Don't it always seem to go...

Just had an email from the immigration attorney's paralegal to the effect that the Permanent Residency applications for Dearest and me have been formally submitted. So the bacon's in the pan, and the scramble to muscle or scrounge supporting documentation resumes in earnest. We're at D-minus-140.

Knowing that the arrow has been loosed has me fighting off a little freakitude, which isn't surprising for someone whose brain waits for the sound of one of life's doors swinging closing behind her to turn around to see what's being lost. Whether what's being lost is actually of consequence is itself inconsequential, but that's not the point. There are any number of people I will miss, and some are guaranteed to drop off my radar purely from inertia as life moves ahead.

Yet one look at the headlines--liberal, conservative, or non-partisan--is enough to tell me that we're doing the right thing. Pathetic that I have to move to another country to find the values that I was raised to believe were the hallmark of democracy. More pathetic still that the target country is, nominally, a monarchy. I read The Toronto Star (week)daily, so I like to think I have some idea of what we're getting into, politically and otherwise. No paradise, certainly, and more certainly not lily-white. But nevertheless politically saner and more fiscally sound than what's below their southern border. And if Putin keeps that crypto-right-winger Harper busy playing Tom Clancy cat-and-mouse games in the arctic, at least that's fewer CPU cycles he has for trying to re-create the rest of Canada in Alberta's image.

But, at any rate, I can officially say it's Game On, after years of ranting and desultorily collecting paperwork. [Deep breath.]