Month: June 2013

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A Card In the Mail

I got a care package from my best friend today and she included a card received from The Oaks Veterinary Clinic in Smithfield, where I had taken Tabitha for a battery of tests at the end of December.

They had put me on their e-mailing list, so I sent them a message letting them know Tabitha had died, that they hadn’t missed anything, and that I appreciated how well they had treated her.

Nothing more was heard from them until today. It looks like the ENTIRE staff signed the card! They all included a little message.

I’m a little dumbfounded since I only took Tabitha there once, but they did call to follow up about a week into her run on medication. My friend has been taking her dogs there for years.

I know many of you are pet lovers, so I’ll share the printed message on the card. Warning: having tissues on hand. It is part of “The Once Again Prince” by Irving Townsend.

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives
even more temporary than our own
live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.

Unable to accept its awful gaps,
we still would live no other way.

We cherish memory as the only certain immortality,
never fully understanding the necessary plan…

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Data Usage Notification

I just tried to load a webpage and this came up:

warning

If you can’t read that, it’s a data usage notification from Bell. It says that I am at more than 90% usage for this billing period and that I have less than 1.5GB available to me to get me to June 13th. If I exceed that amount, I will be charged $10 per additional gigabyte.

1) I am very proactive in watching my bandwidth usage, but I appreciate the ISP looking out for me.

2) $10 per additional GB?! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like that’s going to scare me. I once had to pay Telus $220 in overages for TWO GB ($165 billable to a client, however).

Bell sucks, but their bandwidth package definitely doesn’t.

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Matters of Residency

The big project for this summer is to try to become a resident of Saskatchewan based out of my property. This will help me be more legitimate in the eyes of federal, provincial, and international law. It will also give me the peace of mind that I will never have to change provinces again. The post office here could close, so I could have to change my address again, but that would be a small thing to deal with should the time come.

Before beginning the residency change process, I need to make sure I can get my vehicles adequately insured here. A blog reader recently commented that Aviva does NOT offer the Elite full-timer policy in this province because Saskatchewan has government-run insurance.

So I need to sit down with an insurance adjuster here, present my existing coverage, and see if they can provide me with something comparable for the motorhome. I need coverage for contents (including anything in a shed) and liability, and I want it to be clear that I plan to be out of the country six months of the year so that we can get the surcharge built into the policy. Snowbirds appear to have some sort of official status here, but, of course, the website has no information on that.

The insurance premiums must also be payable in installments as there is no way I could afford to pay my policies in full (one of the many reason I could never move to BC).

Then, I need to make sure I can prove I am an SK residence. This is going to be WAY easier than it was in other provinces as I just need to prove I have an address here! Their list of what is acceptable does not include a property title, but does include a bank statement and a property tax assessment notice. If I get water hooked up, I can use a water bill.

Once I am comfortable that I will be able to get adequate insurance and my residency paperwork is in order, I need to get my insurance and driving abstracts from Alberta. I don’t want to take this step until I’m sure that I will be able to transfer residency to Saskatchewan in order not to tip off Alberta in case the residency change doesn’t go through.

The following step is to arrange for my out of province vehicle inspections.

Caroline and Charles told me to go to the Kal-Tire in Assiniboia as they were well treated there when they moved from Manitoba. The cost for the truck should be about $80, but I have no idea what it will be for Miranda. I have enough confidence in the Kal-Tire brand to believe that I won’t be ordered to have thousands of dollars worth of work down on each vehicle to get my certificate, but there’s always the concern that something could come up. Best case scenario, this is going to cost me a few hundred dollars.

The order of the next steps is a little fuzzy since I don’t understand exactly how insurance is going to work here, but a visit to SGI, the SK DMV, will be in order. I will bring my driver’s abstracts so that I can get a full license, having learned my lesson from Alberta.

Once my vehicles are registered in Saskatchewan and I have my driver’s license, getting health coverage should be a non-issue.

And then, I will be able to breathe a little easier and will feel more comfortable crossing the border.

Charles and Caroline suggested I share their PO box in Montana, which will save me from paying the full rental fee. I’d love to go there once every two months or so and get Amazon packages. There’s so little I can’t get through Amazon that it makes sense to use up my gift certificates every month and drive to Montana to get the items than it does to pay for them out of pocket up here. I mean, a lot of this stuff would be items I’d get in Moose Jaw, so I’d be making a long drive anyway.

I had thought to apply for a Nexus pass once I’m established here, but since Nexus travelers are treated like regular travelers in the non-Nexus lanes and there are no Nexus lanes in Saskatchewan, that seems like an unnecessary step that would give the governments even more information about me.

I’ve been feeling rather like an outlaw on the run for years, so it will be nice to have a veneer of legitimacy even though I will continue to live according to my rules.

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Business is NOT Picking Up

I feel like a couple of recent comments need to be addressed in a post. There seems to be the mistaken impression that business for me is picking up and that I’m raking in the cash. This is most certainly not the case.

Being a freelancer, business is never steady. Sure, I’m swamped this week, but the last two weeks all I had on my plate were jobs from a client who pays me minimum wage at best. The client who’s keeping me busy this week could go dark for all of July. I don’t know.

Since last summer, I’ve been able to ride this income roller coaster and get the bills paid, no problem. But it’s still not enough to go beyond my most basic needs. I need a couple more steady clients who pay me well to serve as my ‘overtime’ pay. Until that happens, I’m going to be scrambling.

I have so many big expenses this summer, including attending the seminar, truck maintenance, and the cost of transferring residency to Saskatchewan, among others.

So these ‘I’m busy with work’ posts are not to say, ‘wow, I’m rolling in the dough’ but rather ‘there’s a reason I’m filling the blog with fluff.’ 🙂

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International Cooperation

Late Wednesday May 29th, I ordered a water filter to be shipped to my friend’s in Virginia. I have an Amazon Prime membership, so the package got there on Friday May 31st, within the two promised business days. My friend promptly checked the order to make sure everything was there, repackaged it, and sent it ‘Express Mail’, which offers delivery to most major international markets within three to five business days.

She had me pay her the $30 or so it would have cost to send the package a slower route and covered the difference for Express herself (THANK YOU, I love you!), only telling me this after the package was processed.

The package left Norfolk on Monday and got stuck in Canadian Customs. It’s always scary to see the ‘item was sent for further processing’ and then ‘item was released from customs’ notes. This was Wednesday. No update yesterday. As far as I knew, the package was languishing in Mississauga.

I checked the status this morning and discovered that it had arrived in Regina at 1AM and left there at 4AM!

I went to the post office around 10, just as the post master was getting into her car, and when she saw me, she got out and told me she had a package for me. My filter was here! AND I didn’t have to pay any taxes on it! So my out of pocket cost was only about $30. Wooho!

This isn’t the first time I’ve been impressed by the expediency of the postal system, but this really was above and beyond what I expected, especially since my friend sent me another package by a slower method and it seemed to be moving along faster.

In other news, Skynet has gained self-awareness AND is prescient. I got up this morning and had crazy fast internet with three bars of signal and an RSSI of -86. At the EXACT minute I hit send on an email to a client, the connection dropped and would not come back. I had to scramble to get out the door and up the hill for my deadline. Once up there, I got offered tons of work for the weekend, which meant enough downloads that I would have had to go up the hill even if I had been able to send an email from home. Be very afraid people.

I don’t expect to be back online till Monday as I have 30 hours of work to do by 9PM Sunday. Gary, have a virtual beer for me each evening!