It's been three months since this website was last updated, but I have an excuse! I've been somewhat busy... :o)

We left Australia on April 17th 2005, headed for England via the USA. The story of that journey will be told in a series of photo sets, which I will be putting together over the coming weeks. Well, months actually. There's rather a lot of them! But for now suffice to say that we made it safe and sound.

We hit these shores at the beginning of June in a haze of jetlag from New York. So much for avoiding jetlag by heading back across the USA. New York is 5 hours behind London, while Perth, in the UK summertime, is 7 hours ahead. Only 2 hours in it. But let's face it, the idea of avoiding jetlag was just one very feeble part of a generally feeble excuse for having a decent holiday!

So we arrived and Scott whisked us from the airport to Tina's parent's house in Shipton Bellinger, where over the next few days the scale of our predicament started to become apparent. Nowhere to live, nothing to drive, no job to go to, and oh my lord, what an expensive place we were in!

Step one was to buy a car. You can't do much in England without a car, especially if you live in a village on the edge of nowhere like Tina's parent's do. So we umm'ed and ahh'ed for a while and ended up buying a Mini. Small, quick and fun, it's maybe not the ideal car to own when you're looking at moving house, but we figured it would do us nicely for the time being. I'll put some pictures up when I get chance.

Next up was a job for me. This was, after all, pretty much the reason for coming back to this country, and most other things depended on this step, including the important things like where to live. Here we hit a snag. The IT contract market had apparently fallen a bit flat around March time and when I started looking there wasn't much work about. Given the near 3 year gap at the top of my CV, I wasn't the most attractive candidate for most roles anyway. Thus finding work proved a somewhat more lengthy process than I hoped it might. But after about 4 weeks of flinging my CV out a hole opened up: the Java Technology Centre at the IBM Laboratory in Hursley where I used to work had a vacancy for a system test engineer. I'd rather be a system development engineer, but I wasn't in a position to be choosy! I phoned my ex-boss who now works in the Java department and she put in a good word for me. A 6 month contract was offered and I grabbed it. Huge hurdle over!

Knowing where I was working meant we could start solving other problems, the primary one of which was where to live. The closer to Hursley Park the better! We'd spent 4 weeks at Tina's parent's house and a few days at Scott's flat so somewhere to call our own home was urgently required. On a Wednesday I phoned a few letting agents and asked what they had available immediately. That morning we went to see about 5 places, and the next day we put in offers on 3 of them. Next morning 2 of our offers were accepted, so we chose one and moved in that day. So Wednesday morning we started looking, and by Friday afternoon we had moved into a place within 3 miles of where I'm working. Nice. Of course, we had no furniture except some garden furniture we'd left at Tina's parent's house, so we shifted in a couple of deckchairs, borrowed a couple of inflatable mattresses, and set up camp in our new home. That was a couple of weeks ago. Since then we've acquired a couple of wallpaper pasting tables, one office chair (which doesn't fit through the door of the room set up as my office!), a microwave oven and a futon. It might not be comfort, but it's home.

The last piece in the jigsaw, at least for now, was getting the stuff we'd shipped back from Australia. Most of our belongings are still in Perth, sitting in a storage warehouse in Welshpool, but the really important things, like my computers and Tina's sewing machines and clothes came back this way. After endless phonecalls and hassling of the local Pickfords people, our shipment arrived at Tina's parent's house a few days ago. Nearly 13 weeks door to door - much longer than planned and almost twice as long as our much bigger shipment took to get to Perth. Hmmm. Anyway, since then Tina has been ferrying stuff from her parent's house while I've been working, and this weekend I've finally got the computers out, cabled up and working. This coincided with the broadband connection being installed, and hence I'm now able to update the website once again.

Where to from here then? Well, on the professional front. my contract is for 6 months, so that ends around Xmas. We can't think much beyond that at the moment, but if IBM don't offer me any further work we'll probably have to start another job hunt for me. The house lease ends around the same time, so maybe we'll be moving on again then. On the other hand, maybe IBM will offer me some more work and we can stay put. Such is life as an IT contractor - you really have to play it as you find it.

On a more personal front, I have a huge pile of photos to work through. I took about 1,600 on the trip across the USA, which isn't actually that many. The first holiday I took a digital camera on (Egypt), I took over 400 photos in 5 days! My technique has improved from the "take lots and hope a few come out nicely" approach I used back than. But I still have a lot of Photoshop work to do on this lot, and given I only have weekends and evenings to do it (such is the life of an office worker) it's going to take some time. I'll make a start tomorrow.

So, in short, we've landed. Life is starting to take on some sort of routine and we have the handful of things around us that we need for a comfortable existence. Most importantly, we're starting to refill the bank account and getting my career back on track. In those respects, things are going to plan.