WHEN TWO HEARTS ARE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER, NO DISTANCE IS TOO FAR, NO TIME IS TOO LONG AND NO OTHER LOVE CAN BREAK THEM APART..

Flip Side of Easter

Well here we are on the flip side of the Easter Holiday. I hope the 'Bunny' was good to all and sundry but that you remembered the true meaning of the season. I was so grateful for my Church family this Easter and the wonderful services that different committees put on Friday and Sunday. Both services were quite inspirational.

I used this last weekend as a chance to file all the annoying piles floating around my bedroom and trying to stretch out the pain incurred by my Osteoarthritis. The next object I need to buy is a proper computer chair as the straight backed chair I am using is hard to sit in for long periods of time. Maybe I can purchase one by Christmas. :) It kind of makes one wonder, at my time of life, just why exactly the world isn't always fair and the answer is grimly apparent.... I think it is because humans are messy and have a tendency to crap on theirs and others lots and lives. (Boy would my grade 10 English teacher, Miss Cole, be wincing at me if she saw the structure of that sentence .....LOL)

The other thing; that is on my mind today, is how well Ruth's lovely garden is coming up in the back yard. The violets are all over the place, and Johnny-Jump-ups are just coming out. Savory, Parsley, Fever-few and a great number of other plants are making their presence known now. As always Ruth is as diligent as a mother hen with her chicks when it comes to sowing seeds, putting in plants, and nurturing them all. We people who live here are fortunate in being afforded the great privilege of being able to sit or picnic in such sumptuous surroundings. When we were in our teens and twenties who would have known that Ruth would still be a 'Flower Girl' these days?

Here is our Flower Girl herself!

Happy Easter

Happy Easter Everyone!

He Has Risen!

HE HAS RISEN!



TOMB
by Joyce Carr Stedelbauer

And when the crowd that came to see the crucifixion saw
that Jesus was dead they went home in deep sorrow.
As the body was taken away, the women from Galilee
followed and saw it carried into the TOMB. LUKE 23

A.W. Tozer said, “I leave possessing nothing but
faith,” He was speaking of his life, but he could also have
said such a statement upon seeing the empty TOMB of
Christ.

As Mary Magdalene ran to tell Peter:

They have taken the Lord’s body out of the TOMB and I
don’t know where they have laid him. Then I went in too,
and saw and believed that he had risen. John 20

I often wonder why people don't think that older folks can't enjoy music past their particular era. Of course I love the 'golden oldies' that I watched climb the charts but there are a lot of artists I like that do good work today. When I was young I often would like a song without particularly wanting to watch the singer in concert. Madonna is one of the cases in point. But what is strange in my dotage now I enjoy listening to and watching Lady Ga Ga perform. I think that I maybe can chalk that up to being on the other side of the woman's movement.






More Just Funny Comments

I love the Beatles, the Animals ...most of the British groups and singles; but there is a lot to be said about artists that have risen in the business since then like Lady Ga Ga, Bruno Mars, Komshens, Gyptian, Whitney Houston, Busy Signal, Nickelback, Bon Jovi, Foster the People, and Katherine Jenkins. I celebrate their wonderful talents as well! Of course I have very eclectic tastes in music so maybe that is why I have almost always been open to the new and innovative.

Is Government Bureaucracy There To Help You?

Does anyone know what civil servant really means? Is government bureaucracy there to help you? Do they do their job properly and professionally? Does it happen on either side of the Canadian or United States Border? Does it happen either federally or provincially or at the state level? I have a lot more questions. I will answer these at the end of my article.



I am going to write this posting from a place that is mine alone. I am going to write it in light of a specific problem. I will try to accurately describe my particular bureaucratic problem. I arrived in Canada in late spring of 2011 from the states. Canada is my homeland. I had been living in the United States of America since 1998. I had gone to live there with my husband who was a native Oklahoman and an American.

My Permanent Resident Card was issued in February 23, 2000. I had gotten my Oklahoma drivers license some time in 1999. When I moved to New York in 2010 my drivers license was issued in June 24, 2010. The reason I am making sure you know the dates of all my different cards is so you can follow what has not occurred since I have arrived in Canada.

Being in Canada again I need to get my Ontario driver's license so I can apply for my Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan card. So the first time I went I thought I was already to apply for the license; but they said I needed a 'line of linkage' between my maiden name and my present married name. So I went and spent some money on the long forgotten divorce papers of 3 marriages, waited for them to come by mail, and brought them back the next month.

Oh by the way, the licensing bureau that I need to go to is in Aurora which is a good 20 miles from Richmond Hill and my niece has taken me back and forth 6 times so far. They don't accept phone calls much; so if they are closed, you have to go there to find out or if there are a lot of kids there because of a PD day you don't know about until you are there. Well then they said that what they asked for didn't provide the 'right' 'line of linkage' so I sent for 3 marriage certificate copies to prove this 'line of linkage'. Two months later, once I got the marriage certificate copies in the mail, I went and stood at the cubical for over an hour and they came back and said that my right birth date was not on my New York license. I beg your pardon???? I have been here a total of 10 months and still have not gotten my Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan or License cards.

I have spent many afternoons on long distance, I can ill afford even with a telephone plan. I have tracked the whole fiasco back to my Permanent Resident Card in the states. Now the negligence is truly on the side of the US immigration bureaucrats as I showed my birth certificate to the gentleman at the counter. He wrote it on his documents in Oklahoma from that. Here is the rub. My birthday is December the 9th of 1947 which is written as Dec. 9, 1947 on my birth certificate card. Some how or another the 'Wazoo' who transcribed it wrote it down as 9/12/47 which in American meant I was supposedly born on Sept. 12, 1947. So this guy at the immigration building in Oklahoma is most probably going to cost me $450 so I can have everyone down the line satisfied that I am who I say I am and that I was born 3 months later on the 9th of December of 1947. What should have been on all the cards according to the American way is 12/9/47 or as in the case of the drivers licenses 12.9.47.

At this point so far I have spent over $60 on this 'proof'. The problem is folks, I was brought up in Canada were my birth date would be shown one of two ways. They are Dec. 9, 1947 or 9/12/47. The card the people at the Immigration place in Oklahoma were shown was clearly written as Dec. 9, 1947 so they should not have had my second way of writing it to blame.

The last part of this saga happened in the past month when I called upon the Member of Provincial Parliament for my region for some practical and sane help with the whole fiasco. They as yet have not phoned me back. So here I sit in my downstairs room, with Dylan the dog barking at me, totally frustrated with bureaucracy!

Now to answer those questions asked at the beginning of this missive. A civil servant is a public official who is a member of the civil service. Civil servants are therefore government workers; usually hired on the basis of competitive exams. My experience is that government bureaucracy is there to help you sometimes. It depends what kind of mood your civil servant is in that day. It also depends a lot on their personality as to whether they do their job properly and professionally too. It is all extremely unfathomable on both the Canadian and American sides of the border why they are allowed to run roughshod over the average pedestrian. This is equally true federally or provincially or at the state level. They dazzle you with their unique civil servant's language, and bury you in forms until you say 'uncle' and tearfully pay their unbelievably large fees. Oh, and I have no idea where I should file my income tax and no one has sent me any 'T 4's. By the way, just for your edification, none of the above should be the case. But it is, so isn't that a bureaucratic pickle?