Roomy

Our good friend Erin is renting our house back home. The roommate who signed on with her is moving out and Erin is looking for someone nice to move in and share the costs. Ideally female, clean and quiet-ish. Garrison Woods is obviously a really nice area and very central to Calgary: do you know anyone? If you do, please email me and I will put you in touch with Erin (if, in fact, you don't know her already!)...

And us? We've had a peek at what would be involved in buying a house here. You see, buying is really expensive here, but so too is renting. In fact, one might argue that renting is ridiculously expensive (rather than just really expensive) because you'll never see any of the money again. Oh, it gives me a headache. So, too, does the International Tax Office of the CRA. We're still waiting on a response to questions we asked them in a letter from October last year... We've followed up with 4 more letters but have heard nothing from them. Very frustrating. More of the finer points of moving country for you? Getting a British driver's license is not straight-forward. It seems they'll only exchange a Canadian license for a British one with a limitation of automatic transmission vehicles. We'll probably need to re-test (cripes, that sounds fun after 15 years of driving) to get permission to drive standard transmission vehicles. We're going to appeal. There's some pretty strong logic on our side but I fear bureaucracy will prevail and I will be doddling around Reading with a Driving Instructor, brushing up for a test to drive a vehicle that we have been driving safely for 7 months already.

The nitty-gritty, lingering issues of international relocation can sometimes get you down. But then we're going to London on Sunday to see Stella, Em, Armando and Oma. We'll go for a walk around Tower Bridge and it will all seem pretty damn cool...