And while I'm blogging again and complaining

Let me share some details about the delights of having a girlfriend and child from another country.

The first delight is called "if we don't find childcare i can't start school; if I can't start school, I can't move in." July and August (looks like that was the last time I blogged anything) were spent frantically searching for childcare using craigslist.org. Most people were out of our range. The ones who were would commit to the hours, then back out. there was a young woman named Amy, who agreed to our rates, then backed out because she got a better offer, then began writing melissa emails as she hadn't answered our ad and discussed rates. these emails seemed, according to melissa, to have been written by a completely different person. The language was very different from Amy's first communications: I think the word Mel used to describe the writing in the second round of emails was "infantile". In other words, Amy was a wack-job. the we had this woman from my neighborhood call up. Not only was she nearby, she was from Canada (Winnipeg), she had great rates, and with a 4-month old, she was always home. After a week of back-and-forth, she also decided to back out. It was too much responsibility: the next day, i saw a brand new childcare ad posted on craigslist from our friend from Winnipeg.

So that's the first delight. The second delight has been the border, which refuses to let Melissa and Sam into the country. Seems UPenn sent her the wrong visa information. This has turned into "penn sent the worng visa information, but the proper visa information doesn't cover us either. Oh and Penn isn't returning phone calls from Montreal's Immigration Authority (or whatever they call it up there.)

I did a little bit of research: Penn as everyone knows is an ivy league institution. the Medical School, where Melissa will be attending, costs about $57,000 per year. let's pretend that melissa will go year round 9summer grad work and all that): that's about $1100 a week. And she's missed two weeks of school because of this. And Penn's not returning phone calls?

So there are two delights for you.
This isn't to say that it's not all worth it. I love my girlie. I love Mr. Sammy. We deliberately had him in Canada so he wouldn't have to absorb the costs of George Bush's stupid war and his stupid tax cuts. We wanted him to have health care forever. We made our decisions, and they were the right decisions. Also, that $57K per year degree is going to go a long way toward Sam living a comfortable life (god knows my earnings, see the previous post, can barely pay for a cup of Judy Rodin's cold urine). But the levels of bullshit the two of us are putting up with are getting intolerable.