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.

Immigration is like Driving...

When I was first learning to drive, my instructor, who had a penchant for the overly dramatic, harped on the concept of making sure you look ahead to find your "Point of No Return". Essentially, the point when crossing a traffic light where if it suddenly turns red, you will no long be able to safely stop in time. I think he was subconsciously teaching me how to run yellow lights, but regardless, I think we just found our immigration Point of No Return.

Looking through the documentation for the ITA, there's a ton of "official" paperwork that needs to be provided:

• Certified copies of passports
• Medical examination results
• Criminal background check (including fingerprints!)
• Proof of employment for all the jobs we put do
• Proof of qualifications, including transcripts
• Proof of marriage, both the certificate and some sort of proof that it's legit (photos are allowed so long as they are dated... wtf?)

and...

• A check for 685£ for the application fee. That's approximately 1336.45 $.

Given that we've already dropped over 500$ on the paperwork above plus 400+ $CDN for the EOI form and there's more to come, we're now at the point where we're "putting our money where our mouths are". Other then the actual buying of the plane tickets, this would appear to be the biggest expense so far.

I think I'll put up a table of all costs incurred at the end of this little adventure.

What's strange is that it now feels real for the first time. I don't know why exactly it takes attaching a price tag to this for my mind to clue in, but it probably says something about the way I'm wired.

It's a terrifying feeling all of a sudden.

Just Found: Flowchart Explaining What We're Going Through.

I'm not 100% certain everything on this is accurate (it says we'd get an interview before our ITA, but that didn't happen) but overall it's a very good explanation of the system:
In fact, the page it comes from has some good stuff on it. We've decided not to go with Immigration consultants, but I sometimes wonder if that wouldn't have been simpler.

http://www.proteapacific.co.nz/new_zealand/nz_detail.asp?id=12&bhcp=1

Level 2 reached. ITA in our hands.

Kickass! Just when I thought we'd have to seriously give some thought to living in NZ as tourists for the foreseeable future, we got our ITA (can't remember the acronym meaning right now). The ITA package is a big stack of papers. A fairly thin stapled package is what we actually have to fill out. The rest is supporting documentation (probably a 100 or so pages of it) explaining the process.

Essentially, this stage is when we are required to prove that all the stuff we put on our EOI form is in fact true. This means we need certified copies of all our degrees, job references confirming our employment, police checks, medical checks (including x-rays!) etc. I'm guessing this will take us a week or two to assemble, get notarized, and ship back off. Assuming this all checks out, I believe (research to follow) that we'll be at the (perhaps optional?) interview stage, which is the last stage before we get the official acceptance.

One of the more disconcerting things about this package is they state not to make any travel arrangements until the process is complete. That doesn't really work for us, given the selling of the house etc. so we'll need to get better informed about that...

It's nice to get a little bit of hope, it was getting a little depressing.

Plans Before We Go.

We've got a few people we need to visit before we leave for the year, and doing it through plane flights etc. is going to be prohibitively expensive. I've always wanted to drive to Vancouver and we'd been talking about driving the country to see it, so combining the two seems like a good idea.

Here's a tentative itinerary...

View Larger Map


Definitely some more challenges to come on this one...

A couple of thoughts that struck me off the top:

• We'll likely buy a beater car either here or in Halifax, get it checked out by a mechanic, then go from there
• It needs to be able to carry all the crap we'd be flying out with
• Selling it in Vancouver would probably be a nerve racking experience, but I bet if i drive it to a bunch of different dealers I'll get some moderate amount of cash for it.
  

As always, pro/cons pop directly into my head (I'm a nerd that way)

Pros:

• We get to see everyone we care about before we leave (note, a Montreal trip is planned before this!)
• Gets us into a traveling frame of mind that we'll need for the next three or so months until we get all settled in
• Cheaper then flying to each spot
• We'd see people we haven't seen in a long while
• Flying out of Vancouver is cheaper and also avoids flying through the States
  
• Exciting!

Cons:

• Damn that's a lot of driving
• We'd be exhausted once we get to Auckland/Wellington
• Selling the car would be a nightmare
• What happens if the car falls apart?
  
• When you factor in gas, hotels / campsites, how much is this going to cost us before we move???

It's just an idea at this point, but I think it would be a fun adventure that would be a great way to see the country.

Plan B

So obviously, the waiting is starting to get a little old. I was on move2nz.com the other day, and glancing at people's signatures gave me a rather awful sinking feeling. Many of the people posting about still being in the immigration quagmire had been in it for a year or more! I know for a fact that if this drags on for more then 9 months, I'm going to lose it (both interest, patience and likely my sanity)

So here's the new plan:
We sell the house and the car.
I resign late August.
We go to New Zealand with return tickets and visitors visas.
We look for jobs there, hopefully one of us will land one (it only takes one from what I've read).
Armed with our new found job offer(s), we update our immigration paperwork.
That should be enough to fast track the process, getting us our residency before the job starts
We get established, live happily ever after etc.

And now, because this blog is sorely lacking in photos, a photo from our Honeymoon in New Zealand. I'll start adding random NZ photos to the entries here to lighten up the mood, until we can get over there and take some fresh ones :)

ARGH.

Rereading the London Branch's information on the amount of time we're likely to end up waiting... Some very disconcerting information popped up:

Your Expression of Interest (EOI) will be assessed within three months of being selected from the pool. We will then contact you, either inviting you to apply for residence or requesting further information. [...]

Once the pre-populated application form is returned to the London branch it should be allocated to a visa officer within four months. [...]

After your application has been allocated to an officer they will generally take between one and three months to make a final decision on your application.[...]

If you find yourself in this situation please be patient – we aim to finalise your application within nine months of receiving it.

I'm really hoping we don't fall into those categories...

Letter perfect.

Sometimes you get an email or correspondence from a friend that hits so many nails on the head that there's not much to say. I hope he won't mind, but this email really put things into perspective more then the hours of racking my brain about this move have of late. He moved from Ottawa to Spain on 6 days notice and has been there 4 years. I've anonymized and edited the content slightly, hope he doesn't mind:

[...]The first six months were non-stop party. Now, I'm a bit older and a bit less motivated to chase tail than I was (what with being perpetually engaged) but I don't think the initial period will be any different the next time I (we) move. I would say that for at least half a year, you're not going to need or want your WarHammer figures, your comics or whatever else you do to occupy your time these days. But that's my personal experience and not necessarily going to match yours. [...]

Life now, almost four years later? It's a lot like life. Sometimes I want to strangle these [...] bastards. Then my mom calls me while I'm walking through a city park, taking in the sun in a t-shirt and light pants in the middle of March and she's fallen on the ice [...] and Spain feels pretty good. Or I go have a picnic on the beach, 30 minutes' bike ride from my apartment (which is pretty high up on the mountain now) at the beginning of April. Or I waste an entire afternoon in a cafe in a plaza wearing the biggest, faggiest sunglasses that I own (in fact, I only own one pair) talking to whatever collection of friends also don't feel like doing anything.

My point? I dunno. Places suck and they rule. Try to make them rule more than suck.

Singularly helpful in fact. Thanks dude. There's a reply coming about a few of the other things in the email :)

A question of Perspective.

While waiting for the Immigration to get back to us and working on the house, I've been doing a lot of thinking. The fact is, Canada is a pretty incredible place to live and Ottawa is right at the top of that list in my opinion (I think my personal list goes Montreal, Ottawa, Halifax, Toronto) so a question that's been bouncing around in my head a lot is: Why?

The fact is, we're giving up a LOT to go to New Zealand. We've gone through pro/cons, looked at all the costs etc. and really it comes down to one simple fact: We aren't going because we're unhappy, because there's facts of Canada we can't live with out. We're going because we want a change and New Zealand seems as good a place as any to make that change.

Sure there's the fact that Carly will likely not have an easy time finding a job here, there's the winters being hard on us, there's an uncertain job situation for me; but really, those are (surprisingly) rather minor things to us right now. We have a great life here, with some good friends, a nice house etc.

What we're jonesing for is the adventure of setting up in a new and foreign land, seeing if we can do it, what it'll be like. Going to explore a new country and in the process fundamentally changing our lifestyle.

Having come to that realization, I now wonder what kind of permanence will come of this... I mean, if all we're looking for is the adventure, what happens when that wears off? When we're left in a country with its own shares of downsides?

It's kinda scary.