The Gaming Den

The last time I witnessed a hit and run I tried to ram the offender with my car to keep him from escaping. I did stick around to give the police his license plate number, I just wish I didn't have shit reflexes.

Also personal: I'm officially the person in my circle of friends who everyone comes to when they want someone to be an asshole to somebody on the internet. I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed.

Hey, nothing wrong with having an assured role in life.

Back a year-and-a-half ago (very early November 9 to be precise), my wife decided she wanted to move to Canada. I was pretty hesitant for a while, but ultimately came to agree with her. Over the last year or so, we've been taking steps to get our permanent residency set up in Canada, and for her to get a teaching job lined up. Well, it's finally happening!

When: It looks like we're targeting moving on August 18. There are a few things we have to get pinned down, but that's the current plan.

Where: We'll be moving up to a reservation in rural Ontario. It's a small community that makes its money from its tourism fishing industry. It's a small enough place that they don't have a store, so we'll have to drive (quite!) a ways to do any shopping. Still, they have an air strip for easier travel or having things shipped. Also, despite not having a store, they have an ice arena, because Canada. They also have a pretty new water treatment plant, which will be nice. One of the other reservations we looked at has to have water shipped in (think those big water coolers you see in offices).

My wife's job: She has been teaching for 13 or 14 years, but got sick of doing it in Michigan (see Betsy Devos and Michigan's right to work act). In Canada, people want to teach to the point where new teachers often have to start substitute teaching. She looked into the Teach for Canada program, and wanted to teach at a reservation for a while. It's the type of adventure she wanted to go on, that will only get harder the more settled we get. She will be teaching in a school of only 50 kids, and will be the 1st through 4th grade teacher.

My job: I've been doing web development for a freight company. I was originally planning to do this same job remotely, but it's gotten more difficult, and I just found out last week I'll have to start my own LLC to contract myself out across the border, and... I just don't feel like learning all of that. Once we get settled in, there, I'll look for a job at a Canadian company that is open to remote employment (which I hear is common).

Our kids: My two girls are 9 and 6. The older daughter is much more apprehensive about the move and about leaving her friends. The younger one seems less upset about it, and keeps asking when we're moving. The two of them are definitely being affected by stress, and I'm trying to be mindful of that when I can be. We were looking at the curriculum of the school, and part of it includes dressing a moose and gutting a fish (life skills, up there!). My older daughter is pretty squicked out by the idea, but the younger one is morbidly curious.

Our cats: The cats can come, and they don't have to be quarantined! It turns out there isn't so much of a hassle as we expected. We'll probably have to leave our expensive, one-year-old mattress behind, because apparently that's a pain to move. At least our family will be intact!

The house: That thing sold super fast. We certainly picked a good time to sell our house and rent. Within 30 hours of listing, we had eleven showings and five offers. The best one came in notably above our asking price. We'll be staying at a furnished place right across from the school, and the rent is stupidly cheap. Also, I'll have better internet in the middle of the woods than I have in the city, here, because Canada. Yay subsidized infrastructure!

All the incidentals: My wife is currently in Canada training. I have to pick her up this weekend. We each drive old Hondas, and we're going to have to find a truck of SUV with four-wheel drive. The current plan is to buy one across the border so we don't have to import it when we move. Since the place we're buying is furnished, we'll be selling a lot of our old, used furniture right before we go. We're only keeping the stuff we care about (like the table we made last year, and the chairs from her great grandmother). My parents offered to come up and help us move, so we're hoping to get all of our stuff up that way. We still have a lot of annoying things to do, like get new cell phones and set up a bank account. Still, this is all moving quite quickly!

Congrats eh!

Yay on your escape!

So we really can blame Canada for stealing our quality teachers....

Josh_Kablack wrote:So we really can blame Canada for stealing our quality teachers....

Pretty much. She semi-retired from teaching in 2014. She took a year off to write after she got a book published, then went to work at a library as the youth services director for a few years. She described it as "her favorite aspects of teaching without all the parts she hates".

So, now she has a chance to get back into it without half the country actively working against her.

I have a cousin (also from Michigan) who got into teaching late in life because she thought it would be a good public service. She quit a few years in and went to Ford because she could make twice as much money for 2/3 the work. The burnout is real, and now DeVos has spread her tentacles to the other 49 states.

So, what about the innerwebs up there?

Sure you may have a better quality of life up in Canada, but you know what you won't have? Freedom*.


*Freedoms you may miss include, but are not limited to, the following: the freedom to get gunned down by lunatics, the freedom to pay almost no taxes if you're wealthy, and the freedom to hunt homeless people for sport

Stahlseele wrote:So, what about the innerwebs up there?

better than I have in the city, here. I’m going from cable to fiber. Yay socialized infrastructure!

Ah, so a straight upgrade then! Nice!

Hey cools.

*googles moose jokes*

The brain drain is real.

My late step-dad's mother is racist against muffins.

I don't like muffins either.

No. No. She loves muffins. But my mom made her carrot muffins and she wouldn't eat one "because they were too dark." This is the same woman who famously declared that she was afraid to get on an airplane in Spain because there were a bunch of Spanish-speaking people at the terminal with us, waiting to board.

The airport should really do something about that.

Due to my brother's prompting I've been trying to ballpark the price of a decent gaming pc build for him and man, is the gpu and ram scene depressing. It's been 5 years since I bought my videocard and you still have to pay ~$150 to get something I'd agree is a strict upgrade. Saddest part is that back in those decadent times people were kvetching that companies were really only just lowering the prices and nothing was going on that we should be excited about. Hell, I really only made the purchase because I had a rebate that got the price down to under $200.

I hear GPU prices are coming down, since the bitcoin miners are moving on from them? Iunno about the technical stuff, I wasn't paying that much attention.

Yes, that and the fact that nVidia has the 2080 series just around the corner will hopefully drive the prices down quite a bit, as should the advent of GDDR6 at some point, but i am not very hopefull.
I had to buy a replacement card at the height of the mining thing . . almost 1000 bucks for a fucking graphics card . . uugh <.<

Also, RAM prices could and should fall sometime soon. And the SSD prices ARE actually going down for once!

Gaming grade PC hardware is just straight up painfully expensive these days. It sucks. On the upside, hardware *needs* haven't increased anywhere near as much as they could have - since most games these days are multi-releases with the consoles, as long as you end up with hardware as good as a PS4/XBone, you've got the horsepower to run *most* games reasonably well. Which still costs 3 times as much as one of said consoles. *sigh*

I HATE SUMMER, I HATE BUGS, I HATE WINDOW AIR CONDITIONERS, I HATE ENTOMOPHOBIA, AND I HATE SUMMER!

Goddamn moths have fucking invaded my room like it's fucking Poland or something. There were like, sixty or seventy of those fuckers, swarming over shit like disgusting Commies. Ick. Now I have to sleep in the living room couch downstairs, which was not designed for sleeping. Or comfort. Jesus fuck, and now there's a battalion of ladybugs crawling on my window sill! MY ROOM IS NOT A FUCKING GARDEN! This has been going on since fucking April! God fucking Jesus fucking shit fuck shit in all the ways that fuck I HATE MY LIFE!

Thanks for finally telling me what my fear is.

Shrapnel wrote:I HATE SUMMER, I HATE BUGS, I HATE WINDOW AIR CONDITIONERS, I HATE ENTOMOPHOBIA, AND I HATE SUMMER!

Goddamn moths have fucking invaded my room like it's fucking Poland or something. There were like, sixty or seventy of those fuckers, swarming over shit like disgusting Commies. Ick. Now I have to sleep in the living room couch downstairs, which was not designed for sleeping. Or comfort. Jesus fuck, and now there's a battalion of ladybugs crawling on my window sill! MY ROOM IS NOT A FUCKING GARDEN! This has been going on since fucking April! God fucking Jesus fucking shit fuck shit in all the ways that fuck I HATE MY LIFE!

Buy window nets?