Chris and I have (sadly) joked about the seeming number of items you hear about that start with "Of all the developed countries in the world, the U.S. is the only one that..."

Well, if this sad little sidebar doesn't speak volumes, I'm not sure what does (thanks aidenraine).

We've had a couple serious talks about where to make our "permanent" home (permanent in quotes because, well, nothing's ever really permanent). Back in Canada has been the plan from the start, and still is, but we still like to revisit the issue and consider alternatives, both mundane and wacky. I know in my heart that I want to be in Canada. I'm sure there are many European countries I'd enjoy, but I do have roots in Canada and there's a big difference between living down here in the (English-speaking, cheap-flights-home-offering, conveniences-I'm-used-to-available) United States for a while. I guess I never wanted to feel like I was dragging him back to "my" city, but the clincher lately is that he's made it very clear that Toronto is the city of all places he's been to (and that's a lot) that he could see making a real home base.

So.. yay :)

Definitely itching to stay put for a while... both in terms of ideally staying in our current place for the rest of the time that we're here, and buying a place in Toronto in a few years that's our long-term home. I love moving, doing something new, renovating... but it's just not very efficient, darnit.

We have visions of buying an old Victorian in the city (maybe a little west, but definitely east of High Park). Something with three apartments, which they all seem to be anyway. Renting out two of them for income and then gradually renovating and taking the whole place over ourselves, muhahaha!

EDIT: I realized it's not every day that an article gives me goosebumps, so I did something I hadn't actually done before and submitted it to digg. If you have an account, digg it?

Four food chains from Canada that I really miss:

The Keg

Swiss Chalet (*shakes fist at Buster*)

Lick's

New York Fries (particularly poutine) 

There are also Timmies' sour cream glazed timbits, and Cultures' spinach salads.

But here in California, there's The Counter, Peet's iced coffee, brewed iced tea, Claim Jumper, cheap and awesome Mexican food and sushi everywhere.

Now that I'm drooling, I think it's time to make dinner.

While I love my home country, the US has certain advantages.  Like a generally better selection of e-commerce establishments.  Oh and there's cellular data rates, but that's another story.

Sunny knows what I'm talking about.  I've seen her discuss this same thing.  It's not that we don't have quite a few online stores in Canada, or certainly merchants who ship to Canada -- but it's no wonder I became such a huge fan of eBay.

First of all, there's no big department store, a la Amazon.com.  Sure, there's Sears.ca and Canadian Tire, but they're nowhere near the same league.  Amazon.ca only has books/media stuff, and Amazon.com doesn't ship most of their other stuff to Canada.  Our closest thing to a NewEgg is NCIX and a few other smaller shops, but nothing huge that has amazing deals across the board and geek-friendly reviews/search engines/etc.

Or what about a huge music store, like Musician's Friend, or Zzounds?  Art supplies?  Pet supplies?  Furnishings?  You can usually find stuff if you look hard enough, but there certainly aren't dozens of big warehouses clamouring for your business.

Case in point:  Suzann had told me about this online shoe store, Zappos.  You can order a whole bunch of shoes, huge selection of styles and size variations, ship them all to you with free shipping, then keep the ones you want and send the others back with free return shipping.  There is so nothing like this in Canada.  Not that I'm a big shoe whore, but I found another site that had the same shipping concept and got three pairs of potential shoes for Meagan's wedding.  Plus 30% off (yay for googling for coupon codes).

Almost all the stores actually in Canada are smaller specialty stores that end up costing a lot more.  Or maybe I should feel good about supporting small retailers... but the cheapass in me beats that part down sometimes  :)

Also, I'm spoiled here in that there are allll these other little states that have the nice convenience of not charging tax when you order from them.  Hell, I can even avoid it in California sometimes, since Provantage is actually shipping our NAS stuff from California to Ohio and back to avoid us paying tax!  I suppose I wouldn't complain about this if I had lived in Manitoba or something, but almost everything ships from Ontario (Toronto's the centre of the world in Canada, dontchaknow) so you're getting dinged with 14% tax.

And why does buying within Canada matter so much?  I'm glad you asked.  The evils of paying duties.  It's not so much the duties themselves, it's the bloody hassle and the couriers.  The tax I can deal with, but couriers (*cough*dieUPSdie*cough*) charge an additional brokerage fee for filling out the paperwork for you.  So you're constantly having to check on shipping methods, asking people to mark something as a gift, checking on policies.. agh.

I ordered an earring holder once without paying much attention and ended up paying $54 in duties/brokerage stuff for a $25 item.

Bottom line... Canadian e-commerce is constantly a good five years behind the times and I'm always in awe here of how fast/easy/cheap it is to get stuff online.

Although we do have Grocery Gateway  :)  I had barely set foot in a grocery store for five years, man!

~~~ 

Eeeee, the doorbell just rang... UPS time!  It's NASday!

I HAVE KETCHUP CHIPS AND AN AERO BAR!

:D

Show of hands -- an introductory textbook for something is a PRIM-mer, or a PRIME-r?

Apparently this is a Canadian/Brit thing to pronounce it the same as PRIME-r, as in the first coat of paint??

And don't get me started on the fact that Chris says "vizzage" instead of "visage" or "nitch" instead of "niche"  :P 

It started by looking up the roots of the Canadian thanksgiving (Wikipedia -- solving bar debates and dinner conversation questions since... umm... whenever), and then I ended up on the fascinating Wikipedia entry for Tim Hortons.  Did you know that there's an RCMP radio code for Tim Hortons, and that the chain accounts for nearly a quarter of the Canadian fast food industry's sales??

I miss Timmies! 

My virtual poppy since they don't do the poppy thing down here in the US and A. 

Happy birthday to Canada!