Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
Happy Birthday America. Pictured in this post is me prior to moving to England. My brother in law bought me that shirt since he wanted me to remember the country I come from. At time of writing this post I am not sure if i am going to wear this shirt today. That is the plan however.
Now I need to find a good place for BBQ for lunch. I am pretty sure there will not be any fireworks for us today.
I keep forgetting we have fresh mint in our garden. Finally M reminded me while we were out so i could remember to get fresh Lime and club soda so I could try making Mojitos. We love them and it is one of the drinks i have been meaning to try at home. Our first two test drinks were both pretty good.
That means that Pandora / Mojitos box is open. I am told and can independently confirm we have a good supply of mint in the garden so my only limiting factor is how many limes we have on hand.
Now I have a good use for our Tiki glasses. Next up is trying to make Pims now that i got real British lemonade.
Being a New Yorker I default to the stance that Mr Softee would kick Mr Whippy’s butt in a throw down. That being said Mr Softee is a cheap bastard and doesn’t offer a Flake (for 30 pence more).
For the uninitiated a flake is basically a stick of chocolate that goes into your ice cream that if you choose to you can scoop your ice cream with. Of course we (the girls and I) just eat it.
I am not so sure who “they” are however “they” say to start at the beginning. For this post thinking about where that beginning is has been murky. When I moved to London I had over a dozen different drafts of things I wanted to write about. I still have most of those drafts and would love to write about those topics. The realities of the move were I had little time to write when we first arrived. In early January when we arrived that was not a problem since I had a backlog of 4 to 6 weeks of written material to use on my posting schedule. I just depended on how many posts I wanted to schedule per week. At one point I had 3 posts scheduled a week and I was able to streach things out by going down to two.
Then everything changed in mid-January. I got the call that my dad was dying. It wasn’t a surprise. It was unexpectedly so soon. He had been sick for a while. The whole situation unfolded much more suddenly than I had thought. By the time I went back to New York and returned back to London I was focused more on getting back into my routine dealing with our shipping container that writing.
At some point I want to write a lot more about my dad’s death however not ready to do that yet. In any event I still had all these ideas about writing, I just didn’t want to. Over the past few months I posted quick blurbs that I’ve thought about however nothing substantial. This also translated into not really journaling much privately either. That was something I really enjoyed doing. I ended up simply logging where I had gone with hopes of going back and writing some blurbs later.
Besides the lack of motivation, it was very challenging to find time. On one hand it is easy to say I was busy. I have read enough to know that busy is a terrible excuse. If something was important to me I would simply find time. The reality of the situation was I was depressed about my dad and tired from trying to adopt a new routine. All I wanted to do at the end of a day when the girls were in sleep was to relax. In recent weeks my wife and I have both felt much more at ease that we are finally settled in. That has helped in getting me to journal more in recent weeks.
Now I feel like I am in the right place to start branching out into blog posts. That brings me to this post. I didn’t need to write all that, however as with much of my writing it felt therapeutic to write it. And that is why I am writing about this topic as my first full post in a while.
We were out over the bank holiday weekend last week and I asked my wife to get me a water. She brought this back. I have never seen canned water before. Is this really a thing?
It may be just a flashlight however it something I’ve had for 25 years. The batteries are corroded and I cannot get the hex screw out to try soaking it in lemon juice. It’s now off to the recycle center and I need to shop for a new one.
I remember carrying that around almost everywhere when I was volunteering as an EMT in college.
Not quite 3-2-1 Backup at the time however I have resilient copies of DVD backups from 1999. Both still work. I did become fully 3-2-1 backup compliant years later when I made an ISO on a hard drive and then backed that drive up.
I can’t bring myself to part with one of these. And on top of that I have the same double backups for every year throughout the 2000’s on DVD.
No I do not have a good answer why I didn’t purge this before I moved to another continent.
Last year for our anniversary we had a baby sitter and went to a Michelle star restaurant for dinner. It was pretty dam good evening. Tonight we went in a different direction. I had to be home to pick up the girls since M had an appointment to get her NIS number. The girls were a bit punch drunk probably from lack of napping and still adjusting to the time zone differences so we were not up for taking them out for dinner. We did want to do something to celebrate our anniversary so we opted for Pizza take away.
We have decided to go through the list of all 22 or so places in the pizza category of the take away app we started using. This was our 2nd pick. Papa John’s was our first pick. Neither were great. I thought this was ok, however T decalared several times she did not like it. Once she even said she wanted NY pizza with a crust. Not sure why since she barely eats crust when pizza has any but i digress.
After dinner we were able to do FaceTime’s with both sets of grandparents then the kids went to bed. Next up a nice glass of the only alcohol I drink in our house Jack Daniels.
Pretty much everyone that we tell or finds out we are moving to London says “wow that is so cool”. The main exception is for immediate family who will miss us, and are not so pleased. They say they are “happy for us”. On top of that anyone I know who has been an Expat in London has said we will love it and its going to be a great experience. I believe those who have done it. I am super excited for this move. I have been passively and actively trying to make this happen for a while, so yes we are all excited including the kids.
With all of that out of the way this post is about the monumental amount of effort that is required to make a move like this happen. Some things you think about and others you just can’t imagine. I am writing this before half of the actually moving happens and it is extremely stressful and mind bending what you have to do. I want to write this post or what is ending up being a series of posts to outline the effort and stress involved. This move is not something we decided to do on a whim. It is not without its risks, challenges or stress. So here goes.
So you want to relocate to another country. That’s great. It is easier said than done. We knew that MC was eligible for citizenship in an EU country for years. It was something we talked about even before we were married however didn’t really do much with it. After our girls were born MC mentioned that if she had gotten her citizenship before they were born they too would’ve gotten it. We were lazy about it however not the end of the world. What must’ve been about a year and 1/2 ago we were talking to a friend who had gotten the documents to get her Irish citizenship. To sum it up I think she said something like it’s simple but not easy.
Somewhere around the summer time of 2016 MC and I started talking about it more. I had always been interested in an overseas assignment. Up until that time nothing seemed to have presented itself. I am not sure what was the motivator however I realized life is too short to wait for something to drop in your lap. So the more MC & I talked about it the more I decided I wanted to see what opportunities there were and seek them out. At the same time MC was going to gather all the documents she needed to finally get the citizenship done. MC’s parents were great help with this. They had either originals or photocopies of original documents that we would need. Some stuff going back over 100 years ago. It was her parents that had enabled MC to have the claim.
It wasn’t until the fall of 2016 that we really started getting the paperwork together to submit an application. Around the same time there was rumblings about whether or not my office in New York would remain or if other locations would become more prominent.
The friend we spoke to previously was right about the application process. What you needed was very straightforward. Getting it and having it certified in the right way to be used was time-consuming and in some cases costly. The fact that we lived in New York City and enabled MC to go to the courthouse was very helpful. It took almost 3 months of part-time document gathering before we had a bundle ready to submit to the Irish government.
We sent our application out in mid-January 2017. They said it could take up to six months to give us a reply. We were pleasantly surprised four months later to get MC’s foreign birth registry document. Then we used that document along with a lot of the other ones we had gathered to apply for MC’s passport. We had that done sometime around late June or early July 2017.
This long drawn out timeline of what we had to do to get MC her Irish passport is important. Without that our family had much more limited options. With a passport from an EU country any opportunity within any EU country was open to both of us. Since as a spouse of an EU national I have the right to work also. Without that it’s not impossible however significantly more difficult to be able to do what where undertaking now.
In Part 2 I will talk more about the opportunity that made use of all this work.
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