Dual Citizenship!

I can't believe I forgot to tell you, but I'm Canadian!  

Thankfully, my WIG Lauren mentioned it in her blog, which reminded me that I had recently made a trip to the Canadian embassy in Seattle.  I think I mostly forgot on purpose because the whole process of printing a card with my picture on it as proof of Canadian citizenship is going to take about a year (serious backlog), and I was trying not to fixate on the awesomeness that will ensue when those 12 months are up (in an effort to make that time go by more quickly).

So, my mom is Canadian by birth, thanks to my Scottish grandparents who moved there en route to the US.  (So international, I know!)  Anyhow, my mom only lived there until she was two, but her birth certificate gives her citizenship, and after some recent inquiries on my part, I found out I'm in, too.  I just have to fill out this form (done), drop it at the embassy (done), and wait a year while the people in the one office in Canada who process all the applications from all over the world shove mine to the bottom of the pile and ignore it for about six months until they finally get around to processing it (doing).

But that's it!  I will totally have two passports.  This confuses me, by the way.  I read a pamphlet about it in the embassy, and they were mostly like, Make sure the dates of entry and exit are in the same passport for each country you go to!  Also, some countries don't want you if you have two passports.  But I don't want them either.  I just want access to all the former commonwealth countries, which I will have with my fancy new Canadian passport-- in 10- to 12-months time plus 2 to 4 weeks to process the passport application.  So there.

Dublin Invasion

Folks, I am back in the game-- the game being Europe.  After a brief two-month stint working as a file clerk in my mom's law office (thanks, guys, for always giving me a job) and a week of mayhem (ish) in the Twin Cities, I've broken a little higher than even and arrived in Dublin with enough money in account to live here very, very humbly for as long as they'll let me.  Luckily, the Good Doctor has a place, so I only have to pay a fraction of the rent I would if I was trying to get a place on my own.

So, at the moment, I'm chillin' to some Salt-N-Pepa while the GD works a 24-hour shift, planning some errands (mobile phone!  kleenex!), and generally plotting (legitimate) ways to stay in Ireland for longer than the three months allotted to me by the very kind, but very stringent Garda officer who let me in.  He looked up the GD in the system!  He took my picture!  Anyone know someone in Dublin who's hiring?

In the meantime, I'm just working on adjusting to the time difference.  I think I may have slept 11 hours last night?  To be fair, I didn't sleep at all on the red eye, and my four-hour nap yesterday afternoon just did not cut it.  I forced myself out of bed around 11 am (just five short hours after the GD had to get up for work), but I would have had no trouble sleeping another five or so.  I am going to use the same technique shortly, however, to force myself off this couch and out into the streets-- just for errands, don't worry.

Also, apparently I only blog when I'm in Europe?  Or maybe it's just that I only blog when I don't have a job, or don't have a job that takes up more than twelve hours a week.  Here's to more of that, at least as long as my credit card balance stays low and my bank account high.  Cheers.