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Updates

I'm out on the ship now, but I do have an internet connection so I've added a new page which links directly to my Fine Art America page. You can now buy prints from FAA directly from this site.

27/03/2021

I've now added my latest painting, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal near Foulridge to the Works in Progress page. You can see the painting as it progressed here.

26/03/202

I think I've managed to get the site back up and running now, and with a new design and layout.

25/03/2021

So I now have 3 days left to try to get the site up and running again. On the 29th I'll be going from the hotel to the ship, which will be in Yokohama. From there we'll be sailing down to Taiwan and then on to the Philippines. Hopefully I'll be able to continue updating this column as we go to work just north of Luzon.

25/03/2021

Well, after 3 weeks of emailing back  and forth with the host company and getting nowhere, it turns out that my anti-virus program is preventing me from adding new photos to the site.

19/03/2021

After 41 hours of travel, I've finally made it to my quarantine hotel in Narita, Japan. I'll be spending the next 10 days looking at these four walls so maybe that will give me time to figure what the heck the problem is with the site. At least I can add text, just not images.

17/03/21

I've been trying to edit the site, but keep getting "Undefined" errors and no one seems to have a clue why.

06/03/2021

 I thought I would add my latest painting to the website, turns out that may not have been such a great idea...

 

 

Learning to Fly

Posted 3/26/2021

The main reason we emigrated to Canada was to fulfill a dream of mine to learn to fly. I attended Professional Flight Training Centre in Boundary Bay, which is a small airfield in Delta, south of Vancouver. We enjoyed Vancouver and British Columbia so much that it didn't take us long to decide to do what we could to stay. Sue was quickly offered work as a legal secretary for a law firm in Vancouver but of course couldn't accept it without a work permit. Fortunately for us the immigration lawyer freely offered his advice and following that we rented a Cessna aircraft for the day and flew down to Seattle. In Seattle I applied for and received my student visa, which would then allow Sue to apply for a work permit on the basis of being a dependent of a student.

Funnily enough, as the agent handed me the student visa in Seattle, without being asked, stated that we wouldn't qualify for a work permit based on this. None the less we thanked her and flew back to Vancouver. Explaining the situation to the immigration lawyer in Vancouver he raised an eyebrow and gave Sue a letter to give to Employment Canada. I think it took about a week to get the work permit.

I don't know how many times over the years people have asked me how to go about emigrating to Canada and really the best advice I can give is be persistent, not give up, and most of all don't believe everything that immigration officers tell you.

Anyway, armed with her permit, Sue started working in Vancouver and I would fly several times a week as well as taking evening classes to learn the theory of flight in order to get my private pilot's license or PPL.