There is a first time for everything.

Wow. This is my first blog. How exciting!

To start, I guess I should introduce myself. I am a 28 year old video producer from Edmonton, Canada and am presently living and working in Las Vegas. Well at least for another 3 weeks.
My visa expires on December 1st so I have to pack up and leave no trace of myself on US soil, then the plan is to come back over the border with my TN visa application in hand and acquire that said visa for another year in Sin City.
Sounds easy enough right?
Wrong.
My first visa experience started in September 2006. The job I presently do was here in Vegas waiting for me to get a visa and come on down. So I said goodbye to all my friends and family, packed up my Toyota Corolla, brought my Moms along for the ride and headed to the land of the free. Here is the sucky part. The customs agent I dealt with in Sweetgrass Alberta didn't like the looks of my application and turned me away. So, I hopped back in the car and my Moms and me drove the 7 hours back to Edmonton.
But that wasn't the end of it, I am down here now after all right?
So I tried again, couple of small changes to my visa application, but this time I flew to Calgary International to try and fly into Vegas. My lawyer suggested Calgary over Edmonton because he thought Calgary would be more familiar with my situation. So I flew down and applied again. This time, the customs agent told me I was "port-shopping". And since I had just been denied weeks earlier in Sweetgrass, he could not give me a visa or allow me to enter the US. So now I have a red flag on my file (which = a bunch of fun questions EVERY time I cross the border I have found).
After the second denial, I thought my bosses were in denial when they told me to hold tight, and they would prepare a third package and even get in touch with Calgary customs to arrange a pre-clearance for me (which doesn't actually happen I have read). My lawyer was responsible for getting a lot of famous international sports figures into the US including Daniel Negreanu and Greg Norman, so I held tight.
Now I was getting pretty sick of going away parties. And so were all my friends and family. They had all said goodbye to me twice already and I wasn't really expecting them to do anything for my third possible departure. Understandable.
It was just really weird for this period. Everything was so up in the air, I couldn't make any plans and every time I saw my best friends I wondered if it would be the last time for a while. Finally on November 29th 2006, I received word that Calgary's Port Director had issued me pre-clearance (which apparently happens once in a while), so I headed out this time very confident that I would allowed passage into the US to start my new job. And it worked!
So for the past year I have been working as an IPTV Management Consultant for PokerRoyalty LLC. They put me on an online network project they put together called RawVegas.tv. It has been SO fun! It has been a lot of hard work though. I don't keep track of my hours, and if I did I bet I would end up being paid $4/hour but I couldn't have asked for a better experience down here. RawVegas is valued at millions and millions since we launched on January 19th 2007 and a lot of that had to do with me. I am proud of the little website that could.
I have had a lot of freedom (freedom = $) to do a lot of cool things this past year. I went to Vancouver in May for my birthday and had the best vacation ever in my opinion. I went to Santa Barbara to see a good friend for a week, and went back to Canada 14 times (for haircuts among other things). I really haven't been homesick at all, the thing that gets me is that I have 0 friends down here. The only people I know are my employees or famous people. Neither of which I can really call friends. So I really enjoyed being able to get home and see my friends the past year. However, doing just that has lead me to a possible roadblock in my plans for three weeks from now.
I will save that story for another time though. It's 1:33 am and I think that is a pretty substantial first blog.

Don't you?