Exhausting week of way too much work, and the clock radio and carbon monoxide detector conspired against uninterrupted sleep three nights this week. Woke up at midnight, having barely just gone to bed, by incessant beeping that I'd never heard before. Turned out to be the clock radio in my sewing room. Figured hubby had turned the alarm on by mistake when he was listening to the radio while ironing his shirts. He wisely irons his own knowing that I can press a quilt seam, but don't manage sleeves, etc. too well. Next night same thing. Apparently in my half asleep state I didn't completely turn the alarm off.
This morning about 5, the unmistakable beeps of a smoke detector whose batteries are winding down woke me up. I couldn't reach the thing, so hubby got up and took the battery out, got back into bed and another beep. It wasn't the smoke detector, it was the carbon monoxide detector nearby. At least I got almost an hour's sleep before my Wake Up Yoga class. Like the class, wish I didn't have to wake up so early for it though.
Later this morning I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about Canada's new citizenship law and looks like I might be Canadian. The government is promoting the change in the law with a You Tube video called "Waking Up Canadian."
Apparently in 2007 when the United States started requiring passports for travel between the U.S. and Canada a lot of people who applied for Canadian passports found out they weren't Canadian any more. The new law attempts to help those folks by granting retroactive citizenship to people who "lost" it between 1947 and 1977, and giving it to their children who were born outside Canada.
My mom was Canadian, but lost that citizenship when she became a U.S. citizen after marrying my dad. After dad retired, they planned to move to Canada and live on some property they had bought years earlier. It had been in my mom's family at one point and is near where many of her cousins still live. Mom and Dad applied for Canadian citizenship, but after two years nothing had happened with their applications and my dad had died from cancer. He was buried in the churchyard in Canada near where they planned to live.
Anyway, Mom decided to go back to Canada after Dad died, and she's been living there for more than 10 years as a landed immigrant, which is what she ended up doing so she could live there again because nothing was happening with the citizenship application.
As of Friday, she might not be a landed immigrant any more. She could be a Canadian again. And, having been born to a Canadian parent, I might be Canadian too!
Always felt like I belonged to two countries with most of my "known" relatives living in Canada and going there all the time to visit. Maybe now when folks say, "You have an accent. Where are you from?" (just because I pronounce words like "about" and "borrow" differently) I could say, "I'm Canadian."
I won't start saying "eh," but I wouldn't mind a butter tart.
