05.12.08
Posted in Canadian life at 12:14 pm by ducky
There were some stories recently about how the Vancouver Olympic Committee was looking for 900,000 person-hours of additional security from private-security firms in the three months before the Olympics. From the article, they are worried about weapons of mass destruction and attacks on “soft targets” like restaurants and hotels.
Um, excuse me: but how does posting a rent-a-cop outside Joe’s Bar and Grill keep a van full of goons with submachine guns from attacking it? How does posting a rent-a-cop (or even ten or one hundred) from setting off a truck bomb as it passes over the Lion’s Gate bridge?
It seems to me to be completely, totally, utterly pointless to spend more money on private security agents. All that will do is make people uncomfortable. If they really want to be effective, they need to spend money on more and better investigators to find the baddies before they get very far, more and better border agents to find munitions before they get in, and more and better bomb-sniffing equipment (to help find the munitions).
This is nothing but security theatre, and I resent my tax dollars being spent on it.
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04.22.08
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, University life at 4:29 pm by ducky
Canada made a change yesterday to the International Student Post-Graduation Work Permit. From about two years ago to yesterday, there was a program in place where if you
- graduated from a Canadian college or university
- had a job offer
- applied for a permit
then you could get a work permit for a year at the company you had the offer from. The company would not have to go through a process of proving that there were no Canadians who could do the job. (If you and said company parted ways, you could change the permit.)
One catch of the program was that while you were not working, you couldn’t leave the country without forfeiting the right to that permit. You were legally allowed to be in the country and look for work. (You just couldn’t leave.)
For many people, not being able to leave might not be a hardship, but I have lots of family two hours south of UBC. If something happened to my mother, I would need to leave Canada. So I figured I had to have a job before I graduated, and looking for work while trying to finish my thesis was a pain.
Now, the requirement for a job offer has been dropped, and the period has been extended. I have get the right to live and work in Canada for three years or as long as my program of study was, whichever is smaller. (This probably means two years.) Not only that, it is a totally open work permit. I can work for anyone, and I can even not work for an employer (i.e. I could consult if I can’t find a Real Job).
This relieves the stress of looking for a job enormously!
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03.22.08
Posted in Canadian life, Married life, Random thoughts at 9:26 am by ducky
My beloved husband has been wanting to try snowboarding for a while. When I realized late on Thursday that Good Friday was a statutory holiday, we made very quick plans to go to Grouse Mountain, a local ski area. Jim and I talked by phone briefly, and later in the day, when I was in the midst of something, got a message from him, asking me to to confirm that I wanted him to go ahead and buy tickets etc. Sure, sure, go ahead.
Um. I didn’t read the email carefully. He asked if he should buy snowboard rental and lessons for both of us. And I said yes. Oooooops.
I took one snowboarding lesson seventeen years ago that was a total disaster. I was up at Tahoe for a M-F trip, and took the lesson on Monday. I was so sore that I couldn’t ski on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or Thursday. Friday, I gave up and came home.
I was thus quite nervous about another lesson, especially since I am seventeen years older now. However, the instructor was better, and I am seventeen years wiser. I didn’t try to push it, and took frequent rest breaks. The snow was also nice and soft yesterday — there had been about 11 cm of new snow in the past 24 hours, and so I fell into nice fluffy stuff and not onto ice. (A ski patrol guy we sat next to at lunch told us that he was not allowed to ever say that the snow conditions were “icy”. He was required to say that the snow was “hard”.)
Looking at the lesson from a distance, you wouldn’t think it would be so strenuous. After all, I would simply slide down a little hill, sit down, rest, take off my board, stand up, walk up the hill, sit down, rest, put on my board, stand up, repeat. So it would be sort of like walking up a hill carrying a relatively light board, sitting down and resting every five minutes. Not so hard, right?
Wellllll…
- While you are sliding down, you have to have your knees bent and springy. This takes some exertion.
- There are two ways to go down: facing down the hill and facing up the hill. In both cases, you have to lean into the uphill edge. I found going down while facing up the hill enormously physically strenuous for my feet. I found pulling my toes up (to dig in my heels) much easier than pushing them down. I could pull up my toes by pulling up my whole foot. It didn’t seem to be adequate to push my foot (e.g. the balls of my feet) down with my calf; it seemed I also needed to push with my toes e.g. tense the muscles in my arch. I happen to have a very very narrow foot with a very high arch, so it felt like I didn’t have a lot of muscle mass in my arch to point my toes down. It was actually painful to go down the hill pushing with my toes. I suspect that I was doing something wrong.
- Standing up on the board from a sitting position when facing down the mountain, is really difficult, and takes quite an exertion of strength. Your feet and board are way in front of your center of gravity. You have to get your center of gravity above the board — while still keeping pressure on the uphill edge of the board. What I learned to do was to grab the downhill edge with my right hand and pulling while pushing myself up with my left hand. Jim’s physical geometry and flexibility are such that he was not able to grab the downhill edge of the board like I could.
- While standing up, if you let the pressure off of the back edge of the board, the board will start to slide. Having the board slide while you are shifting weight is a really easy way to cause you to immediately re-enter a sitting position. Thus, the number of standing-ups probably averaged four or five per trip down.
Note: It is much easier to stand up if you are facing uphill with your board downhill from you because you can get your center of gravity several feet off the ground just by kneeling. However, then you are facing up the mountain, which is difficult. Once I learn how to do turns reliably (shifting from looking uphill to looking downhill), my life will be much better.
Jim wants to do three or four more snowboarding lessons. Ulp. I guess the exercise will be good for me.
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01.19.08
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:11 pm by ducky
Western medicine is amazingly good in some ways. They can sometimes cure things you didn’t even know were wrong with you.
The docs discovered my mom’s PMP on a CAT scan they did looking at what they think was diverticulitis, an annoying but generally easy to treat disease. I believe that she is totally recovered thanks to that early diagnosis. Me, I went to the doctor because I had a bump on my arm, and they ended up checking me out for cancer. (It wasn’t, but it could have been.)
I went to the doctor for three pretty innocuous things. I might not have gone if there were only one, but three together pushed me over some sort of tipping point.
- The most important thing was that a bump on my arm — which the docs had told me was fine but to keep an eye on — looked different. The skin around it was peeling slightly.
- One was that my urine output didn’t seem as “forceful” as it should. My brother-in-law had had fibroids in his urinary tract, and the thought crossed my mind that I might have something similar.
- The last one was so trivial that I honestly can’t remember what it was.
They said my bump was infected slightly. They said that when the infection died down, they could take it off if I wanted. I did and they did.
They seemed far more interested in my urine output, and that ended up causing a cascade of diagnostic tests which culminated in them taking out a polyp six weeks ago. While it turned out to be nothing, there was a non-zero chance that it could have been cancer, where early detection probably would have saved my life.
And that underperforming urine stream? That thing which seemed too trivial for a visit to the doctor on its own? It got robust again all on its own.
I am just astounded at how random life is. In only a slightly different version of the universe, I could be saying, “A bump on my arm saved my life.”
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Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 8:22 pm by ducky
The brain is really strange. Or maybe I should say, “my brain is really strange”.
The surgery that I mentioned in my last posting was to remove a tiny little uterine polyp. While polyps are almost always benign, I knew that uterine cancer was really nasty. (The Wikipedia article on uterine cancer seems to indicate that it’s usually only nasty if you are post-menopause, but I didn’t read that article until I researched this posting.)
So five months ago, when their diagnostics first surfaced the possibility of a polyp, I could have been really freaked out about it. Fortunately, I am really good at denial for health/safety issues: I once hid away a fear of heights, I was unfazed by a good friend’s 7 cm breast cancer tumour, and I took my mother’s PMP in stride.
Unfortunately, I am not good at denial when it comes to bureaucracy. I was actually quite anxious about the bureaucratic aspect of the prospect of uterine cancer. I was worried that if I got cancer, I would be disqualified from getting Canadian Permanent Residency. I’d have to leave Canada when I graduated, and that would put me in the US without health insurance and with a history of cancer. This seemed absolutely horrible to me.
Intellectually, I realized that it was rather stranger to be worried about losing a visa than about losing my life, but that’s how my brain worked.
Perhaps partly this is because I have seen a lot of friends and family have really seriously hugely awful bad things happen to them, and almost all of them pulled through. The friend who had that 7cm breast cancer tumour five years ago is not just alive but very active. Mom had surgery that required 40 stitches and is — as far as anyone can tell — completely recovered. A high school friend got multiple meyeloma, which is one of the deadliest, deadliest forms of cancer there is. One friend got throat cancer three years ago and is still talking. Another friend got leukemia, was in remission for three years, and has been fighting again for about two years. Even cousin Ellen was in remission for three years after (criminally) late treatment of her breast cancer.
On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of snafus with paperwork. Constantly. All the time. (Like how the Canadian government couldn’t figure out for the longest time that I spell “Kaitlin” with a “K” and not a “C”!) So in some ways, it is easier for me to believe that bureaucracies would destroy me than that cancer would destroy me.
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01.12.08
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, University life at 11:30 pm by ducky
Last night, my beloved husband and I went to see Zarqa Nawaz (the creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie) speak at our local gorgeous performing arts hall.
Her talk was wonderful and funny and thought-provoking — I’m really glad I went.
One of the points that she made was that when a Muslim does something bad, there are cries about how this is just one more example of how Islam as a religion is repressive/bad/evil/ugly/whatever, but nobody tars Christianity or white culture if someone white does something bad. One thing that she mentioned was that the leading cause of death of pregnant women in the US was homicide, but that nobody talks about how US culture is brutal to women
I was shocked by the statistic. But thinking about that this morning, I started to wonder about how meaningful that statistic was. What else are pregnant women going to die of?
- If a woman is pregnant, she’s not going to be old, so she is much less likely to die from diseases of old age. Pregnant women probably don’t die of heart disease very often.
- If a young woman has some nasty illness, she’s probably not going to be pregnant. Either her body won’t have the resources to get pregnant, or she’ll have the baby and take steps to not get pregnant again, or the illness (or medications) will cause her to lose the baby.
- Pregnant women usually don’t put themselves in dangerous situations. Women generally don’t hang out in war zones, mine coal, drive trucks, or enter motorcycle races once they find out they are pregnant. (And before they find out they are pregnant, they might also get missed by the statistics.)
While yes, it is bad that homicide is the leading cause of pregnant women in the US, I’d like to see how it compares to US women of childbearing age who are not pregnant, to US men of the same age, and the same numbers for different countries.
I did a little digging, and found some stats at the Violence Policy Center (VPC) and some stats at the US Bureau of Justice (BOJ):
- Black women were more than three times as likely to be murdered than white women.
- Women were more than 11 times as likely to be murdered by a man they knew than by a stranger (VPC).
- When the woman knew her murderer, 60% of the time, it was an intimate or ex-intimate according to VPC. However, according to the Bureau of Justice, about a third of women were killed by their intimates. (Maybe the difference is due to different classification of “intimates”. VPC includes ex-intimates.)
- Only about three percent of male victims are killed by their intimates (BOJ).
- In 90% of the cases where the race of both victim and murderer were know, the woman was killed by men of a different race!!! (BOJ)
- The number of women killed by their intimates in the US was pretty stable for 20 years, and then started falling in 1993. It’s at its lowest point ever right now. (BOJ)
- The number of men killed by their intimates in the US has been falling steadily and dramatically for the past 30 years. (BOJ)
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12.24.07
Posted in Canadian life at 7:36 pm by ducky
As I mentioned before, I scalded my hand and ended up feeling very foolish about a resulting trip to the emergency room. Well, I now feel very good about that trip. On Saturday, I got a bill for $130 for that trip because I wasn’t covered. With a bit of exploring, we discovered that the British Columbia Medical Services Plan didn’t think that Jim and I existed. This was disconcerting.
Apparently, when you get a study permit extension, or extend your work visa in Canada, you also have to tell the provincial health care plan that you got an extension. It’s not enough to just keep paying your bills.
In BC, you have to fax your new study permit or work permit to the head MSP office at 250-405-3595. Be sure to include your Care Card number somewhere on the fax so that they know whose file this regards.
You have 90 days to reinstate your same number; if you take more than 90 days, they have to issue you a new number. We faxed in our permits today, 24 December, one entire week before the 90 days would have been up.
If I hadn’t gone to the emergency room for what turned out to be a trivial matter, I would not have found out that my Care Card had expired before the 90 days was up. I would have had to go through even more paperwork… so now I’m glad that I went!
Keywords: British Columbia Medical Services Plan, Canadian study permit extension, Canadian work permit extension, health care, health insurance.
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11.26.07
Posted in Canadian life, Too Much Information, University life at 7:09 pm by ducky
On the day before US Thanksgiving, I was at my lab late, waiting for my beloved husband to get done with an opera chorus rehearsal. For reasons that don’t matter, I didn’t go home for dinner. Instead, I prepared some yummy cup-of-soup for dinner, adding boiling water from the electric kettle in our lab. I immediately grabbed the cup in my right hand to take back to my desk… and slopped boiling-hot soup on my hand. It landed in the little triangle of skin between the thumb and index finger, where there is a little depression — and saw no good reason to leave. This hurt, so my body acted quickly to throw the water off of the web of skin.
Unfortunately, that meant that soup jumped out of the cup onto the floor, onto my shirt, onto the desk, onto the back of my hand, and even one little splatter onto my forehead. YOWCH!
I quickly grabbed my waterbottle and poured it over the back of my hand (watering one of the office plants in the process). It hurt, but not so much that I thought I couldn’t clean up some of the mess before going 50m to the closest washroom to run more cold water over my hand. So it was a minute or two before I ran more cold water over the burn.
It hurt, but it didn’t hurt that badly. I had never scalded myself before, but I certainly had burned myself before, and it wasn’t painful in that same league. So I ate what was left of the cup of soup and went back to debugging.
After a while, the scald started to hurt. It hurt more and more as time went on. This was really, really strange. I wondered if scalds were somehow different from “regular” burns. It was hurting enough that I was having trouble focusing on my work. “How long would it keep getting worse?” I wondered.
What really made me nervous was that I was supposed to jump in a car and go down to the US in a few hours. I have travellers’ insurance so that I can get medical treatment in the US if needed, but it would probably be a big logistical hassle. Finally, I decided to go to the emergency room a few blocks away. I felt kind of foolish for doing so, but I had never had the experience of a burn’s pain getting worse and worse as time goes on.
As soon as I got outside, my hand started feeling better. This made sense, given the cold and moist air on my bare skin. At the emergency room, they saw me quickly, told me I was fine, and sent me home. I felt relieved but somewhat foolish, but it had been really strange for the pain to increase.
I went back to the lab and commenced working again. I started typing and mousing and typing and mousing again. With my hands. Especially my right hand. And what do you think happened? The pain started increasing again in my right hand!
I felt really, really stupid at that point. It was hurting more and more because I was stretching the scalded area. Duh.
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09.24.07
Posted in Canadian life at 10:01 am by ducky
Here’s another difference between US and Canadian culture that totally surprised me: Canadians normally do not allow write-in candidates for their elections. In the US, it is normal and customary to allow write-ins.
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07.11.07
Posted in Canadian life at 10:03 am by ducky
When we were first living in Canada, we noticed that every time we crossed into the US, the border guards would ask us how we liked our car. The first time, we didn’t think much of it. It was a nice shiny relatively new car.
The second time, we thought it was a bit of a coincidence, but we do have a pretty neato car.
The third time, it was clear something was up, but we couldn’t figure out what (and we didn’t want to ask).
When we got British Columbia plates, they stopped asking us.
People suggested that maybe they thought our car might be stolen. This made no sense to us: why would we steal a California car, drive it through Oregon and Washington into Canada, and then take it back into the US?
Then someone pointed out that maybe we stole license plates in California, stole a car in Canada, and were driving the stolen car into the US. This makes slightly more sense, but wouldn’t it be easier to steal plates from BC or Washington? If I were going to steal a car from BC, I’d steal the car, go find a car at an airport rental lot that looked just like mine, swap the plates, and run south. I figure that by the time the owners noticed that their plates were different, I’d be long gone.
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