Snail mail

As we did a whole bunch of online shopping last week, we've spent most of the last few days running up and down two flights of stairs to get packages from the delivery people.  Except for when it snowed, of course, because I think the post office took Monday off.  Two inches of snow is a lot.  Apparently.  But finally, today, two things that I'd been expecting for quite a while showed up.

First, the approval for my renewed residence permit, which technically expired three weeks ago, saying where I could pick it up.  This is now a full month after they said they'd get back to me, although it's still well within their "this may take up to six months to process" limit (and seriously, if you know it's going to take six months, why do you only send out the renewal forms a little more than three months ahead?).  I'd been getting increasingly anxious about the lack of a residence document, and actually called immigration yesterday, at a cost of 10 cents a minute (service calls like that all cost money here), to find out what had happened to my residence permit.  The lady assured me that it had been processed, the computer told her they'd issued a new permit, and I'd be getting a letter in the next two weeks, at the very latest.  And that they weren't going to kick me out of the country, which is always wonderful news ;)

Also, this showed up:

Well, more accurately, a book containing that chapter showed up.  Good thing they sent me an author copy, too, because the book retails for $115 CDN on Amazon.ca and I must admit, I wasn't going to buy one.  It's the extended, finally-published, chapter-form version of the paper I gave in Sweden a bit more than two years ago... like governmental bureaucracy and the mail, academia works at a snail's pace.