Pauley

I remember having to spell something to someone on the phone and I said Zed and he didn't understand and I was like oh yeah Zee, shaking my head.

I remember a very British-sounding play-by-play guy saying "zed" during an American broadcast of a World Cup soccer game last summer, and his American color commentator ribbing him for it. "Zed? What's that? Did you mean 'Zee'?"

My wife generally likes to mock the whole pronunciation thing by referring to the E-ZPass module on my windshield as an "E-Zed-Pass".

(Oh, hey, did ya miss me?)

Also, I will never get used to calling a highway a freeway. It sounds so wrong! Or the washroom a restroom.

I still think it's an "expressway."

hehe My husband gets up at 3am to go to the gym and then to work. I myself get up because the alarmclock wakes me say my goodbyes and back to bed I go. I do not react well with little sleep however if i sleep past 8am I end up with a headache Too much sleep!

I can't beat this myself, but I know someone who can...

Over the last year I've become good friends with the morning/noon meteorologist from one of the local TV stations. In order to be in to work in time to prepare his forecasts and graphics for the morning shows starting at 5 AM, he has to be out of bed at 2 AM, and is back in bed again around 8-ish at night.

I know this is important to me (and I didn't see it... maybe it's here-heh), so I thought I'd contribute:

VOTING FOR CANADIANS LIVING OUTSIDE OF CANADA

I tried a sample questionnaire, filling it out as my wife would. Most folks here would likely be disqualified from voting for the same reason she is:

To qualify to vote, you must intend to return to Canada to resume residence in the future.

Reference: Paragraph 222(1)( c ), Canada Elections Act

Voting abroad procedures are in place to allow Canadian residents to be able to vote while away on business or vacation. People who have immigrated outside of Canada typically don't intend to return, and are thus deemed ineligible to vote in Canadian elections.

so I have been trying to find a pair of swim trunks for the hubster.. I looked at Walamrt and couldn't find any and was told they went on clearance.. umm, it is the middle of August in Los Angles, I am sure people still want to buy swimwear ..

Oh, no, you must be mistaken. August is Back to School time. Summer shopping was over back in July.

Don't blink; you'll miss Halloween costume and candy shopping. That's all on clearance by mid September, and Christmas shopping starts.

I need to write mine up and send it out today/tonight; apologies for the delay. Hopefully it gets there before August ends...

Notaries only certify the signature on the document & have nothing to do with the content.

My understanding is that what notaries can and cannot do depends on the state's laws. Some states (Pennsylvania is one, I believe) allow their notaries public to certify true copies of original documents. New York, I know, does not.

Wow Pauley that's great timing, have fun.

Actually, there wasn't really that much timing involved. You have to request them (usually online) for specific dates and name the two specific people to attend, and they call anytime from the day after your request to the morning of the taping and ask you to answer a trivia question about the show (I had to tell them that frequent Late Show neighbor Rupert Gee was the owner of the Hello Deli) to be issued tickets. I had specifically requested tickets for next Wednesday; we aren't getting in to Manhattan in time to attend tapings Tuesday night, and there weren't any scheduled later in the week.

Sweet! I just got a phone call and answered the trivia quiz to win tickets to The Late Show with David Letterman next week when we're in New York City!

tonight we are grilling burgers and corn on the cob...

No burgers, but we boiled corn on the cob last night. Yvonne put a chili lime rub on hers, and I sprinkled some of the Red Robin seasoning you can get at their restaurants on mine... Mmm, mmm, good.

New York State took Yvonne's Ontario Class G2 license and issued her a full-privileged Class D license.

I LIKE the way you think.

Ditto. *high-fives*

I'm not on twitter but we have a VJ Canada facebook group if you're a facebooker! Visa journey Canada

Joined!! Will post my intro later on, either tonight or this weekend.

Followed! I'm @bluejacketsbabe

Oh, so I was wondering (sorry if this has been talked about before) if anyone who is in the States celebrates Canadian Thanksgiving? My husband and I did last year and we had a lot of fun! We've actually decided to make it an annual thing and we invite our friends over and have our own Thanksgiving dinner! It's nice because Kyle gets to celebrate the holiday when he would at home (although it's not necessarily on actual Thanksgiving day, usually on the weekend since we don't have the time off on Monday) and we get to celebrate Thanksgiving with one of the biggest things to be thankful for - our friends! Just wanted to know if anyone else did something like this or any other Canadian holidays or traditions after moving here.

Followed!! I'm "pauley" on Twitter and on Facebook.

We don't have a firmly established tradition on Thanksgiving yet, but in the past few years we've celebrated both by way of joining our respective families on the appropriate dates - we spent Canadian Thanksgiving with Yvonne's family and American Thanksgiving with mine.

But to the rest of you attendees.....

I leave that decision to the rest of you what you want to do wth your photos of the meetup here on VJ...

Lol..Just cut and crop us (Ant+D+BabyA) out..

And we'll be fine there....

You made it easy to do by all standing to the left of the photo, so it's not difficult to cut you guys off the side.

There's been enough stuff going on that I haven't had a chance to do much processing on pictures from that weekend. They're not lost, though, I do have them and will get them up as soon as I can.

Pauley I am so happy you also followed up with a long story haha.

Ours was too weird to just pass off as "we met online" or "we were introduced by friends."

Yvonne and I can credit (or blame? ) several people and organizations for guiding us together:

• My instrumental music director in high school my senior year, Miss Mayer
  
• Toronto band Moxy Früvous
  
• Our friend Victoria, and
  
• Pottery Barn
  

Miss Mayer had been a huge fan of Moxy Früvous nearly since they got started, and had been to many of their shows in Buffalo. She let me borrow her copies of their CDs, which I copied to tape (it was '97, MP3s were only just starting to appear, and I didn't have a computer yet anyway) and listened to all the time in college. Eventually, as I started getting spending money, I bought up my own copies of the CDs, and bought every one that came out after that, up until their (permanent?) hiatus began in September 2000.

Früvous fans (we called ourselves Früheads) had, since 1998, been gathering each February at the annual FrüCon in Toronto. Through the Frühead.com website that had started a year or two prior, I started chatting with a bunch of other fans and ultimately decided to go, catching a ride with some other friends for the weekend to go to Toronto, and meeting a lot of people I'd chatted with online on FHDC in person.

It'd be understandable if you thought that's where I met Yvonne, but you'd be mistaken -- we're not there yet.

Victoria is one of the many friends I met through FHDC and FrüCon, and she lived and went to high school in Toronto. She's quite the artiste, and likes drawing comics. For a while, she and a friend drew a web comic, "The Stairwell," featuring herself and a number of her friends at school, who all hung out in the stairwell at one end of the building between classes. As a place to allow them all to chat online, as well as interact with fans, Victoria created a message board for the comic, and I signed up there and chatted with and played games with some of the friends I'd already made through FHDC, plus a few other names I hadn't seen before. Among the crew that posted pretty regularly was Yvonne. I knew of her existence on the board, but outside of the conversation topics, we didn't really interact all that much.

Eventually, the comic waned, but the message board kept going for a little while longer. As the board started to fade, one night Yvonne happened to sign on to FHDC one night while only 3 or 4 of us were online, and we all started chatting. As the conversation went on, she posted a few pics (I had pictures on my profile there already), and I remember thinking to myself, "wow, she's really cute... not that I'd ever have a chance of dating anyone like that...". Later on, we started chatting on MSN Messenger (as it was still called at the time), and on to AIM later.

Over the next two years or so, we grew pretty close, and joked on occasion that we should meet, but never really did much about it. In May of 2005, she was shopping for new sheets for her bed, and had her eyes on a nice set from Pottery Barn, but ran into a conundrum -- PB in Canada did not carry the sheets in stores or online, and PB Online in the US wouldn't ship to a Canadian address. I don't remember whose idea it was, but between us we cooked up a plan -- she'd order the sheets and have them shipped to me, and she'd come down over Memorial Day weekend to get them, and we'd use it as an excuse to meet in person.

Over that weekend, we instantly hit it off, and had an awesome time. I figured it'd either be a one-off weekend, or at best it'd be a month or two before I'd see her again, but not long after she got back to Toronto and back on IM, we started making plans for her to come back in two weeks for another weekend. We decided at the end of that second weekend that we should call it official and say we're dating, and the rest is a cliché.

Kathryn, how wonderful you found him!! I had tears in my eyes when i read how Smokey reacted and purred away to you!! That kitty sure sounds happy now, and he definately chose you as his owner. I"m glad he is ok and that you are not giving him back to that women who started all this to begin with!

I've seen a joke on tshirts/notepads/placques/whatevers that "Dogs have owners, cats have staff." Maybe Smokey was just conducting interviews for personal assistants, and Kathryn ultimately got the job!

Slightly off topic, but is there also a thread for 'what are you watching?' i.e. tv/movies? Cause I think that'd be fun.

Not that I'm aware of; I don't think you've started it yet.

http://www.stviateurbagel.com

FTW and omg you can order them hubby promised me sometime this year we can order them..i'm almost drooling just thinking of them...sigh

That's definitely the place -- my wife took me there the first time we went to Montreal. She found a place in Toronto that does Montreal-style bagels, but we haven't found anyplace in Rochester yet that does it. Probably they all think that there's no topping the New York bagel. *harumph*

Barring the technicality that Canada is not a foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignity , the US is only able to command obedience to its laws within its own boundaries. The oath as stated has no legality or recognition in Canada nor does it impact Canadian citizenship.

Technically, Canada, as a nation, is a sovereign state, and thus is covered by the US oath. As repeatedly stated above, though, Canada doesn't give a $#%& what you say in a spoken oath -- as long as you haven't filled out the Canadian paperwork to renounce, you're still a Canadian citizen.

Activating the Visa and returning to Canada for a few mths might be an option. Not sure if US immigration looks down upon that

This is pretty much what my wife did -- we were approved March 18th, got the visa the following Monday. She came down to WNY from Toronto on April 3rd, returned to Toronto April 7th, and didn't actually permanently move until May 8th. All the dates on her paperwork (visa stamp, green card, health insurance, etc) say April 3, though she was still a resident of Canada for another full month.

Last winter I "read" (by way of audiobook/podcasting) a techno-thriller called 7th Son: Descent. The first two sentences of the prologue are quite the hook:

The president of the United States is dead.

He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy.

In the weeks afterward, seven seemingly-random-at-first men are bought together in an underground bunker to discover that they all look very much alike. They then learn that they're more than just long-lost brothers -- they're clones, and the original man they were cloned from appears to be the mastermind behind the assassination.

The author originally wrote 7th Son as a nearly-thousand-page thriller novel, then learned in dealing with publishers that no one reads thousand-page thrillers. He split it into three parts, and started publishing them as "podcast fiction" - a weekly episodic audio download where he reads a few chapters to you, then you wait until the next week for the continuation. Last year, the first book of the three, Descent, was published in paperback. It's a reeeeeally fun read if you're into near-sci-fi stories like this.

ooo. I keep hearing such great things about that series. I think I might pick it up after I'm done with what I'm reading now.

As have I... I listen to a lot of TWiT podcasts, and Leo Laporte keeps talking very favorably about them when bringing up suggestions for Audible.com purchases. I hear a movie of the first one, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," is being cast now.

Okay I sent mine out just now! It actually wasn't so hard to find a postcard of my home, I managed to get lucky.

Since it's almost August anyway, I'll just come out and say I got Ant! So Ant...your card is on its way!

You were already outed (as everyone was) a page ago.

Hey everyone, in case you're curious. Here's July's exchange list. Start hounding those ppl if you don't get a card LOL

Sender .............. Receiver

1.* Ant+D+BabyA.....ashenflowers

2.* ashenflowers.....Chickaflick

3.* Canadiandggal.....Marilyn

4.* CdnMN......Colleens

5.* Chickaflick.....coraliesolms

6.* Christi and Ian.....lilacvioletiris

7.* Colleens.....sdw

8.* coraliesolms.....Pauley

9.* JLovesA.....Ant+D+BabyA

10.* Kathryn41.....Canadiandggal

11.* kizza.....Karthryn41

12.* lilacvioletiris.....OBX

13.* Marilyn.....SupportGeek

14.* OBX.....CdnMN

15.* Pauley.....Christi and Ian

16.* sdw.....JLovesA

17.* SupportGeek.....kizza

Mine should have gone out last weekend; still keeping an eye out for my incoming one...