Personal

Wait, The Money is Different Sizes in England?

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One of things that turns out to be way more complicated than you would think when planning to move to another country is banking. Before agreeing to go to England we did a lot of research on what it would take. One of the big challenges everyone flagged was getting a bank account. Apparently the Catch-22 is you need to be there to get a bank account in most circumstances. To be there you need money to live. That’s hard without a bank account. Most banks want a local address before you can open an account however most places you want to rent from want a bank account. See the challenge here?

Other things that I’m trying to be smart about is keeping our US presence while were gone.

Then of course there’s the whole thing of English money might not fit in my wallet since it’s different sizes. It’s never a good sign when the company that makes the wall that I own “Bellroy” has a specific line of wallet they market to the UK. That makes me feel like what I own now isn’t going to really work. I might get lucky and maybe everything will be NFC payment. It might be better than the US but that’s wishful thinking.

Next Up Selling Our Apartment / Finding a New Place

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From starting the discussion to signing employment contracts with my company took about one half months. For now we have about 3 1/2 months until I am tentatively scheduled to start in London. For the past few weeks my wife and I have been working to clean up our apartment and de-clutter. We finally did that enough that we posted it with a realtor so we can begin the process of selling it. A few people have mentioned that I should just rent it out while were gone. Even if I thought that was a good idea ( I’m not sure that I do) my building does not allow that. The co-op we live in requires owner occupancy. From what we’ve gathered there is pretty low inventory and a generally high demand in our neighborhood for a two bedroom apartment of our size. Fingers crossed things go smoothly.

If selling an apartment in New York wasn’t enough at the same time we are trying to find a house to live in for when we get to London. Well not yet at that finding a house part of the journey. Were trying to find a few neighborhoods that meet our criteria to start looking for a house. Thankfully I work with a lot of really awesome folks in London already. Several have provided advice about where to live. Much of that advice has been in sync with each other. Funny enough some of that advice has been in contradiction with other advice. It’s funny trying to weed out my families priorities versus what others find important. All the information has been extremely helpful though because we’re learning where we don’t want to look and where we do want to look.

As of writing this post the realtor has just put up the links to our apartment. They look pretty fantastic if you ask me even though I am biased. The next step is to have people view the apartment and hopefully get some offers.

While the selling goes on in New York my wife and I need to plan a scouting trip to London to figure out what neighborhood we want to live in. Online research will only get us so far.

The Why & How’s of Our Overseas Move

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Now that it’s pretty public that we are moving overseas in early 2018 I can finally write publicly about it. I wanted to write about it for a while. I’ve journaled privately a little bit to collect my thoughts however I have not sat down to write any cohesive posts. There’s so much to talk about I’m not sure where to begin. The internal narrative in my head is saying start at the beginning. The question is not sure where to begin or what’s the beginning of the story.

I guess I can start by saying this move is the culmination of multiple events and actions on MCN my part that enabled us to have this wonderful opportunity. It started with MC and I talking about if we would even want to do something like this as far back as last August. We had talked about it when we were dating but it was more like if the opportunity ever happened would be considerate. In August we talked seriously about what that would mean for us if it was a possibility.

MC also worked to get her Irish citizenship. That was something that she talked about doing as far back as when we were dating. The process involved was simple but not easy. That’s why we never really worked on it. While MC had that process in motion and we were waiting for details from the Irish government an opportunity arose at work. Up until earlier in the year I had been managing a regional support group. There is very little international opportunity. A reorganization was announced in March. As part of that I moved into my current role. It was something I’d on a smaller scale in the past and enjoyed. Taking it on globally was a challenge and just different enough to what I was doing that I was eager for the change. The added benefit was that the role was a global one. That opened the door for the discussion about relocation. My manager was open to it and we made the case to our leadership. That took several months however in the end they were on board with it.

I have always felt doing something like this would be very interesting. I almost had an opportunity ages ago in 2000 but was literally days too late. The only other firm opportunity that came up was when I was at Datastream. That however was to go to France. I don’t speak French so I had reservations. I always felt that if an opportunity presented itself I’d be interested.

The how we are going boils down to MC having her citizenship that helped the use case with my company and my new role that I started in May. The why we are going is the experience. I think my dad said it when I was talking to him last week about this that how many Americans have an opportunity like this? I looked it up apparently it’s about 2 to 6 million out of how many hundreds of millions of Americans live overseas. I’ve grown to love believe that the most important thing in life is the experiences. To experience another culture while doing a job I enjoy greatly is a fantastic opportunity. Don’t get me wrong there are many downsides to this that I will go into in another post. Going and not liking it is one thing however having an opportunity like this passing up is something that I think I would always regret.

My Return to Facebook

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It was a nice long run. Since the beginning of 2017 through the middle of September I might have logged onto Facebook all of a handful of times. During that time I might not have posted anything. I don’t count blog posting since I write them and it auto magically gets posted to my twitter and Facebook feeds without me logging in.

This week all that changed. I started wading back into what sometimes feels like the cesspool of Facebook. Why after calling it “sometimes cesspool” like would I return? I did not really want to. My not using Facebook has taught me a few things. For one sharing photos to a limited number of people is challenging. I have an iPhone. My wife has an iPhone. My parents have an iPhone. My in-laws do not. If I want to share photo and use iCloud, I have to call them and let them know they should turn on their iPad to look for an update. That is a technology fail. Finding a tool or service that a large number of people use is hard. Getting people to start using the tool because you want to share information is challenging. Especially if that’s the only reason they’re going to use it is for you. Using Facebook I lower the barrier to use significantly since many people are using it already.

Facebook’s not quite secure however. Photos on Facebook aren’t out on the Internet for everyone to see however they are also not securely locked away that virtually no one sees. That basically became my trade-off. For the past nine months or so I haven’t really shared what’s going on and I was ok with that. I am not self-centered enough to assume that everyone that is a friend of mine on Facebook is missing photographs and updates about what’s going on in my life. There are some family and friends that are interested and are not set up technologically to connect in other ways. Those people I do miss the connection.

That brings us to why I’m back. During roughly the same time I was radio silent on Facebook a lot is been going on in the “real world”. When not posting on social media I could relatively easily meet up with someone for dinner or an afternoon to hang out to catch up. I could talk to someone in the family who talks to someone to pass on details of whats going on, etc. In the near future that will change a lot. Starting on or around new year we will be moving. There will be significantly more distance between close friends and family and where were going.

We are moving to London. Yes I said it correctly, London England. If you have read five paragraphs in to this blog post you earn the right to be one of the first (ok maybe twelveth) to know that were moving overseas.

I plan to write a lot more about our planning, reasons why were going, and the experience in the future. This post really is about my return to Facebook. Why I returned is directly related to our move overseas. The way I’ve been updating friends and family limited who got photos of my kids and what was going on in the world with us. Becoming more “normal and oversharing on Facebook will be away for those close to us to know what’s going on since will be thousands of miles further away.

I still have issues with Facebook’s facial recognition of photographs. Especially of my kids. On the other hand my wife does post photos so the exposure is already there. Commenting about what we are doing goes to my blog that is completely open on the Internet. I do that deliberately however I know I need to be mindful of what goes up there since there is no restrictions.

The other aspect reading about what other people are up to and having quick discussions with soon to be faraway people. The challenge is doing that while weeding through all the other stuff on Facebook. The other stuff being political commentary, news articles, etc. That’s what drove me away in the first place.

In the end that’s the price I I am willing to pay to have some more level of connection with those friends and family. Because of that Facebook wins. I am back. I might not be happy about it however I’m glad to have a medium where I can share what’s going on in our lives while we are 5000 or so miles away.

The W Sisters and The Story of Their Inheriting Fragments of My Remaining Childhood Toy Collection

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I find it fascinating what stuff my parents decided to keep from my childhood. When I got too old to play with some toys I boxed them up in old VCR box or two and put them in a closet. It felt like ages later but in retrospect was less than 10 years before some of those toys made it out of their box when younger cousins would come over to play.

Not all of my childhood toys were created equal however. My remaining G.I. Joe’s and Star Wars action figures along with some miscellaneous other action figures and matchbox cars were what the family would get to play with when they would come and visit. Other stuff such as most of my transformers and I believe the Lego state safely tucked away. Of the toys is that made an appearance when the cousins came over only the matchbox cars survived. I don’t know where any of the Star Wars figures went. The G.I. Joe’s physically are still around however I believe I’ve written about in the past that the rubber band that held them together deteriorated on most of them so by the time I opened the box with them in it they were in pieces. I did have some other action figures that survived. Most notably my Ironman, Hannibal Smith’s and Murdoch from the A-Team.

It must have been well over a year ago when I asked my mom to bring the action figures over to my house if she still had them. I wanted to introduce the girls to some of the superheroes that I thought I had. What my mom brought wasn’t a whole lot since overtime things broke or got lost. I was still surprised how much stuff there was. The box that she brought over was mainly matchbox cars, G.I. Joe’s and a few of the other action figures I mentioned. There was one or two small transformers and a few transformer accessories. At the time I thought that was all that survived.

Of the toys that I got some of the matchbox cars I could not give to the girls because the wheels were very loose and I was concerned A might put them in her mouth after breaking them off. After I vetted what toys were safe for the girls I gave them some matchbox cars and action figures to play with. MC’s parents bought a few other new matchbox cars had to the limited collection I had released for use. Even to this day I get in all the install job when I see the girls playing with a matchbox car that I recognize and remember playing with when I was a kid.

More recently I wrote about asking for Legos that I knew my mom had. After I began asking for that it opened the floodgates for my mom to want to purge what stuff she had left from my childhood out of her apartment. Having an apartment of my own with two kids made it high time I probably took this stuff anyway. I was surprised at how many transformers and additional matchbox cars I had in the second box I received in August. Several of the matchbox toys I can’t give to the girls because the paint is flaking off them. Most notably are two die cast metal space shuttles and one 747 where one of the space shuttles would sit on. That jet for some reason I painted completely white and the paint was flaking as well. I did find several transformers. I even had the cab to optimist prime. I don’t know where the semi part of him went however I was happy to have anything at all. I decided that there was no way I was giving the girls Transformers from the 80’s to play with. First of all they would break them in a minute. Second of all there’s too much nostalgia in it for me to chance them destroying them. Nancy found a shelf in our bookcase where I have them on display now. Jetfire still remain separate however that’s a different post in and of itself.

Next up for my mom to bring over is my baseball card collection. When she brought up that she was doing that I asked where my comics were. She insisted that I didn’t have any. After I insisted she look for them further she found my boxes and will bring them all over together. The baseball card collection is not that substantial. I had significantly more of them when I was much younger. I remember my mom would bring home tons of them were confiscated or found from her classes. That must’ve been late 70s and early 80s. What I do have are a few complete annual series from the late 80s. As for my comic books I will wait to go through them before writing more about them. I have an idea about some of what I have however I don’t recall how extensive the collection that I kept was. I think I kept everything that I don’t however I will need to confirm that once I get them.

It’s cool getting all these flashbacks from my childhood. As an adult I purged a lot of the things that I had taken with me when I moved out or previously gone from my parents. For example I remember getting rid of my relatively extensive collection of Dungeons & Dragons books in the mid to late 2000’s. I could’ve gone some money for them on eBay but the amount of effort to sell all of them would’ve been too much for me at the time. Each piece individually wasn’t worth that much however the entire collection might’ve been worth selling. I also have purged much of my book collection from my childhood. There are a few that I kept however not much. That reminds me I need to find where I put my Narnia Chronicles box set. I know I loaned them to my niece Morgan with the specific instructions that I would like them back when I have kids. My sister did give them back to me recently but I don’t remember what I did with them. T’s not quite ready for those stories however she might be pretty soon.