accounting

 well... this morning could have gone better, mr smear was his usual uncooperative-in-the-morning self and our day began unpleasantly. although we did eventually have a (relatively) good talk, he was still unhappy for most of the walk to school. then i dropped him off and told him i was off to the doctor, and he very aggressively demanded that i tell him why which was kinda cute.

[jackals going mental, i've shushed them twice tonight already and i feel like they're not caring much]

i walked to the clinic and sat with our doctor. by the time i left, i had referrals for a sleep lab, a neurologist, a psychiatrist and blood tests, along with a prescription for alpha lipoic (supposedly for my pseudo-RLS hip issues, at least it's not psychotropic).

i came home, helped gd with some stuff (her back's giving her trouble), then got sent out to draw money for her. i was feeling a bit woozy by the time i got back up the stairs, so i hurriedly wolfed down an early breakfast and headed off to work.

i think my work day was pretty good, but it could've been better. i'm very excited by how we're performing as a company, though, the results of our weekend efforts were particularly exciting ^_^

i picked mr smear up from his therapist and he hung around the office - mostly pretty chilled - and i feel like the end of my day was alright. then we came home for dinner.

...

gd and i had had a discussion about his eating habits this morning, it's something i've been bothered by for a long time: he only eats symbolic amounts of the food he really needs. tonight i was proud of both of them; in spite of the drama (mr smear claims it was the most traumatic experience of his life) he ate three whole slices of zucchini.

...

we had a good chat with my mom and sister while mr smear got ready for bed. one of my cousins' kids is coming to tel aviv and we're making plans to meet up. and it was a little bit of a relief that it's his brother who was the jailbird and not him. we saw my nephew for a half a minute, and were shocked because he's not looking too good at the moment - his health situation's been terrible, he's been having a really hard time :(

after putting mr smear to bed, brushing my teeth and showering, i settled in for some phone calls to my canadian bank. it took a few tries, but eventually i got them to close the account and it looks like we're properly done with them!

it feels good to close the chapter on that.

i just realized how late it's gotten, i'm going to try going to bed now.

the summary post

for the impatient, there's a TL;DR at the end of this post.

OUR STORY
---------

just over a year and a half ago, when the south african government responded to covid with steps that could only accelerate its downward spiral, we made the decision that it was past time to get out. we've discussed making aliyah on many occasions, and we decided that that's the move that makes the most sense for our family - we want to be with family and with our friends, we want our son to grow up in a jewish environment with (generally) good social values and an attitude of participating and contributing, fixing and improving.

we approached the jewish agency, and began gd's aliyah application. after half a year of expensive document production and deliveries, we understood the following:

1. the canadian government makes the production of documents (police clearance, birth / marriage / etc. certificates) for non-resident canadians very complicated, and requires third parties with high fees for every interaction, each interaction also costing high fees. not to mention long processing times (even before covid), expensive courier fees on top of the aforementioned fees, and complicated rules regarding who can speak to whom and when deliveries and pickups are allowed.

2. courier companies - we've used quite a few different ones - are generally very bad at picking up and delivering documents. one would expect the opposite, but one would be wrong.

3. canada is not a signatory of the hague convention, so the only authorities able to authenticate canadian documents are the israeli authorities physically located in canada. consulates cannot communicate between themselves or make use of modern technology like fax machines, scans or emails for authentication purposes. nobody informed us of this, so we paid and waited to have the documents authenticated by a south african apostille and then the local high commission of canada, but neither of those authentications were considered acceptable.

towards the end of 2020, my israeli passport was renewed, but only for two years. i can only keep travelling as an israeli if i come home - this lines up with my intentions to return, but does put pressure on us to get through a process that we have no control over.

by the beginning of 2021, we miraculously* had all the documents in order and submitted them to the jewish agency. a few weeks later, they got back to us to tell us that we needed one more document which had never been mentioned before. apparently the reason they needed this document was to make sure that gd's name - which is the same on her birth certificate, her passport, our marriage certificate, our son's birth certificate - hadn't changed at any point.

* thanks to my mom, who heroically managed to retrieve original documents that the israeli consulate had posted by regular mail in spite of our instructions and that had been stuck in a container in pretoria that wasn't due to be unloaded for many months.

...

as we've been outside of canada for more than five years, and gd's a temporary resident here (and doesn't have proof of residence), she's not authorized to apply for her own documents. so we had to find a lawyer to submit an application, then wait a month or two to discover that the directeur de l'état civil representative we'd spoken to had given us the wrong form and forgotten to tell us that the lawyer needed to identify themselves in a specific way. so we reapplied, and eventually the certificate (a few months later) was returned to the lawyer (it can't be sent to anyone else) and we sent it off to the israeli consulate in montreal.

we then applied for a new copy of gd's police clearances, because the israeli authorities don't consider clearance older than six months to be valid even if you haven't returned to the country it's issued by.

(i haven't been keeping track of all the costs, i'm honestly scared to go back and put it all together. the authorities involved have made certain that we've had to tighten our belts to make aliyah. suffice it to say that every single interaction we've had with a canadian authority or the israeli consulate in montreal has cost us a lot of money, the last round alone costing us thousands of dollars US)

finally, after half a year of waiting impatiently and trying to plan to move on with our lives, our two canadian documents were authenticated by the consulate in montreal and we scheduled a pickup.

did you know that consulates don't operate after 12 noon? did you know that couriers can't guarantee pickups before 2pm? we didn't.

so after a report of a failed pickup, we made alternate arrangements. unfortunately, before the consulate received my email informing them of those arrangements, fedex picked up the document (outside of that 12 noon window, it should be noted).

and promptly lost it.

TL;DR
-----

so now we've been set back by half a year on top of the year and half that this ridiculous sham has been dragging on, and we're totally over it. we're going to try a different approach. we're now winding up our south african affairs, and we're going to restart the process from israel. we *might* need to swing by canada to sort out the documents, that's not clear at the moment. but what is clear is that wherever we land up, we're outta here, before 2021 is out.

next year in tel aviv.

bell bill bull

after months being hounded by collection agencies on behalf of bell for a clearly fictitious bill that i disputed (it was for a period i'd already disconnected my service and left the country), i finally got through to the right people (bell employees can't communicate by email or make phone calls out, apparently). after a breakdown of the final months and my payments, we finally established that bell bills are actually for the two months prior, meaning that a bill for march is actually the bill for january. it suddenly struck me that they'd been doing that since my first bill, which means that although i only signed up with bell in november 2012 my first bill in december was actually for the month of september. a time when i didn't receive any service from them.

it took the supervisor, who's clearly been working there for years, a few moments to process this information. i explained to him that as a human being, he had two choices: the first was to cancel the debt and call it a day, the second was to leave it as is and let me take all this information before a judge if and when we return to canada.

to his credit, he acknowledged the absurdity of the situation and cancelled the amount. this story has only cost me a few dollars in calling costs, but it's cost me a whole lot in hours that i don't have and in stress i have way too much of.

i knew all about hydro quebec doing crazy shit to steal customers' money, but this just blew my mind. and apparently videotron's similar.

wow, canada, you guys put up with a lot of shit.