I have two roommates, both of whom are my best friends. Yesterday one of them, A, saw the writing on the wall and realized he’s about to get laid off from his job due to some weird things happening at the top. So we had a home meeting last night to figure out what to do about the household finances while he looks for a new job. That was fine. However, A went into a doom spiral thanks to the current state of the US and he and J, my other roommate, started talking about making plans to skip the country if things get unbearable. They were talking about us, A’s sister, and her family all heading north together.
I didn’t say anything because it was late and I had to get up at 6 this morning for work. But I don’t see this being a workable plan in any way, shape, or form. First off, if things do get that bad it will spiral out of control too quickly for us to get to the Canadian border. It’s a 12-hour drive at the fastest, and that’s to the east coast. J used to live in British Columbia and that’s probably where they’re thinking about heading. We are in North Carolina. By the time we got anywhere near the border, Canada would probably have closed the borders if things get that far down shit creek.
Secondly, they’re both rather blase about our chances to find work in Canada. Sure we all have college educations and some of us have advanced degrees but they’re not in anything STEM. And if we’re going north, other people also are who have more useful skills than our Neighbors to the North would find more attractive. Also, as I mentioned before, J used to live in BC and he had employment issues himself when he lived there that can’t all be attributed to his crazy ex-wife.
But my biggest problem is that I think these plans are only reinforcing A’s doom spiral. His sister isn’t helping because they feed on each other’s worries. What I want to tell them and I can’t and/or won’t is that there is no way we will be able to skip the country. We might as well resolve to stay here and fight like hell. A and his sister need to stop watching the news, and J needs to stay off Tiktok and getting riled up. Yes, we all have the feeling that there is some shit going down this year, but running away isn’t the solution.
It’s also a pain in the ass to do it. They don’t just literally let in anyone, and even if you are going to qualify to settle as permanent residents, it will take a lot of time and money.
If they are struggling financially, that is the worst time to try to move to Canada. And if they want to do it quickly, forget it. It isn’t going to happen. Unless they decide they want to become undocumented immigrants, and then they have to live with the fear of deportation and trying to get by with the kind of work available to undocumented folks. Would that really be an improvement over their current situation?
I don’t think Canada is going to be the viable escape route they think it is, particularly with the situation you’re describing. If they really want to do that, they had better get a financial advisor, start planning and saving money, and see if they can find someone in Canada willing to offer them a good job. (That last bit would help a lot.)
My guess is that all it’s going to take is showing them the reality of their plans to kill that idea. It’s not simply a matter of wanting to go to Canada. There is a shit ton more involved with that.
@Atamasama summarized the issue very well. Immigration isn’t a trivial matter, whether immigrating from the US to Canada, or from Canada to the US. For immigration to Canada, there’s a points system that assesses things like education and skill level, and multiple hurdles after that.
My son recently married a US citizen and they’re both now living in Canada. Despite being married, getting his spouse legal residency status involved massive paperwork and required the services of an expensive immigration lawyer, and among many other things it required proof of sufficient income to support his wife. Someone coming in cold, so to speak, with no job in hand and no such support, would have no chance.
In both the US and Canada, the best chance of immigration from the other country is to have a solid job offer and a company willing to go through the immigration hassles on your behalf, which typically includes attesting that the skills are so unique that no one else could do the job.
Listen, it’s the little things. I just saved my first file using that format and I’m so excited about it. No I don’t have to track it to the minute, but it’s great for organizing grant files, such as monthly meeting agendas and versions of applications.
This is now likely going to be the second recycling pickup in a row that I’m going to miss because of shit weather, for which I pit this entire winter. As you might imagine I have quite a bit of recycling piled up by now and wasn’t sure it would even all fit in the recycling bin, as huge as it is. But the forecast is: “Winter Storm Warning”. We’re to expect variations of rain, freezing rain, snow, and/or ice pellets, with accumulations of up to 10 cm of some form of frozen shit. Right now it’s snowing.
So it’s not only a major PITA to take stuff out to the recycling bin, but it would be in the way of Snowplow Guy. So unless this all blows over by late tonight and Snowplow Guy clears the driveway, I’ll have to wait another two weeks for the next recycling pickup.
Winter has its good points – I love the idea of garage-as-fridge – but I’m really getting tired of this crap. And I’m looking forward to putting regular tires with the original factory rims back on the Camry and opening up the sunroof to glorious summer sunshine, as I’ve never had a car with a sunroof before!
The Unix command line tool sort has a -h, --human-numeric-sort option so that file sizes with units sort properly, so 500k, 2M, 1G sort in that order. There needs to be a --human-date-sort option that is smart enough to handle 2025-Dec-21; Dec-21-2025; 12-21-2025; 21-12-2025; 12-21-25; and good old December 21, 2025; etc.
Every month I get a notification of a new itemized bill from my hospital network. The document warns that “it is not a bill”, but also refers to itself as a “bill”. The amount of the outstanding balance is correct based on the procedure and insurance, but because it is not a bill there is no information on how to pay it.
The website says there is no amount due, despite the bill/not-bill document saying there is an outstanding balance.
This is the same hospital billing service that shows my 2025 payments as:
As bad as the political climate is here, at least we don’t have precipating poop. You may want to look into moving south.
OTOH, what we do have is horrendous fog from the almost monthlong snow finally melting away & high dew points. You know how the rule of thumb is to keep two seconds between you & the car in front of you? I had to go somewhere last night & took the interstate because of the fog. All of the large green & white directional & exit signs couldn’t even be seen until about three seconds & couldn’t be read until about two seconds from passing underneath of them due to how dense the fog was. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it that bad. I was 100% driving by watching the lane & edge lines & I turned on the GPS to give me some clue as to where I was as I couldn’t see a single curve or turn coming up.
Today I left the house for two hours to get a haircut and some groceries. I returned to find part of my kitchen ceiling on the floor. This is causing me no small amount of distress. I’m pretty sure that the part which fell is directly under our upstairs toilet.
Oof, leaks suck. My mom was chatting with one of the ladies who lives in a townhome across the street; apparently, every. single. one. of those townhomes has a flat roof area just over the dining room, and this was just the perfect place for small ice dams to form during the recent snow event. Now they’re all dealing with water damage in their dining rooms.
What fell was s a piece the size of a dinner plate. On further inspection, there are more cracks and some sagging. It looks like we’ll be taking the current material down and replacing it.
I don’t like my job. I like what I do, very much, but my current employer sucks for so many reasons and I don’t expect things to change. I’ll talk to my boss and keep working on solutions because this could be a really good job, but I’m not holding my breath. It would involve hiring another person to share a burdensome repetitive task that gets in the way of developing, and for them to invest in training.
So today I started fishing. Reached out to a former colleague to ask what’s up at their firm. There’s a second person I’m thinking of doing the same with, I just don’t know them as well and need to fine tune the approach more than the casual text I just sent.
Maybe I won’t like anything I catch. I don’t really know what I’m looking for. That’s the beauty of fishing, though. I can always toss things back into the sea and keep looking.
I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I’m too damn old to sit around hoping for others to change.
I’m sorry to hear about your job woes. I take from some of your previous posts that much of this is due to working for a branch or subsidiary of some giant American company with what I assume to be a shitty corporate culture.
Pretty much. And I’m remote from this tiny branch and cut off from a lot of the more interesting things they do as a result. They need me (or someone) where I am, to do that repetitive task, but the consequence of that is that I’m not available for bigger, more interesting work which is where I want my career to go.
It’s complicated but fundamentally I’m just not a good fit. I’m too restless and ambitious to be locked into the drudgery I’m stuck in.
The corporate overlords dont help, either. Bureaucratic to the point of crippling themselves. It’s been in a “reorganization” for as long as I’ve been here. Nothing actually changed at our level.
