Atlantic Xpat

Understand the in-laws thing completely. Have been through swings and roundabouts with mine and the MiL lives 5 mins away. Would echo everyone elses comments - Rent for a year just to get the area you want to be in sorted with least risk/cost of change. Also easier if it went all tits up on the employment front.

If your realtor is not working then bin him and get another. Above all, get some space and privacy and try and ensure your Mrs understands the needs for this.

MillieF

Yes, I'm with AE, on this. Speak to your wife and tell her how you feel. Write it down if you feel that you might be misunderstood. Of course you are feeling under pressure, you are at work all day trying to adapt to something different, and then you come home and you can't even relax properly there. Certainly I'd ditch the relator too. Try to get out of the house, just you and your wife for a bit, go for a long walk, just together somewhere you can explain how you feel....after all you have he PIL, may as well get them to look after the kids for a couple of hours! Very best of luck.

Steve_

Québec is ground zero for metric and then it slowly diminishes the further away you get. Housing for example tends to be sold in square metres in eastern Canada but out west they still use square feet.

There was a serious attempt to convert to metric in the mid-1970s, President Carter tried to get it going in the US (hence the metric road signs on I-19) but when Reagan came in he stopped it, so as a result it made it very difficult to do in Canada.

I know some older folk still use Imperial but in reality it's a combination of US and metric units. So you buy 2.54cm nails and 3.78 litre jugs of milk.

Screw sizes for example always are in US units with some stupid conversion chart, so even if you know Imperial it doesn't help much because in the US system they use vague fractions like 1/16th of an inch.

Even with Robertson screws which does get on my nerves. Look at the spec on page 7 and following of this catalogue: http://www.robertsonscrew.com/Linked...icing-e.vs.pdf

Steve_

Well it's used worldwide, so it's not that bad, l/100km. I've gotten used to it.

How long

Steve_

I've decided that I'm going to make everyone use metric, when I went into Lowe's I honestly had no clue what I was looking at so I got a shop assistant to work it all out for me on his calculator. I got one of those customer review e-mails from their HQ in North Carolina, "Is there anything we can do to improve our service?" "USE F---ING METRIC"

I thought it was bad when I saw one foot sq. floor tiles, 4mm thick on sale in Home Depot but then they had a radio ad for them! WTF?

Siouxie

Your in-laws probably think they are being supportive in asking how your day went when you get home from work, lol. It's never easy staying with people and I am sure if they realised that you feel they are being intrusive they would probably be horrified.

If your wife has been away from her family for a number of years then perhaps it's understandable that they would want her nearby, particularly as they now have grandchildren.

I would suggest, as others have, that you get out for an evening with your wife alone and discuss things. What does she want? Perhaps she is feeling pressured at present to go along with what they want, or maybe she would actually like to be near her family - but if you don't talk about it (out of earshot of the family) then you won't know and it will end up causing a rift between you.

Have you narrowed down the area you would like to live in? Perhaps suggest to her (alone) that you take a drive out that way over the weekend (leaving the kids with the grandparents and having some 'us' time will make a big difference) and look at what the areas are like would give you more of an idea. The chances are that you would get more 'bang for your buck' by moving outside the downtown core, so that would be more ammunition for moving 'north'.

Finally, I would talk privately to your real estate agent and tell him/her that either they can take your instruction and keep it private (i.e. not informing b-i-l about it) or you can take your business elsewhere. It's always a mistake to use a family friend to represent you as they are easily influenced by their long-time friendship.

Oh the joys of relocating, eh?

dbd33

It means nothing to me. So I put fifty bucks in petrol in the tank and load the car up with #8 screws, 3" and 1 1/2", 8' fence boards sawn in half at the shop and go off for another evening's fence building. I believe it to be true that, apart from speed limit signs (which are in kilograms but which I interpret in mph) the only exposure to metric I have is on this board.

What would you do with metric floor tiles, cut them down so they'd fit the floor?

dbd33

It would be utterly perverse for Lowe's, a nationwide chain with some branches up in Canada, to use metric in the one shop near you. Do you expect them to provide service in Welsh too?

orly

Learning other languages was something I tended to be poor at. Variously "taught" Latin, French, German and Irish over the years at school. Hardly remember any of them.

orly

Anyone else had blank looks from colleagues when you say "14 stone" or such like?

Some people I work with were genuinely bemused at how quaint it was in the UK that we weighed ourselves in stones and would get distances at the roadside in yards and miles. When I pointed out that people here use lbs which are ~454 grams and talk about the "footage" of their houses the penny (fortunately decimal) dropped.

Canada is about as metric as it is bilingual. Not very.

dasher3

I only know my weight in Kilos...but I seem to be the only one here who does

james.mc

Canada is going metric gradually.... inch by inch

AlliF

Funny you should say that - we have just had a total drama relating to that very issue.
We are just in the process of completing the sale of our house in Australia and needed to sign the transfer of title documents and return to our conveyancer. We didn't even notice there was a difference in paper size when we printed it out . We were then told the Australian titles office couldn't accept it on anything but A4! We managed to get some A4 paper and do it again but it's only just got there in time.

Zoe Bell

All my paperowk that I get from the IB is on A4 paper.
it reall effs up the copiers here, they dtect it isn't quite right but don't seem to know what to do, even when I try to force the pdfs to scale to letter