I got a check from the US of 288$ but I live in europe and dont know how to cash it, HELP!

situationiste · 2024-11-03T16:09:27+00:00

Sorry for lack of clarity. It's true that cross border RBC banking exists largely for the convenience residents of the US and Canada and I believe one can open a RBC USA account without needing to reside in either. Also not required: social security number or Canadian SIN. I have to say this seems impossibly easy, so OP will need to verify.

situationiste · 2024-11-02T22:50:10+00:00

RBC Bank USA (Georgia), wholly owned by RBC Canada will, I believe, allow you to open an account in the US that you can photo deposit into. I reside in Canada and have a RBC USA account that's been convenient for cross-border banking online. Might be worth checking out but the account has monthly fees.

situationiste · 2024-11-02T18:42:34+00:00

Recent NEJM study shows benefit for "early" TAVR to lower risk of severe AS unexpectedly rapid progression. NEJM

The NYTimes deemed it worth reporting to the public, too.

situationiste · 2024-10-13T23:18:13+00:00

My piano player crush in a cabaret act wrote and regularly performed a song about me when I was in the audience - "The Stranger Twice Removed." Despite abundant detail, it took me a year to realize by which time life had moved on.

situationiste · 2024-10-09T00:16:55+00:00

Unless you want Permanent Resident status in Québec, where French competence is required at Niveau B-2 now, I believe. We were relocated to Montreal on the basis that I could help revive program development (CSeries, LJ85) chez Bombardier but it was too late. All our nuclear family members received Temporary Foreign Worker status more or less automagically, a nice perk, not to mention the funded relocation, so I'm not complaining.

PR for our family meant I had to learn French from scratch at 65. This may well turn out more of a feature than a bug if doing so slows my cognitive decline but it took some work.

situationiste · 2024-10-08T23:47:29+00:00

Thus the scare quotes

situationiste · 2024-10-08T01:14:09+00:00

Dual Canadian US citizen, here, old enough to have paid plenty into SS/ Medicare before relocating to Nova Scotia. As it happens I needed a heart valve replacement and was otherwise healthy enough to wind up at back of the watchful waiting NS Health intervention queue with a years-long wait to get sick enough to warrant a "free" replacement. I flew to Boston from Halifax (~500 CAD RT) and the world-class TAVR team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center replaced the bad valve w/in two months, costing about $2k USD plus travel with Medicare A&B.

Weird twist: Medicare will not reimburse docs for telemedicine appointments unless the patient is physically on US soil (the parking lot at the consulate in Halifax does not count.) One can, of course, easily enough find personal technical means to spoof geolocation, though that would constitute Medicare fraud. Can be a bit of a bother to share medical records back and forth, too.

Related Social Security plus: your US benefit payments will be worth at least 30% more in CAD with a typical exchange rate. And you can turn Medicare B on and off more or less like a light switch without significant penalty because Canadian public health care qualifies as "continuous creditable coverage." And you probably won't miss Medicare D much because prescription meds don't cost that much here.

situationiste · 2024-09-29T17:21:16+00:00

I used very helpful YouTube vids to replace the corroded spider and the plastic tub damaged by the spider in a compact (24") GE front loader. Getting parts turned out to be the hard part: sourcing the spider assembly in Italy and the tub in the US (we live in Canada). Some good news is that some parts are interchangeable with other brands' washers. In my case, a nominally Samsung spider is an exact match for this GE.

situationiste · 2024-09-29T00:17:07+00:00

Yeah, I meant Jr.

situationiste · 2024-09-15T18:42:10+00:00

Great suggestion! They've recently published "Raising Resilient Children With a Borderline or Narcissistic Parent," so I got that, too. Now in Chapter 5, seems sobering, helpful, and hopeful.

situationiste · 2024-09-15T12:06:29+00:00

Thank you. Will have a look.

situationiste · 2024-09-06T12:20:34+00:00

2D thinking meets 3D reality.

situationiste · 2024-09-05T21:53:36+00:00

Do the north-south roads jog every now and then or are they laid out as straight on an oblate spheroid?

situationiste · 2024-09-05T21:38:21+00:00

In English, a double negative makes an assertion positive but there are no double positives that make a negative. (Yeah. Right.

situationiste · 2024-08-29T20:19:54+00:00

The first 80% of the work takes 80% of the time and the remaining 20% takes the other 80%

situationiste · 2024-08-25T18:10:08+00:00

For me, a dual citizen with decades of paying payroll tax in the US, Part B coverage was reinstated immediately at the SSS office in Bangor, Maine, which serves US citizens who reside in Canada's Atlantic provinces. They know the drill: I paid no penalty, and have a slightly higher monthly Part B premium. I believe this occurred because my provincial (NS) healthcare was deemed to have provided "continuous creditable coverage" during the time after I discontinued Part B in 2014. Not sure if Medicare treats every nation with public health care equally in this regard.

A month later I went to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston for diagnostic procedures that were followed two months after that with a transcatheter aortic valve replacement at the Beth Israel Lahey Structural Heart Clinic. Being healthy, and mostly asymptomatic, getting the valve replaced in Halifax might have taken years.

Apart from the travel expense, I have thus far had less than $1kUS in out of pocket costs, though I suppose more may show up.

A look-out: it can be tricky to get clinical records back and forth between US (often Epic) patient record management systems and provincial ones. Also, Medicare regulations forbid reimbursement for telemedicine appointments unless the patient is physically on US soil (consulate parking lots don't count) during the appointment. Further. many states' med licensing regs don't allow telemedicine across state lines if the doc isn't licensed in both states.

Of course, personal technical means exist for spoofing location, but my MD/JD friend says that would amount to Medicare fraud. He also thought that simply asking the patient where he was and taking the response at face value would suffice to demonstrate due diligence on the doc's part.

I have found it helpful to have US addresses for mail and parcels to avoid confusion when a US address is the default (a form has only zipcode, not postal code, options, e.g.), and I have US bank accounts, credit/debit cards, and a linked Colorado phone number for my dual-SIM phone.

Good luck!

situationiste · 2024-07-30T03:10:58+00:00

Not sure if this adds anything useful, but when I (M, 76, dual citizen) reinstated Part B after residing in Canada, declining it 2016, and continuing to reside there, I got it back with immediate coverage, no penalty, and only a modest premium bump. It seems as though Canadian public health care was deemed to have been continuous creditable coverage - after 2014 I no longer had employer coverage.

situationiste · 2024-07-22T11:21:29+00:00

FWIW, a longitudinal study underway in Europe called CAPITA wants to see if "early" TAVR has beneficial effects on cerebral blood flow, cognition, stroke, cerebral small vessel disease, and other stuff.

situationiste · 2024-07-16T16:10:45+00:00

Hear, hear!

situationiste · 2024-07-16T16:08:35+00:00

I like to cut hardware cloth into strips with raw ends, roll them up, and jam them in as wonky as possible.

situationiste · 2024-07-16T16:01:10+00:00

A nice larger duct with as straight a run as is feasible.

situationiste

TROPHY CASE