Visas, PhD and other fun things

Well they could be fun. But sometimes they are just hard. At the moment Eyal and I are investigating what loops we need to jump through so that he can come and live with me in Australia, as a de facto or spouse (I don't like the word spouse- it sounds too much like 'louse'). We had joked that he could immigrate on humanitarian grounds as in Israel the bitterness of the ongoing conflict can be damaging to the soul.

Luckily he is not Palestinian- I can just imagine how almost impossible it must be to organise and jump through loops when you really are living in war-zone like conditions (as some Israeli's and many Palestinians are). The loops in place are easier for people with lots of money, time, professional assistance and good English reading skills- and of course who live in the same place for long periods of time. Though we have some of those things- finding a place to even submit the visa is difficult- we have only been spending small amounts of time in Israel, so waiting there for the suggested 7 months while they process his visa is not an option...

The problem with the visa loops is that you have to jump through some of the ones that come later before you can do the ones that come first. Bureaucracy is the mother of all catch 22's. But if you do happen to know someone in a similar situation there is free clear advice offered at the 'Immigration Advice and Rights Centre' in Sydney.

As for the PhD, it seems possible that it is finally time to stop collecting parts and frameworks to fit them into, and actually start putting things together, which always sounds like fun when I think about it- and when I sit down to write- it isn't. I am trying to sit down and collect the pieces I have to describe everything I know about what the determiner 'det' does in Kriol, starting with where it fits syntactically into a clause, all the way up to how it is used in discourse, hopefully these various levels of analysis will inform each other. I better keep at it...