Life's a Stitch

Not really. We’re eight years from retirement, one of us pensionless, the other with a teensy-weensy one due to the recent sale of the company for which he works. We moved to Canada 24 years ago, young and oblivious to important life implications, simply because it was pretty. It’s been a good life, but we gave up a lot, the worst being proximity to family. It’s hard to raise kids without grandparents, cousins, and aunties.

What we didn’t count on giving up was Social Security. I had heard of other ex-pat’s discovering that they left the US without enough credits to collect SS, and not enough work experience in Canada to collect the full amount of Social Insurance. Being the type that wants to know what I’m in for, I insisted Chuck and I make trek to our "local" SS office, 80 miles away. He could not understand why I wanted to know so far in advance, but I bet you can. Give up? Because I want to know how much yarn I need to buy.

So, the good news is that we both have enough credits to qualify for a partial benefit. The bad news – it won’t start until age 66, well past our planned date. And the US will reduce the amount because we’ll be eligible for a partial Canadian benefit, and neither side can tell us by how much. I’m just going to rely on that blind faith we had 24 years ago and assume that both together will equal a normal benefit. And I don’t have to feel badly about not spending one penny at the two Washington yarn shops we visited that had 20% off everything.

Having camera difficulties, I reached back into my computer’s brain and found this picture of Mari and Ms.Grace. Does this look like a girl who had difficulty with the concept of having an animal living in the house with us?