So I just checked and my SSN should arrive within 2-3 weeks of landing in the US.
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I have 30 days to get my driver’s licence in Washington State.
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I need either an SSN or ‘proof of ID’ – a multi-stage, minimum 2 week process – which involves presenting proof of address twice and waiting for a form to arrive in the mail.
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I’m not sure that it’s actually possible for me to get a driver’s licence in Washington State before I’m not meant to use the UK one anymore. Anyone got any great ideas?
I’ve worked two superbusy nightshifts – and last night was just insane. Nothing simple, no straightforward patients, not a single bloody easy thing all night.
I was (and am) wrecked.
Getting up off the sofa for night-three is proving to be quite challenging. Despite spending some time fuzzling and being nuzzled by next-door’s cat.
So, my friends who are moving to the US this coming week went from a standing start to packing their stuff into a container today, in 3 weeks flat. Although they have been living in, rather than renovating, their house, which makes that side a little easier. However, in contrast, and meaning they definitely win the difficulty challenge, they’ve got 2 kids and 2 dogs. And one of them (the adults, not the kids, nor the dogs) works from home.
In contrast, our 8-9 week moving schedule seems positively lackadaisical. Here we are swanning about our house touching up paint here, filling render there, and they’ve manically packed and are moving now. It doesn’t really feel that way.
I feel the pressure mounting, day on day, not helped by my rota which consists entirely of endless night shifts. We also need to visit my mum properly and have promised to go down and help her take down her exhibition:
[All proceeds from the art sale to the Red Cross Nepal Appeal, let me know if you want to see price list or photos]
We went down for a couple of hours yesterday – and then discovered she’s been invited to keep the exhibition up an extra week – and become the artist in residence for a month – pretty damn cool :)
Anyhow, so that’s next weekend gone.
At some point, after the house is on the market, it’d be really rather nice to see my sister and her kids too.
Between all these competing time-sucks the whole thing feels damn tight.
Jobs we still need to do:
– Paint the entryway
– Paint the back wall (just touching it up, but there’s a lot of touching up)
– Remove the doors and get them dipped-and-stripped
(Bye bye last hardboard-covering-panel…
)
– Touch up some paint in the kitchen
– Finish the deck and the garden path
– Weed the garden and chuck down 100s of litres of bark chip
– Paint the bathroom doorframe
…
And I think that’s it…
I am beginning to think we might just miss our deadline, but we’ll see. It doesn’t help that I’m on a night shift in the middle of this week which takes out two entire days for one frigging shift. And on nights all this weekend. But what can y’do.
Also, what doesn’t help is waiting patiently for the visa interview appointment. I know, I know, it’s only just over a week and a half since the doctors said ‘okay’, but I want to know godsdamnit, so we can at least plan/schedule one-damn-thing.
Also, slightly anxiety inducing is that I have to take a driver’s test within a month of getting to the US because Washington state only honours my UK driver’s licence for one month after we get there. Gah.
There are over 2,500 “crisis pregnancy centers,” or CPC’s, in the United States. These centers receive tens of millions of dollars from the federal government, and more money from 23 state governments, to provide “crisis pregnancy counseling” to people with unintended pregnancies. Several states require pregnant people to receive counseling at one of these centers before they can get an abortion. Christian volunteers generally make up the entire staff at these centers (they must legally refer to themselves as “centers,” rather than “clinics,” because usually none of the staff members are trained in medicine).
Despite not being genuine reproductive health clinics, these centers generally set up shop right next to real reproductive health clinics, make visitors fill out “intake paperwork,” and have their volunteers wear white lab coats and carry clipboards in the hope that pregnant people will confuse their center for a real clinic that gives accurate information about reproductive health. They then proselytize anti-abortion rhetoric, using phrases like “your baby,” “your preborn child,” and “you’re already a mother now”; framing the pregnancy in terms of the pregnant person’s “relationship with Jesus”; and reciting objectively false medical information about abortion and birth control, including:
Along with the false claims above, CPC’s have frequently been caught giving inaccurate readings of ultrasound images, such as when one recently told a pregnant woman that her IUD was a baby, because no one on site is actually trained in reading ultrasound images. Given all this information about crisis pregnancy centers, the federal government should immediately cut off funding to these centers for practicing medicine without a license, impersonating real medical clinics, dispersing false medical information under the guise of being a licensed medical clinic, and proselytizing Christianity, making the federal and state funding of these centers a violation of the separation of church and state. Women who have been deceived by these false clinics are the real #womenbetrayed.
In case you missed it, on Sunday, Donald Trump finally released his immigration policy. In it, he proposes a repeal of a key part of the 14th Amendment: the Citizenship Clause, that allows anyone born here to claim citizenship. Other candidates are now following suit — but that’s actually great news for Democrats in 2016.
It’s like some kind of supervillain wannabe contest, at this point.
So, I managed to make some extra work for myself. After living with our lovely counters for about 4 and a half years, I put down the – I thought clean and dry – blender top and then discovered it wasn’t. It’d left two water stains on the counters.
So – years ago I bought a TV capture box. A relatively nice one. A Miglia Evolution TV. All brushed aluminium and shiny. They went bust, and so software support was discontinued with OS X 10.4.
…which means that for all its shiny shiny, it doesn’t work. At all. Current versions of OS X don’t know how to talk to it and won’t let you even install the drivers.
Which is upsetting.
So I bought a cheap USB capture device from t’internet.
Because, y’see, back in days of yore when this was all fields, and so on, there was an actual incompatibility between videos sold in the US and those sold in the UK. UK VHS videos were PAL – 625 glorious interlaced lines at 25 frames per second, and US ones were a somewhat lower res 525 lines, but a slightly faster frame rate of 30 frames per second.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, I largely don’t give a monkeys. At this point in history nearly all video cassettes have been consigned to landfill or plastic recycling. However, I’ve four cassettes – and actually a fifth containing a film that shows no signs of coming out on DVD – that I’d like to capture.
So I found a spare old tape to test it with and after freeing the motors off a little cerchunky-whirry:
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Then I had to find the video cables for it. Because it uses SCART, which is a wildly convenient standard if you’ve got a SCART cable going into another SCART device. Less so if not. But, today I located (in the bucket of wires) my SCART to S-Video adaptor cable.
Hurrah!
Only not.
Because I can’t get the tracking good enough for the crappy cheap USB capture stick. If I plug the video into the telly it’s VHSarrific. A bit wobbly, in the way that VHS sometimes was, but not unwatchably so. And fuzzy, in the way that I’d forgotten how bad VHS was. But otherwise… it works.
Plug it in to the capture card and it is unwatchable.
Imagine that high quality image flickering about all over the shop. It’s dreadful.
Now, the question is, is this something that possibly a better video recorder (like lovely John has) might fix, or is it something that is a sign of such a flawed USB capture stick that it won’t work even then.
Hopefully we shall find a solution. Not, of course, that I’m sharing this wonderful Promo that Nikki and I made for Granada. Oh no. Although, it’s quite entertainingly bad.
