sweasel.com

Huzzah! It will be fun reading about how you handle the bureaucratic nightmare you’re about to enter. 🙂

So, what are you going to do when you get there? Extreme distance telecommuting to work at your present job or do you have a new gig lined up?

Oh, no no no. I cannot look for work. I’m going over on a <koff> marriage visa. If I look for a job before I get there, get <koff> married and get the next visa (the Further Leave to Remain, or FLR) I’ll lose my status and get sent home. No lie. There was a recent newspaper report of a girl coming over on a fiancee visa. They went through her stuff at Heathrow, read her diary, found an entry about looking for work during the previous trip and put her ass on a plane home.

I cannot TELL you how fucked up and evil this process is.

In order to GET the visa, I have to show that we have enough money to support the both of us, a house, have made official <koff> wedding plans. We got to give them our passports, birth certificates, proof that we’ve known and visited each other for some time, bank statements, utility bills…and on and on.

So, basically, I have to sell my house, quit my job, move my stuff, make official <koff> wedding plans…and then they’ll decide whether I’m allowed to come over or not. And a lot of it is at the discretion of the most famously petty bureaucrats in the world’s most famously bureaucratic nation. Thanks to the appeals process, a genuine case will almost certainly prevail — eventually. But they don’t half put you through hell first. And every damn visa along the way is another $1K.

And it’s apparently even harder coming the other way, UK to US.

You want to talk to people who HATE illegal immigration, talk to somebody who’s done it legally. My sphincter’s so tight you could strip the insulation off wires with it…

The calmer answer is…I don’t know, but certainly something freelance. Probably several somethings freelance. I’ve driven a desk for almost 25 years now, and I really liked it, but a nine to five won’t fit in now, and we’re moving to the wrong sort of area for it. After cashing in all our chips — if everything goes well — we should be in safe territory for a while. Enough for me to look around.

I’ll probably take in a little web design, some illustration, maybe a little fine art. Basically, the whole idea is attractive enough that I’m pretty sure I’ll get hit by a Buick before any of it comes to pass.

Ah, Brits aren’t so tough. The other day, me and three of my buddies beat the crap out of one of ’em.

Pip pip and cheerio. I say, guv’ner, this is bonnie news. It’s a long way to tip a rarie and all that. Stiff upper lip, etc.

Good on ya, yer stoatliness.

Ahhh…the hoops people will go through for looooove.
Best of luck to you on your future plans. Will you post any wedding pictures? 😀

Grrrr….WTH is up with my stoat emote? My ‘koff’ before ‘wedding pictures’ didn’t show up either. Oh well. *tips glass in sweasel’s direction*

So I’m gonna have to change my monitor sweep rate to 50hz to get the brit version of Weasel’s site?

Quarantine? What do they know about you that we don’t?

I can’t blame you for wanting to leave the US east coast. Strange people live there. Especially in New Bedford.

Best of luck in the adventure, dude. We’ll all watch with interest. I assume you’ll be “calling it in” from the laptop in the interim.

Is this starting – like – now?

…and otherwise getting rid of a lifetime’s accumulations (anybody need a quart of nitric acid?).

Dibs!

I’m guessing the quarantine is for the cats, yes?

Best of luck with the >koff plans there Stoaty. I have lots of advice on what NOT to do in a marriage, if you are interested. I’m writing the definitive tome on the subject.

I need to read more carefully. I woulda taken that nitric acid. There are many interesting compounds and substances that can be easily made from nitric acid, and almost all of them are noisy and fun to play with. Probably best to leave it here in the US.

Marriage? Um…as a confirmed permanent bachelor who dated many and married none…I will be silent on that subject.
No I won’t.
Yes I will.

I. Will. Resist.

Nitric acid is no fun! Especially when you blow it up in Organic Chem lab and have to spend an hour and four sodium bicarb shakers to get it all cleaned up.

As for your marriage plans, if you want, Weasel, I’ll be happy to forward all the “Make her worship you” and “No more embarrassment!” emails I get. Haven’t read them, but they sound promising….

I don’t have any whiskey boxes to send you for packing, Weasel, but can you use some old pizza boxes? I duct tape ’em together to make attractive end tables. Will you be needing any furniture?

PtB, your browser strips out everything between angle brackets, assuming it to be an HTML tag. To fool it into showing angle brackets (and the stuff between), you have to use character entities. A character entity ‘sits in’ for a character. In HTML, they start with a & and end with a ; So! The character entity for left angle bracket is ampersandlt; where “ampersand” is replaced with &. The character entity for right angle bracket is ampersandgt;

More character entities described here. Feel free to practice right here in the comments section.

This educational moment was brought to you by Nabisco, makers of delicious cookies and cakes.

Hm. I haven’t looked in on my bottle of nitric acid for a while. It’s still in the styrofoam packing sleeve it was mailed to me in twenty years ago. I think it had to go FedEx or summat; anyhow, I’m game to ship it if you want it, EW. I’ve been dreading handing it over to the environmental agency.

Thank christ I got rid of my skeleton a few years ago.

I’ve got an even more terrifying thing in the bedroom closet. It’s a home sauna unit the previous owner (who was a gigantically fat man) had installed. It pokes through the wall to the master bathroom. It’s been defunct for years and slowly rusting through. It looks like it would crumble and flood the upstairs if you look at it funny. Problem is, a plumber won’t touch it because it’s also electrical, and an electrician…well, I’ve been trying to get hold of an electrician for years to do some small jobs, and they don’t even waste their precious time returning phone calls. I’m going to have to get in touch with a place that installs them to see if they’ll de-install one.

Yes, the quarantine is for the cats. Once upon a time, if you took a pet to the UK, it had to spend six cruel and expensive months in quarantine there before the authorities would release it. They don’t have rabies in England and they’d like to keep it that way. Now, your pets can effectively spend that six months quarantine in your home, stateside…and all you have to do is follow another series of precise and bewildering bureaucratic procedures. It’s another of those “get one tiny thing wrong and they’ll put everybody’s hairy ass back on that plane and send them home” deals.

Like, a USDA vet has to sign off on the paperwork…in blue ink.

I shitteth thee not.

I am having the hardest time feeling any sorts of happy about this moving business. I wanted to say something about how I will miss you when we lose you to “over there”, but it just makes me sound crazier than you guys already think I am. My husband’s little sister started hating on me a few weeks before our wedding because she felt I was taking her brother from her. Immature, but yeah! I’m not too keen on your beloved right now.

Hey, and it’s EW1(SG)’s birfday, too! Nothing says “happy birthday” like a big ol’ bottle of corrosive acid!

Good heavens, Dawn! That’s very sweet. Odd, but sweet. I’m not going anywhere as far as you’re concerned. Nothing will change here except that I’ll have a little less free time in the next six months and a HUGE BUTTLOAD more free time after that.

I used to think it would be a real wrench to move, until the day I realized that most of my social life is on the internet. Even my real life friends I see more through discussion boards and Skype these days.

I just recently started reading the nonsense on your site. I certainly hope you don’t intend to stop shoveling this about due to the move.

Heavens no, Hucklebuck. There is no foreseeable end to the nonsense I intend to shovel. My nonsense-shoveling days have only just begun. Wherever there is nonsense, I will be there. With my shovel.

My promise to you.

I shall add to Dawn’s concern. We like to think of you as our weasel. The ‘American’ weasel. They can’t have you. So there.

Oh and thanks for your instructional link. Not sure what good it will do as I am a computer illiterate in many ways. But I shall stare at it nonetheless.

Expatriate Weez
Crosses the pond for true love
Not the dental plan.

Not the hardest thing I’ve done for love. That would be quitting smoking. Brrrrr.

PtheB is right. You are an American Weasel. We shall consider you as simply “visiting” over there for an extended length of time.

..and I must say that your assurances to Hucklebuck have reassured me too. High-quality nonsense (well-shoveled) is surprisingly hard to find on the Net.

…and, this is the only site where one can spontaneously burst into poetry and not have people stare or make comments about you.

Shoot, you guys, certainly I’m an American weasel. I’m a right flag-humper, as a Canuck of my acquaintance once called it. The Weasels didn’t become American on purpose, though. We were deported for poaching.

Anyhow, I always think of Brits as being unfinished Americans. Like the beta version. Before they got all the bugs out.

I’m still trying to work out how you can transport a weasel for poaching.

I mean… what were they supposed to do? Go to Mickey D’s?

Transported for poaching! Cool.

My heart soars like a hawk.

My folks were “invited” to leave in the mid 1600’s after siding with the wrong branch of the family in some kind of political squabble. I figure my side got the “win” ultimately – by coming here.

Yam? Good grief, what a horrible visual.

I hope your new underpants are leech-proof. If not, go buy some tape too.

On the internet
No one knows you wear duct tape
not real underwear

In her darkest hour
Albion cries out: Weasel!
England needs you now!

England needs Weasel
‘Touch me there,’ cries Great Britain
O God! O Weasel!

GIMME A FOOKIN NEWCASTLE!

Or, uhm, whatever’s in the box there.

Best wishes on the move and the new life abroad.

I just wanted to say abroad.