Moving To Canada

I have dealt with an internet company since October 1999, a US company. The company has been excellent, everything was easy to understand, the customer support has been great. But last year my bill suddenly quadrupled. A call to the company saw me trimming services that used to come with the account, that I did not need. But even after all the trimming, the bill had tripled.

What to do!

I began a search for a new company, with two criteria in mind. One is that is that the company be Canadian owned and operated. The second is that customer service has to be stellar.

I opened an account at a Canadian company, to explore their services. There were issues. I contacted customer support. AI ran me in unhelpful circles for three days before a human was finally brought into the mix, and stepped in to resolve the issue, which was at their end. That company has a few bugs to work out, and I decided they weren’t going to use me to do it. They had a slick user interface, but the customer support was not great.

Which took me to another Canadian company that I had some experience with. Their user interface is bare bones, and yet highly accessible. Needing assistance is not a problem with this company, their technical support is top notch, no AI, just an interactive, respectful, knowledgeable human at the other end of an email message. This company is perfect for me.

And so I am in the process of moving to Canada, virtually.

My first company tried to persuade me to stay, offering me a 25% discount for my account. No thanks, the experience of the quadrupled charge for bare bones services was enough to convince me that things had changed significantly there, and that their new profit focus was no longer acceptable.

So that is what I’ve been up to, moving to Canada.

I’m not done yet, but I hope to have completed the move by the end of the month.

The main part of life, the most important part of life, is on the domestic front. We are settling in for a long winter’s snuggle.

The weather is up and down like a yo-yo, extreme cold, then above freezing temperatures, snow, then rain, then snow, then rain, etc. Where we notice this the most is on our daily walks. We have to check the temperature and walking conditions every day to see what to wear, and to plan our route around icy conditions on the roads and sidewalks.

It is raining out there as I write, with a little bit of snow mixed in from time to time.

There are days we deem unsuitable for walking, which is always disappointing. A fall at our age could be life changing, so we are super cautious about footing. We walk in the extreme cold. We walk in the winter rain. We walk in snow. We walk in slush. We do not walk when the footing is dangerous… which seems to be more frequent this winter.

Ginger has cabin fever! He pines for the artificial Christmas Tree (plastic), mourns the lack of plastic bags on which to chew, demands constant cuddles, and spends a lot of time loudly pontificating they mystery of our misdemeanours. Today I offered him a helping of pureed squash, well, that was more like it, finally the humans around here are catching on to how things should work. We don’t call him Ginger Whinger without reason. He is a full fledged member of our little family, whinging and all!

P.S. The image is a photograph taken at our Camp, during the summer, a truly Canadian forest.

Worldly

Weather

2°C
Date: 5:00 PM EST Tuesday 13 January 2026
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 100.1 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 2.4°C
Dew point: -1.2°C
Humidity: 77%
Wind: SSE 27 gusts 37 km/h
Visibility: 24 km
Visibility: 0.8 km

Quote

“Follow the grain in your own wood.”
Howard Thurman
1899 – 1981