It's All Lani's Fault

My name is Erin. I am a United States citizen who will be landing as a legal immigrant to Canada in nine days.

Why am I emigrating to Canada, you might ask?

Well, if you really want to break it down, it's entirely Lani's fault.

My best friend, Chrissy, got married in December of 2005. Her husband (Lani) convinced her to start playing an on-line massive multi-player video game called World of Warcraft. In the summer of 2007, while we were eating dinner at Max's and Erma's before going to see “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, Chrissy told me I should start playing WOW and join her guild, The Ancient Sun.

I have never been any good at video games. I was okay at games like Dr. Mario or MarioKart, but any other games... I had played WOW before and got bored of it, but I decided to try out Chrissy's server and guild since it would give us more opportunities to interact, since we only saw each other about once a month.

On August 8, 2007, my character joined Chrissy's guild.

I met some truly amazing people while playing with the Ancient Sun. I soon became close to several of the guys and girls in the game and we quickly became friends on Myspace and Facebook. One weekend in July 2008, while I was on my way from West Virginia to Chicago for a wedding, I stopped and had lunch with two boys in Indiana (Jeremy and Rammy) and on the way home I stopped and had dinner with Jeremy's older brother, Bobby, who was our guild master at that time.

I had so much fun meeting these on-line friends in real life that when the opportunity arose for me to travel to Vancouver and Ottawa to meet more than a dozen of them, I went.

In Vancouver, I met Clayton, James and Colin, Yves and his wife, and Anat and her son. In Ottawa, I met Rob and Mark and Coop, Roxie and Donny and Wade, and on August 24, 2008, Gates and Justin threw a party for us at their apartment.

I've come to realize that going to that party was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Because that's where I met Gates in real life for the first time.

I'm moving to Canada because I was able to obtain a Family Class Permanent Residency Visa.

Gates, my husband, is my sponsor.

I would have never met him if I hadn't gone to Canada to visit my Ancient Sun guildmates, I would have never become a part of that guild if Chrissy hadn't asked me to join, and Chrissy would have never played WOW if her husband, Lani, hadn't convinced her.

So, in short, it really is Lani's fault that I'm about to become an American Emigrant living in Canada.

And I really can't thank him enough.