green

You would certainly be welcome to move up here. There is a blog by an American who decided to move to Canada; it is called We Move to Canada and it makes for interesting reading. She describes everything she went through before moving up here and she also describes the differences between the two countries. Something I never knew is that Americans wear shoes inside their houses; up here we take 'em off as soon as we get inside our front doors. Hah! Go figure, eh. I am bare-foot right now.:heh:

Well, that's the point of both my and TommyO's posts. Such a scenario does not seem to be in the cards in this country. Our Christian social right is not well viewed by mainstream Canadians - indeed they are regarded as a fanatical fringe group to put it bluntly - and our Conservative party was finally able to achieve a minority government only by squelching the voices of those members who attempted to talk a Christian social conservative line. This uneasy minority victory was also helped along by the fact that the Liberals, a party which had been in power for many years, was now viewed as being careless and corrupt. As for our elections being corrupt, for both provincial and federal elections we rely on the printed ballot which must be marked by pencil. Collecting these ballots and counting them is done on something much like a pyramid system and all parties have their local members present during the voting day and at the count as well. It may in theory be possible to corrupt a poll or two but when you take into account that an urban poll takes in only a few streets you can see this business becomes complicated. Moreover, the total number of official ballots handed out must correspond with the number of names crossed off for every poll and all these documents must be saved against further review. It is true that a lot of trees get killed whenever Canadians have an election....:cry It should also be noted that the largest single group of Christians in Canada are Catholic. This is not only because many of us are French Canadian but also because many of our Christian immigrants come from Catholic countries. These are folks who come from Italy, Poland, the Phillipines, the Hispanic countries, Ireland, Portugal, Spain.....

I am pleased y'all like the saying. My friend who used to say this was none too happy with his family and I have often felt much the same way about my own family. My parents were very interesting people but they were not well equipped to be parents. They were smart and cultured and had lived through interesting (living in Europe during the war) times and I have profitted from that. They were also truly awful at understanding children and dealing with their emotional needs. I guess I am still dealing with that. This is why I made a point of never having children of my own.

That's brilliant! :heh: :heh: :heh:

Wow! This is so different from where I live. Up here the church is not welcome in the affairs of the state. We have no local Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells and their ilk. There have been a few folks who have tried to set themselves as religious and political forces but they have met with little success outside their own tiny bands of supporters. Indeed they are viewed with suspicion by most Canadians, certainly the ones who live in urban centres. For many years our Conservative party was only conservative on economic issues. It was socially liberal. When it was destroyed by an overwhelming victory in the late '80s by our centrist party, the Liberals - a party which falls considerably to the left of your Democrats - a small rurally-based party of Christian social conservatives formed in Alberta, our oil-rich province. This splinter party helped to keep the Liberals in power for many, many years since it served to diffuse those votes destined for the right. The two parties eventually married up, a cautious marriage of convenience mind you, and finally won a minority government. They lost the first time around because the Canadian voters were spooked by the noisy voices of the Christian social right. The second time out the party did manage a win, a minority win, but only because the Liberals had become complacent and corrupt and their leader managed to squelch the voices of the more extreme members - the ones that wanted to interfere with the Canadian legislation guaranteeing a woman's right to choose and same sex couples' rights to civil marriage.

Yep, being 5'6" was hell when I eleven years old but I would love to be 5'9" today.:eek:

Yah, a week is good but Lila's vacation is better! Thanks for the good wishes, eh.:eek:

This is an over-reaction, grrl. I hope that you realise that your contribution to the communal discussion is valuable. Indeed this is one of the miracles of the internet: it permits us to meet and greet and to swap information and ideas. I really do believe that the internet ranks up there with the Guttenberg press in terms of inventions that have changed humanity. The Guttenberg press finally brought about literacy: this was through turning the written word into something which was cheaper to produce and thus much more easily available. Literacy drifted along with this increased availability of written material. The internet really is extraordinary. The net provides a public forum and a place for the free and easy exchange of ideas for all of us who wish to engage. The internet is utterly democratic: everyone has a voice.

Ah yes, this is so true. Sometimes a grrl finds herself wondering where the logic is..........:welldoneclap:

Yep, I have given POA to one of my nieces in the event that my husband, a guy who is 9 years younger than me, should cash in his chips first. I have warned both of them that I do not want to be kept alive after my mind has long since left the nest. It is degrading and both morally and environmentally wrong. Better to spend the energy, knowledge and the cash assisting someone who actually can be rescued, eh.:rolleyes

My hunch is that the man thought that it was a dreadful indecency to keep his former wife, now an existence entirely lacking a brain, alive for all those many years. And he was right, I think, the poor woman should have been laid to rest years before she was and it should have been done with respect instead of under those zoo-like conditions of publicity. Would anyone of you wanted anything different for yourselves?

Congratulations on the fabulous weight loss. We are leaving for Mexico this Friday but only for a week.

Yup, our economy is intimately tied up with yours. We will also likely see a depressed housing market. This issue of the economy is one of the many reasons that I am anxious that the United States remains a strong, free, healthy, and democratic country. The world needs the U.S. and so does Canada.

It seems to me that certain Christian sects focus more strongly on sin and sinners and punishment than others. They ignore the more positive messages of compassion and joy which are also present in the Bible. This leads to self-righteousness and a bullying, intolerant attitude towards others. I also suspect that this constant emphasis on sin might also lead to a certain amount of self-loathing in many adherents. If this is true, and I suspect that it is, then it is kind of ironic for so many of us spend time in counselling trying to learn to like ourselves. Certainly people who are happy with themselves are more tolerant, more generous in their treatment of others. It is notable that some of the least tolerant statements have been publically made by fundamentalist Christians. (I know that we would encounter even more intolerant attitudes from fundamentalist Muslims. Life in the United States is infinitely easier than life in the Middle East. This is because there is the long and healthy tradition of the separation of church and state.) It seems odd to me that anyone can get worked up over the issue of civil marriage rights for same sex couples. If your version of God does exist, well then, these are folks who won't get into heaven. Why should that be any skin off your snout? It is their business, isn't it? At the very worst they will be down below where all us atheists are. I guess I will be seeing all my friends.:welldoneclap: As for this business of homosexuality being a lifestyle choice, that is crap! I have always had gay friends. They all knew that they were attracted to the 'wrong' sex long before they hit puberty. And I myself tried homosex once out of curiosity; it was the most boring sexual experience that I have ever had and taught me that I am irredeemably straight. The truth is that you are what you are. Loving people who want to form a union must be allowed that right.

Bubblebutt, I'm with you, girl. I am not fond of wildlife either. We don't get much of it where I live which is in the heart of a major city but my husband persists in dreaming about relocating to the country.:phanvan I have only recently conquered my fears enough to spend time with him up at his folk's cottage and we have been together for over 20 years. (I used to send him up on his own.) We do have cats, however, and sometimes in the winter the litter box gets kinda stinky; it can be a real hassle cleaning it outdoors in the winter when the weather is real nasty. I guess this might be considered a peeve of mine: that such lovely creatures can produce such stinkies.:cry lol

Kymcgill, your mother sounds like a toxic individual. Your story puts me in mind of a comment that a friend of my liked to say. He would say, 'you can choose your friends but your family is a curse sent to you from God.' DynamoMini, my parents dealt with my early puberty by shipping me off to boarding school. My brothers got to stay at home with the family. My mother also assumed that I would continue to grow until I was sixteen and being a thrifty woman bought all my school clothes way too large. Not only was I a menstruating giantess when I was in Grade 5, I also had the additional humiliation of swimming in these huge clothes which never did wear out. I was still wearing them when I got expelled from boarding school in my terminal year of high school for smoking marijuana. By then I had become, you see, an extremely bitter and rebellious kid. I think that it is wonderful that you make a point of welcoming other young girls into puberty with a celebratory rose. This is indeed a real kindness.

Up here in Canada we cannot get mortgage relief by applying this against our taxes but on the other hand any profit we might make when selling our principal property is clear profit. For those of us who happen to be living in the right place at the right time this can mean making a bunch o bucks. There are people who make money by buying run down houses, moving in, fixing them up, and then flipping them for a good profit. Because the profit is made on the principal dwelling the profit is exempt from tax. I have ridden the inflation train by buying houses and then trading up. Two of my homes have doubled in price, and one of them had come close to quadrupling. Now we are thinking of moving again. We will be trading up but we have no desire to engage in the hassles of home reno. I guess we are figuring that this will be the last one until it is time for us to be warehoused in nursing homes. We have been looking for a couple of years now but haven't found anything which would justify going through the aggravation and expense of moving. Green may well die in her current crib, eh.

I find it interesting that a number of my co-lapbanders also went through what I endured when I was a just a kiddy. I went through a horribly premature entry into maturity. I got my first period at the beginning of September exactly two months after I turned 10. I was already wearing a bra, size 32A, and I was plenty bitter about that. I was a tomboy and not too thrilled about growing up to be a grrl and to have this thrust upon me at such an early age was just plain creepy. To make matters even worse both my parents were small, slim, elegant brunettes and here I was, a great big lumbering blonde. I reached my full height when I was 11 years old. I was 5'6". I felt like Baby Huey. Ugh! I cannot say that I ever fully recovered from the horrors that my body presented to me when I was such a young kid. Remember that this all passed during the 1950s, eh. The betrayals of the body are always a torment for a young person, are they not?

Oy gewalt!!!!! Ugh, but that's nasty!

Mwahahaha! That is too funny.....:heh:

Yup, I'm inclined to agree. Especially with the observations concerning other people's kiddies. I never had any of my own because I am about as maternal as a snake but there are children whom I quite like. These would be the children whose parents have raised them to be polite and sensitive to others in addition to being intelligent and curious. Ducking out on the discipline thing because you love your children and you want to be their friend instead of being a parent is doing your children no favour in the long run. They grow up to be selfish maladusted egomaniacs and you, as a parent, never will get to retain best buddy status with your kiddies. This is only normal; children do require their emotional and intellectual privacy and should be growing up with and growing old with their own peers. I have lost a few friends due to their invasive parenting techniques. These would be those well-educated, affluent folks who start their families when they are close to 40 years old. They can do some pretty nasty stuff to their little over-indulged little treasures and then they insist on subjecting their mild mannered childless friends to these kidzillas. One of my friends, a woman who was deeply in denial about the behaviour of her daughter years after I found it evident that the kid was a brat, finally humped the horrid child off to a psychiatrist who was a specialist in ADD-type disorders. The expert interviewed the teen at some length, called in her mother and said, 'there's nothing wrong with your daughter. She is horribly spoiled is all and now she is probably too old for you to fix it.' I know this because the kidzilla's mum told me all about it. Of course I have seen lovely kids who are trapped in living situations which are intolerable because their guardians are doing a lousy job of it and that peeves me. In the case of my husband's nieces this is because their parents happen to be a pair of kidzillas who carelessly went on to have children of their own. Now the parents are snarled up in an interminable divorce brawl; the divorce has been going on for years.

Yep, I was torn between talking about the tax situation where I live or explaining why I am an atheist or talking about the fact that up here where I live same sex marriages are legal and the roof has fallen in yet! No one has been smote, eh.:faint:

We don't pay city taxes - just federal and provincial. The city gets the income from property taxes and that's it. And yep, there are a whole lot o threads goin' on.

Your Tina is starting to remind me of my mum, another Brit. My mum had a difficult time spending money on personal pleasures. This was in sharp contrast to her sister who spent her way through her share of their inheritance within a couple of decades and ended up on welfare. Of my two parents my father was more comfortable spending money; my mother became very chary of her money after my father died even though we kids were always after her to loosen up and enjoy herself a little more. In fact spending money was not enjoyable to my mother. When she died she left my brother and I quite a nice bunch of change. It was enough for me to take early retirement and it bought me this lapband and my now thinner body. I hope Tina gets back in time for her birthday and that you make her a terrifically happy woman on that day. I am sure you will.

My property taxes are just shy of 3 grand on a house valued at approximately $450,000. Property taxes can really vary for some reason on houses which cost about the same amount. We have been looking for a new house and I have disqualified a few because the taxes were over $4,000 - sometimes well over that figure!:phanvan We pay both provincial and federal sales taxes which together amount to 14%. Food is exempt from sales tax unless it comes in the form of a restaurant meal.:cry