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The W Sisters and the Story of The Missing Wedding Ring

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What must have been 6 or more months ago I lost my wedding ring.  Needless to say i was not pleased.  What was really annoying is that I almost never take it off other than to go to bed.  My youngest has been caught on several occasions taking the ring and walking around with it.  When i noticed it was missing i made the assumption that she was the culprit.

The ring stayed missing.  Even when MC lost and then found her engagement ring T had moved.  I was pretty confident that the ring was in the house.  As we are planning to move I was hopeful that when we packed up our bedroom I would find it.

After a few months of not finding the ring I broke down and bought a new one.  Where the last one was a nice Platinum ring I bought a $40 titanium one.  it was weirdly light.  I figured i wanted to wear something but i wasn’t prepared to give up hope about my original ring.  That meant i wasn’t ready to fork over money on a gold or platinum ring to replace the original one.

Today I wore my Pea coat for the first time of the season.  As I was fishing for my keys as I was coming home with the girls I felt something metal that wasn’t keys.  I thought at first I lost my new wedding ring.  Even before i looked at it i knew it wasn’t the new one.  it was much heavier.  My hopes went up.  I was still wearing my new ring.  I had finally solved the mystery of the wedding ring.

I am now wondering how it got in there.  I can’t remember taking it off and putting it in there so it may have fallen off when i grabbed something in my pocket.  then i didn’t use the coat since the season was over.  I now feel a little bad that i thought A did it but she is totally the usual suspect on stuff like that.

Next up for my newly found ring is to go and get it resized.  I had it sized down right after I lost the weight in 2013 however even after they did the work it still felt a bit loose.  Comparing the new and old rings it is apparent the new one fits much more snug and still comes off pretty easy.  i will try to bring it in within the next week so i can start wearing it again.  I am so glad that mystery is solved.  I still would look at A for a alibi first if something like this happens again.

 

Partsearch Schwag

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While going through my stuff to purge things I don’t use anymore I stumbled across some old Partsearch Technologies Schwag.

Besides the hats I found several jerseys even though I never really played much. One year they may have been especially desperate since I have personalized jersey with my name on it.

I also have a leatherman somewhere with the 2004 / 2005 branding on it that didn’t last either. On a related note my prized Idealab! Pens are gone. I think they dried up so I threw them out in the last move or the one before that:(

The Facilitator Of Deliciousness

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I’m pretty sure that replacing this kitchenAid mixer is in my employee contract for moving.  If not it’s a stipulation in the unwritten marriage agreement that we get a new mixer when we get to London. It will be an expensive item however this mixer is the bringer of deliciousness, the facilitator of cake making so we will, no must have one. Unfortunately just not this one.

I do reserve the right to have sticker shock and at least think about alternatives when i see the price including VAT.

My sister graciously said she would give our mixer a home. I told her I I reserve the right to be an Indian giver her and take back the mixer if/when we come back to the states. She said she’ll take that chance and put the mixer next to another appliance with the same restrictions she got from her friend Amy 11 years ago before they went to Hong Kong. Well played Carrie.

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.