My mother was born in Malaysia in 1944 – when it was known as British Malaya.
.. I might already be British.
HOW DO I CONFIRM THIS?!???!
Category Archives: everyday kimli
who are you
Unless this woman got married in the UK to some guy named Herbert Hawthorne and stayed in England long enough to be counted in the 1911 census, then somehow got to Canada and met my grandfather and got married and had babies in 1913 and 1914 .. I’ve been tracing the wrong line in the UK.
There’s another woman with the same name from the UK who, in 1901, was counted in the Canadian census and listed as having immigrated to the correct part of Canada in 1893. This could be the right line, but every time I try to search for her, the records are crossed between these two women. For all I know, the information I have is partially correct (the birth certificate I received for the woman in the image above has a birth year of 1883, not 1884). Most of the information I DO have was researched for me by the amazing Ken in Calgary, and I am forever grateful because he was able to provide a ton of stuff – now I just need to put the pieces together.
What I DO know:
- All the information I’ve found about my grandfather is correct
- Every piece of war correspondence I’ve been able to find lists him as “Husband of Edith J. Welsh of 2883 St. Andre St. Montreal”
- I confirmed my grandmother’s maiden name when I stole my dad’s birth certificate after he died (which I then had to return) and also in a story my dad had written about his early life
- I really should be working and not looking into all of this right now
I absolutely hate it when I have a mystery on my hands that I cannot solve. It’s rare that my Google-Fu fails me (or I only search for really simple things), and it’s infuriating when it does. At this point, it’s not even about wanting to immigrate to the UK – it’s about getting to the bottom of this once and for all, because it’s pissing me off and few things motivate me more than being pissed off.
I WILL DECIPHER YOU, EDITH CORNES!
one step closer
Dear England,
When can I move in? Can I just put my stuff anywhere? I’m gonna need a shelf in the bathroom; I have a lot of girl potions.
I received my grandmother’s birth certificate in the mail this week. It’s a little sobering to look at – as someone who often feels adrift and without family ties, it’s probably always going to trip me out to encounter my history. I learned that my great-grandfather was a coal miner! That is neat.
Getting the birth certificate was just one small step in this whole “get to the UK” process: I still need to find a way to tie my grandmother to my family. Unfortunately, it’s proving to be ridiculously difficult to get any information out of Quebec and Nova Scotia – my grandfather’s birth certificate would be nice to have, but I NEED my grandparent’s marriage certificate. Seeing as I have no idea when or where they got married (I’m assuming they didn’t have grandparent sex until they were married, so I can safely guess it happened sometime between 1910 and 1912), this is proving difficult. Complicating matters are the other women who share my grandmother’s name – it seems that a lot of babies were named Edith Jane in England in the late 1800s, and several of them had some variation of the name “Cornes” (if not the name itself). Most of the information I can easily access online refers to an Edith Jane Cornes born in the right location, but the year is off by one. If that’s not the right woman, then everything I have is wrong and I don’t actually know where my grandmother was born. It’s all very confusing.
If I want to get to the UK legally and not just as a tourist, I need to prove that:
- you are a Commonwealth citizen – check!
- you are aged 17 or over – check!
- you are able to work and you plan to work in the UK – checkity check check!
- you can adequately support and accommodate yourself and your dependants without help from public funds – I don’t want your public funds! Let me work!
I have those, so what next? Well, I must show that at least 1 of my grandparents was born:
- in the UK (including the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) – yes, as far as I can tell
- before 31 March 1922 in what is now the Republic of Ireland – my great grandfather appears to have been born in Ireland, but I think that’s a generation too far removed to qualify
- on a British-registered ship or aircraft – that would be super cool, but doesn’t apply here
Apparently, I can claim ancestry if my relationship to the relevant grandparent is legitimate OR illegitimate. That makes things easier!
Unfortunately, this is where things get difficult. When I apply for UK entry, I need to include:
- your full birth certificate – I have this!
- your parents’ and grandparents’ marriage certificates – um. I don’t know how to get this. My mother MIGHT have her marriage certificate, but I won’t know until I can get my hands on her papers and go through them myself.
- the full birth certificates of the parent and grandparent through whose ancestry you are applying – I have A birth certificate for a woman I THINK might be my grandmother, but I’m not sure and I don’t know how to verify :(
- your marriage certificate or civil partnership registration document, if your husband, wife or civil partner intends to join you in the UK – I have this! The real question isn’t “do you have paperwork”, it’s more “will Ed join you” .. that, I don’t know. So far, all of this has been idle wishing. But what if I could do it? What if everything fell into place and I got the papers I need and had a way to get there and a plan and could work and and and? What then? Would Ed come with me? Would I go my own way? Should I stay or should I go? Why DO fools fall in love? Did you let the dogs out?
So many questions.
I wish my dad was around to provide some answers.
And a cream egg. I wish I had a cream egg.
LET ME LIVE IN YOU
poetry in (slow) motion
poetry!
Henceforth I insist that all package status updates be delivered in Haiku form.
Departure from in/
ward office of exchange – Van/
couver Canada
Package is delayed
Customs has opened your goods
Nice discount panties!
There’s no way that dress
Will cover your pasty ass
Keep on dreaming, though.
Your mail will be late
A conspiracy?
No, we just hate you.
.. I could do this all day, but things need speccin’.
recycling
I wasn’t in the office on Thursday due to a sinus migraine (or as I like to call them, snigraine), and people were busy:
LATEX EXPLOSION
I still don’t know who was responsible, but I truly appreciated the unexpected surprise. I didn’t know what to do with all the balloons, though .. so we made it someone else’s problem:
it doesn’t count as recycling if you have fun while doing it
They fit much better in Scott’s office, and the best part is he’ll blame someone else. Hooray!
Seriously, though. I laughed a lot. Good times!
twelve
According to Wikipedia, the only important thing that happened on March 30th 2001 was the discontinuation of the Sega Dreamcast.
Hmpf.
Delicious Juice Dot Com is twelve years old today. That is .. so many words. Just think of what I could accomplished if I put all that energy towards something useful!
Okay, that’s not fair – this blog has always been exactly what I needed at the time. I would likely explode with feelings if I didn’t have this blog as an outlet, and as always, I am grateful for anyone on this ride with me.
Twelve is SO MANY!
new record
I wrote two complete blog posts today that I can’t publish because they’re both incoherent with rage and unresolved issues. I should just delete them both before I get myself in trouble, but they’re lurking in my drafts folder. Perhaps one day I’ll calm down enough to extract the logic from the emotion and write something meaningful, but at the moment it’s just a heaping pile of anger and incredulousness – it’s best to keep those pent up inside, where they can fester quietly as a mental illness.
So, there’s nothing to see here. If you want something to see, you should check out my #rando tumblr – there’s lots to laugh at over there. Here, not so much. I’m at home with a yucky sinus cold and all I want to do is sleep and drill a hole into my face, but I have to taxi Ed around in a couple hours so I should probably hose the grossness off. Not the best start to a much-needed long weekend, but I’ll take it (and milk the whining for all it’s worth).
To the tumblrs with you!
the era of boners is upon us
I’ve been using Rando since I posted about it last week, and I had been struck by several things – receiving new pictures took forever, and there was an extremely surprising lack of boners. You would think that, given the anonymous picture-sharing nature of the app, boners would be among the very first images sent out (guys just love to take pictures of their junk – seriously, what’s up with that) – but no. No boners. I received dozens of pictures, but not a single erection. As I am a somewhat closeted conspiracy theorist, there was only one possible reason for both the innocent nature of every image I received AND the length of time it took to get a response: someone was manually screening the random photos and deleting any naughty scenes.
My second theory was that someone had invented the world’s most powerful anti-boner algorithm, but that’s not as exciting as a room full of people hunched over big CRT screens from 1970 and manually approving or banishing images while The Ride of the Valkyries was piped in over a scratchy PA system.
Over the weekend, Rando’s response time improved significantly. Now I was receiving new images as fast as I could send them, which made my new project much more interesting (a Tumblr of Rando images with imagined backstory). This is good, right? Maybe they upgraded their servers or something! Faster performance is more better! Everyone wins!
It’s a happy theory, but my version of reality is probably closer to the truth: someone at the switch threw the towel in. Besieged by a never-ending onslaught of boners, the person doing the sorting went mad and ran screaming from the room; gibbering and foaming at the mouth and yelling about dicks.
I received my first Rando boner today.
It is not at all impressive. It’s kind of shiny and sad looking. I will not be posting it on my Rando Tumblr, because it’s more pathetic than interesting (but I’ll send it directly to you if you want to see it).
So, boners are happening. I am amused, anticipating, and apprehensive, all at once.
when you’re smiling
What started out as a gross Wednesday morning has turned into a glorious spring day – an appropriate metaphor on several levels – and while outside at lunch, these things made me smile:
- A man walking down the street carrying a giant empty picture frame
- The trees at Burrard Station, tipped with thousands of pink buds about to burst
- Pringles on sale at SDM for $1.99 a tube
- A lady in a business suit sitting at the bus stop, swinging her legs like a little kid
- This:
neat idea – hope they get some awesome pictures
In fact, the random smiling started this morning when I stumbled upon an abandoned bag at my bus stop, containing pure treasure:
an ultimate vhs collection!
A bag of cinematic masterpieces, free for the taking! I wish I had taken the time to delve into the bottom layer of the bag, but they were wet and kind of grubby and my hands were full. If the tapes below the first few were even half as amazing as those pictured, someone is in for a weekend full of explosive action in glorious 480p!
Also, everything about my previous post makes me smile. You should read it. It has boners.
crushing on catie
I have a crush on CATIE.
They’ve been in the news lately, because some woman in Nanaimo was America-style-outraged that her 13-year-old son received a saucy flip book in sex ed class. All her arguments are stupid – sex education is incredibly important and as much as she wants to think otherwise, 13 is exactly the right age to be introducing children to the ramifications of STDs, pregnancy, and how to avoid them if they just have to bust a nut – but her questionable horror at safe sex aside (along with my laughing: “It upset him to the point where he didn’t feel comfortable” hahahaha boners), the story glossed over the most important point of all: WHERE DO I GET THESE WONDERFUL FLIP BOOKS?!
Some extremely inappropriate work conversations and furious Googling later, we had an answer: the book is produced by CATIE (Community AIDS Treatment Information Exchange). Sam went about ordering some of the flip books to share with us, and they arrived yesterday:
the bad news: “something sexy” doesn’t involve handcuffs.
the good news: there’s a different pamphlet for that!
While the flip book is smaller than expected, it is chockfull of awesome erection action. Click the picture above to see a .PDF of the contents, or you can watch this Vine we took of the book in action.
Clearly, CATIE has some amazing education pieces to look at. Naturally, we immediately ran to the website to see what ELSE we could find:
(um, all of these are NSFW – you may want to wait until you’re alone before you clicky clicky)
- BDSM: Safer Kinky Sex (complete with people cosplaying Drow and rubber hoses full of semen)
- Use Your Head While Giving It: Blow Job Tips
- Reading This Can Save Your Ass: Safer Rimming Tips
- Dear Client (A Manual for Clients of Sex Workers)
- XXX Guide (not a reference book for fans of Vin Diesel, but a handbook for sex workers)
- These amazing anime superheros with dildo guns
.. and so on and so forth. There is a huge variety of educative materials that CATIE produces for institutional, group, or individual use, for free. It ranges from serious to funky fresh for the youths, and covers topics far outside the standard sex education fare such as LGBTT2IQQ-related information, body mods, drug use, and more.
Also, there are these:
.. a series of alphabet cards for gay and bisexual men.
They are incredible. How incredible?
*I* learned something from them. I thought I knew everything there was to know about sticking your wiener in things, but nope. I missed a few.
Seriously, I am totally in love with CATIE and I want to give them all my money so they continue to produce awesome education material for years to come. Plus, hilarious pictures of auto-fellatio. It’s like CATIE made these cards just for me!
