trying to see all your family and friends who want to see you "just one more time" and knowing you can't reach them all before you leave. But in the end of this whole process all i can think about is that its happening. We can buy our one-way ticket and head to a place i've been dreaming about for the last 3 years; a place where a teacher is in high demand, where apple trees grow randomly on the side of the road where people threw out an apple core as they drove by, and where we can sea kayak, parasail and find hot springs to bathe in.

Thirty years old and heading out on an adventure...life is indeed amazing.

Approved in Principle!

This is it folks, this is really happening!

Our decision on your application:
I am pleased to tell you that we have approved in principle your application for a New Zealand residence visa.

Hazzah!

Allrighty now, let's warm up the credit cards and get ready to fly!

Thank the Freakin' Gods We Found a Home For the Cats

Just a quick update, thanks to my good friend Caroline, both cats will be living in the country with her aunt, together :)

We're dropping them off tonight so that they can get acclimatized and see if they play well with the other animals. We're also meeting their new mommy tonight so I'm sure it's going to be emotional.

That being said, it's still the best thing for them. The thought of having to put them through a 27 hour flight in a cold cargo container followed by 6 months of quarantine seems very cruel for our personal needs. Further, the financial costs of that is quite tremendous.

Thanks again for everyone who tried to find them homes, I'll keep you all in the loop if something goes wrong (crossing fingers)

Useful Tools and Other Ways to Make The Big Move Easier

Rather then get whiny again about how we still haven't heard back from the NZ immigration officer, I figured I'd mention a couple of sanity restoring tools we've used to keep track of everything going on.

Information Gathering:

• Official websites. NZ in particular has a lot of good info about immigration, their site is fairly easy to navigate and you can do quite a bit online, including filing your EOI
• Web Forums. We've hopped between a few, http://move2nz.com and http://emigratenz.org are our current favorites.
• Blogs of other immigrants. Not so much for a source of info as a glimpse into what life might be like over there. I found the ones that were demographically similar to us (young couple, no kids, no attachments) to be most interesting.
  

Tracking:

• Wiki: I put up a wiki very early in this process to figure out all the different things we needed to keep track of. I'm sure there are non-digital ways of doing all this but that concept is pretty foreign to me, so let's move on...
• reliable Email: This isn't much of a tool, but keeping EVERY email that had anything to do about NZ turned out to be essential. Google mail makes this easy, but anywhere can do it. We routinely went back as far as a year to find contacts, info etc. that we needed in hindsight.
• Budget: We'd been saving up for quite a bit to make this trip happen, but we were still stunned by our out of pocket expenses. tracking savings and expenditures for this project made us realize that we'd have to save more in order to avoid being in debt by the time we arrived, so we stepped up the automatic savings plans.
  

Planning the move:

• Starting Early: we started talking to movers VERY early (last year, before we'd submitted the EOI) had 7 companies come in to give us estimates. We shortlisted 3, dropped one and are now dealing with 2 companies, both very friendly and helpful, who I'm happy to say haven't objected to the scale down of our move
• Empty Boxes! at the beginning of the summer, with the selling of the house, we packed up a TON of our stuff for staging and put it into storage. This turned out to be critical to figuring out what we could live with out and what we wanted to bring. We made 2 piles, storage Canada and NZ. turns out we were right about the storage Canada and we figured out how to reduce what we wanted to bring to NZ by quite a bit. Essentially, once everything was packed, it was easy to figure out what from the NZ stuff we didn't need.
• Scanner: Carly ended up scanning all of her school notes to reduce the amount she needed to bring. I thought this was brilliant and it's going to save us quite a bit in the long run

The Traveling

• Airmiles: Turns out that we'd accumulated a whole bunch of airmiles without noticing. Since we didn't need them in NZ, we bought a pair of tickets to NYC to visit mom, got 350$ worth of gift certificates and still had enough for free movies. On top of that, other points collection systems have been reducing our costs. Aeroplan for 100$ of gift certificates, free meals from Pho Mi Bo Ga and Subway along with other gift cards we hadn't used yet. No use holding on to them now!
• Vaccuum bags: nothing reduces the size of your clothes and other fabric items like these puppies. They are allowing us to bring our Canadian duvet and pillows on the plane with us.

What we could have done better:

• We really needed to get our timing down better. As is, we're cutting it VERY close. We may end up homeless before we've got our visas which may end up costing us quite a bit.
  
• We didn't take into account the amount of time it would take to find homes for the cats which is now causing a LOT of stress.
• We initially didn't realize that the ITA was an additional step. We had originally thought we'd be able to leave by July. We've been lucky though, the ITA process is hopefully almost done and it's been considerably faster then what's stated on the website.

There ya go, a productive post rather than more emo.

Interview: Done!

We got the interview done!!! This is speeding along nicely, as we only got our ITA to them on the 27th of June. We don't have job offers (obviously since we had to do an interview)

I screwed up one question when i mentioned there might be a few months where i'm wrapping up lose ends with the company I'm with here, the person mentioned that a Skilled Migrant immigration was for people looking for work in NZ. I had to correct myself by saying that I had to wrap up things in Canada before I could transfer to the NZ subsidiary, that seemed to clear it up.

She seemed very pleased that Carly is a certified elementary school teacher now, I get the impression that's starting to be a rather pressing problem.

She told us that it would take approx 1 week from the time she received the final document to make the decision, so hopefully within the next week or two we should hear back the decision!

A side note: if you are born in one country, but now reside in a different country, there's some additional documentation you may need.

I was born in Costa Rica to Canadian parents, who moved around a lot, so they want a Statutory Declaration (affidavit) that I did not have Costa Rican citizenship and don't have a criminal record there (the though of a 1 year old having a criminal record makes me giggle)

I'm About Ready to Scream.

Ok, it was bound to happen, this is going to be a whiny post.

The waiting is getting oppressive. In fact, it's starting to affect my daily life. We got confirmation of our application being in the right queue on the 27th of June but we got not further feed back from there.

It starts simply enough, when you start to realize that there are significant deadlines that are coming up, whether or not you have your Visa, that you can't get around. We need to move all our stuff to Kingston the second week of August. We need to be out of the house by August 28th. Those aren't negotiable.

Then there's all the stuff that depends on the "acceptance" date. Like buying the tickets, finding homes for the cats, getting rid of the car, figuring out what to do about my job, arranging the movers, getting our finances sorted... the list goes on and on. And none of it can be done without knowing the state of the Visa.

And then of course, doubt starts to creep in. There's a few technicalities in our application that may or may not be an issue, but when you start obsessing over them, the become HUGE in your mind. you start making backup plans, looking at the money you've saved and wondering how long it would last if you completely homeless and jobless in a new country.

Your mood goes down hill, you start to lose sleep. Nothing seems to be going anywhere with the direction of life, so nothing seems to matter. Tempers flair.

... It's only been 21 days. The website says this can take up to 4 months, though we were told via email that it's more likely to be 4-6 weeks. Either way, we just hit the 3 week mark and i'm going nuts.

Good thing Carly's a patient soul.

A Great Post On Being a Nomad

It's funny how sometimes people have the same thoughts and ideas at the same time. Nothing has been more cathartic for me then figuring out what stays, what goes and what I can totally live without. Every time i look at the costs of moving, I distill my life a little more, decide what my true interests / passions are and what is a random fad.

I just started reading Big Contrarian, and it's quite well written.

From Big Contrarian:

It gets easier.

During our move to New York, I remember watching my girl getting lost in memories. She’d been living in the same place for five years. Every nook of her basement apartment in Chicago hid an artifact and every artifact begged for reflection. As I ran up and down her stairs, assembling, organizing and taping, I would catch her in these moments where it was clear that the next phase of her life was starting, and that the old one was slipping away. She was a mix of nervousness, anticipation and regret. I was an impatient machine: barking commands and commanding she move on to the next corner.

I’ve never lived any where longer than two years. I have no excuse. I wasn’t an army brat; My family wasn’t in a relocation program or hiding from the mafia. We just moved. And when we stopped, I started.

I’ve moved four times in as many years. DC, Chicago, New York, San Francisco. I’m heading back to Chicago in a few weeks¹, and I can already feel the city tugging me at. The to-do list getting organized in my head.

Movers need to be arranged. Boxes packed. Goodbye parties avoided and contacts kept at a distance. Better to disappear slowly. Grand exits are only appropriate if you’re never coming back.

Every item in my apartment has already been assigned a value and weight. Many won’t make the next leg. There are books I’ve only read once; Utensils that haven’t aged well. There are clothes I’d rather forgot I ever owned and gadgets made obsolete. Anything I keep is one more box to unpack when I arrive, and I’m often in a hurry to get settled.

I won’t get lost in memories when I pack. I’m the same impatient machine privately as I am publicly. Done correctly, I can pack my entire life in one evening. Two if there’s something good on TV.

I won’t miss this apartment, or this city. I’m taking everything with me that they gave me. Knowledge, memories, friends: they travel with you, bouncing around in your brain available whenever you’d like. San Francisco isn’t going anywhere.

Across the country, there’s some empty space just waiting for me to shuffle into. To fill with junk, cigarette smoke, programming books and loud music.

It’ll be different than this one, but it will be the same.

And two years from now, who knows where I’ll be. But I’ll be in a space filled with my shit, some of which I have now, some of which I’ve yet to acquire. I’ll be with her, and I’ll be OK.

Life could certainly be worse than that.

Heart Wrenching

It's with incredible sadness that I put up the first of what will likely be several notices trying to find a new adoptive home for my cat, Mitou. I've quite literally been losing sleep over finding her a good home. Casey I'm not too worried about. She's still a young cat and is very affectionate.

Mitou in her older age has decided to live a more sedentary life. She's a very calm and laid back cat, . She's 14 now but in very good health. I'm trying all of my social networks first then I'll reach out to coworkers. Family likely won't work as they all have animals / prior commitments. I'd hoped I could find a solution that would allow me to get her back if we came back, but realistically that's really not fair to whomever will adopt her, so that's out of my mind now.

It's cliché I know, but you don't realize how important some relationships are until you're about to lose them. I feel worse about leaving my cat then leaving my country...

You Always Read The Instructions After the Fact.

Carly and I have now submitted our ITA to the NZ government. Of course, after we sent it out, we realized we'd sent the wrong type of birth certificate for Carly, but thankfully, our VERY nice and helpful contacts at NZ immigration have told us they will process the rest of our application so long as we Fed-Ex the right one out ASAP.

So now we're back to waiting. This time though, I'm considerably more up-beat about the whole situation. In fact, the only thing really stressing me out is that we won't have enough time to finish up all our "fun" stuff before we go on our grand adventure. Here's the list of what we want to do before we head out:

• Trip to Toronto including Geeky.Net User BBQ
• Trip to NYC to visit my mom
• Trip to Halifax to visit Carly's parents
• Trip(s) to Montreal
• Camping with friends x 2 at least

Maybe I should just resign early :) I'm sure I'm missing at least one major trip on that list, but it's a good start. I think we might try and get a multistage plane ticket when we fly to NZ, so that we can make stops in Vancouver and Calgary before heading over there (also, that would guaranty we don't fly into the States, which I'm not crazy about doing)

Well That Certainly Was Fast.

House has been sold. In fact, we got a conditional sale approx. 36 hours after it hit the market. All the conditions were cleared up this week, so that's one more thing on our list. What's truly awesome about the sale is that the buyer was totally OK with our closing date of August 28th, meaning we're on track for a September 1st departure date.

Right now we're waiting on a few answers back from NZ Immigration and finishing up our application. I'd hoped that it would get done sooner, but real life got in the way.

We've arranged to have essentially infinite free storage (thanks Jess!) for all our stuff, so that's another thing out of the way. It's looking like the month of August is going to be nuts. We need to get rid of the car, decide what's coming and what's going, move all our stuff, find new homes for our two cats and probably a 100 other things that are currently slipping my mind. I'm going to have to go update my wiki with all these steps and what's been taken care of....

It's starting to feel like a real project now, which means there's milestones, todo lists and a lot of well defined work. That's a complete change from only last month, when we hadn't yet put the house for sale and there were so many maybes and conditions to worry about. Now there's only 1. Are we going to be allowed into the country or not? Yeah, kind of a big one granted, but we're hopeful.

The Sale

Pretty much everyone who is likely to read this probably knows by now, but today is the day our home goes for sale. Prepping the house has been one of the most stressful and difficult tasks Carly or I has ever taken on. Carly's been doing the lion's share of the work. If we sell the house quickly or for close to our asking price, all the credit goes on her feet.

The timing is a little nerve racking. We haven't exactly been accepted to NZ yet, so selling now is a big risk. But with the state of the Ottawa real estate market and the dates we're hoping everything is done by, this was the most logical way of doing it.

The fact that we might end up homeless in Canada while waiting for our paperwork to be complete doesn't exactly fill me with happiness, but we've had a few offers for temporary housing should we encounter delays.

Selling the house is also the first tangible act that solidifies our moving plans. We've been chasing after the paper work required for our ITA in the mean time, but that's again just a fart in the wind compared to the harsh reality that we will not have anywhere to go back to if we don't make this immigration work. The whole concept of a backout plan has been tossed in favor of giving the move all of our attention and dedication. My guess is for something this big, you pretty much have to.

On the driving across Canada front, I'm sad to say I don't think it's going to happen unless one of us lines up a job in NZ before we go. It came down to cost and neither of us liking the idea of being exhausted from a 5000km trip before we even landed in NZ. If we're going to make a major trip in a jalopy, we might as well do it in NZ rather then here.

Hopefully we'll have more of an update on the actully move soon. I'd like to get the paperwork done by the end of the week, but both of our Universities haven't been the most helpful, so that might get pushed back a week.