dual

i am officially australian (and still canadian). i had the ceremony last nite where i said the oath with around 130 others and then we each got our certificates of citizenship, a native plant and our electoral enrollment papers. the only minor stress was the start of the evening. we had a flexicar booked at 5pm. the plan was to go get zac's nanna who lives nearish to the town hall in coburg where the ceremony was taking place and then get to the town hall for me to register (i had to be there between 5:45 and 6:15). i had gone online to add a half hour to our original flexicar booking and the site told me to pick a different car because that pod was out for maintenance. i called flexicar yesterday morning to ask why my confirmed booking was no longer available and why nobody had told me because the only reason i knew is because i decided to change my booking. they said the car had been in an accident the day before and was out of service. they knew about my booking for the evening and would be replacing the car so my booking was ok, it would just be a different car there. i rode past my booked car spot mid afternoon and the damaged car was in the spot with its back end crunched in a bit. when we walked up just after 5pm there was no car there. i called flexicar a bit panicked because i didn't know if we'd have time for whatever alternative they would offer. of course the office closed at 5 so i had to go through the whole long voice mail message before it would allow me to speak to the on-call person. i got to her phone and it rang a lot and then went to voicemail! i left an urgent message explaining what was going on. at that moment a girl zac knows through work (she works at a different organization but zac had been in touch with her several times in the past few weeks) drove up to the line of traffic at the red light. she asked us if we were waiting for a flexicar. i said we were but we were pretty sure it wasn't coming since we knew it wasn't just somebody else that had the car out past their booked time. she offered us a lift which we gladly accepted. turns out she lives in boronia (which is about an hour in the opposite direction she was taking us, past where she'd just come from). sooooo thankful for her and her perfect timing. flexicar called while she was driving us and the on call woman said she was going to have to call the operations manager because she was also under the understanding that there would be a car there for us too. i explained someone had helped us and we wouldn't be needing flexicar that nite. she's gonna make sure we get some extra driving credit added into our account for all the stress it caused us. we also had to get zac's sister to pick up nanna and then drive us home afterwards. other than that mix up, it was a good nite. after, we came home and celebrated with an aussie dinner of (vegan) meat pies and coopers beer (i should have gone for the more aussie vb but its not good and probably not vegan). then we had dessert of canadian thanksgiving pumpkin pie. it worked out ok-- it was almost proper pie consistency (just a bit less firm than it should have been) but it doesn't taste great. its ok but i think maybe i needed more sweetener or something to make it taste like proper pumpkin pie. the soyatoo whip cream helped though. (that's the first slice. the one i had today was a bit less sloppy looking)