Children, high stress job, 4 (5?) books in progress at once, and she still found time to review bomb me. Now in I'm down to just one straggler among my regular readers. So far, my to-do list doesn't allow me to resume writing for probably another month.
Made a simple phone call today to update Canada Pension Plan about my new address. Turns out, my social insurance number was flagged as dormant even though the morons have been depositing payments into my checking account for five years. Naturally, I now have to go somewhere "physical" to prove to them that I'm still alive and in Canada. They don't do it online. So a change of address becomes a two hour event, assuming there isn't a whole room packed with Canadian sheep in line in front of me.
Add to that a multi-week event changing my address with U.S. Social Security. Called a bureaucrat, proved who I was, only to be told that changing my address over the phone would lead to a termination of benefits. WTF? So I paid $100 roundtrip cab care to the U.S. Consulate only to be told they don't handle Social Security services in Calgary. Dumbass suggested I travel to the U.S. and visit a Social Security office in person. Having heard that I might lose my benefits, I started researching online, only to find out there is no clear answer. So I shelled out $300 for a phone consultation with a lawyer who was nice enough to tell me I didn't need her services. She referred me to an expert site and gave me a refund. The expert site didn't respond for over two weeks and several attempts, so I went back to the lawyer. She did a bunch of research to my questions and came up with "you're probably ok." A day later, the expert site responded with the same information. This dragged on for six weeks and $400 just to make an address change. I can't wait to file form 8022 with the IRS to give them my new address, too.
I won't even discuss the saga of my 8-month-old awesome Epson printer starting to blur the output. I'll save that saga until I know how it ends.
Nite all.
