Recently in Life Category

On Thursday 19th August I will be leaving Northern Ireland and relocating to California. I'm keeping my current job with 3PAR (who I should point out are actively hiring in Belfast), just moving west by a few thousand miles. I'll be working in the Fremont office, but based on advice from most people I've talked to I plan to live in San Francisco.

I've got a few trips over to England planned between now and then which will give me an opportunity to see people before I go. Also I'll be at DebConf, where I hope to try and meet a least a few other Debian people from the Bay Area and pick their brains for advice about where to live & things to do.

This is something that's taken a lot longer to come together than I originally expected. I'm very glad it finally has, but obviously there's a degree of trepidation about the whole process. If I seem somewhat disconnected from reality for the next few months rest assured I'm sure I'll be back to normal soon enough once I've moved and found somewhere to live.

Translink are breaking the trains for 3 months at the end of March. This is manifesting as the line between Ballymena and Coleraine being entirely shut (it's only single track, so it's not like they can do one side at a time), but will hopefully result in a smoother, faster journey. Not much good for the 3 months when my journey goes from a single train ride to a train, bus, then another train ride. And gets longer by 20-30 minutes (so potentially 5 hours a day commuting. Yay!). I think not.

So I have rented a flat in Belfast, conveniently only 3 minutes walk from work. 3 month leases are hard to find so I have it for 6 months. I'm a bit freaked. I shouldn't be really; I lived alone when Katherine first moved back to NI. But that was in a house I'd been in for ages rather than somewhere entirely new to me. It proved its worth last night when we were able to walk to Do You Remember the First Time? in a couple of minutes though. Being in the city centre is damn handy, though I'm having to get used to the regular noise of traffic again. :)

(This post primarily a test of Drivel; it's not worth the hassle of dealing with Virgin or BT to get a broadband connection, so I'm going to end up continuing to use my Orange 3G dongle and trying to do things in local clients where possible.)

(Not a great picture as it's taken with my phone, but I think you'll get the rough gist.)

Just before the New Year we accepted an offer on our house in Norwich, which had been up for sale since September. It was a bit lower than we'd hoped for, but the buyer was an investor and so we hoped it would be quick and not involve too much hassle.

How wrong we were. We finally completed on Friday, with the money hitting our account today (thanks to the Ulster Bank being a bit shit about telling our solicitor how much was outstanding on the mortgage). I'd become convinced that it was going to fall through, that we wouldn't be able to find a new buyer and that we were going to end up having to rent out a house that it wasn't convenient for us to check up on (due to the radioactive body of water between us and it). So I am somewhat relieved to finally be rid of it.

My grandfather (my last living grandparent) was found dead in his flat today at 11am. He lived alone in Liverpool (his choice; my mother had offered to help him move to Newry in the past but he hadn't wanted to) and when my uncle failed to get hold of him yesterday for his weekly phone call he became worried. When there was still no response this morning my mother called the police who ended up breaking down the door of his flat. He was apparently found in bed, which hopefully means it was quick and without suffering.

It's been a while since I was close to him; when I was much younger he would take me into the centre of Belfast when he visited and we would wander round, always ending up with a trip to the Electronics Centre, where I would disappear into large boxes of pruck, and Anderson & MacCauley's for lunch. More recently I haven't known what to say to him, which was a bit of a shame.

He died aged 81, with all his own hair and possession of his mental faculties, which doesn't seem like bad going. I think he would have found it very difficult to have had to rely on others to live his life, so perhaps in some ways this was better. *sigh*

My body hates Mondays. Over the weekend I get up at 9am or later. My coffee consumption is also minimal. This morning I was up at the usual 5:30am and was on my 4th cup of coffee before 10am. And we're not talking weak coffee - my cow orkers have been known to pour the pot out if it doesn't meet with their approval for strength. This thunking between the weekend and my weekday routine means that Mondays are sort of a blur for me. Thankfully I seem to fall into more of a rhythm by Tuesday.

(This post is a substitute for any technical content. I'll try to think of some soonish.)

Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand was really a much bigger step.

A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.

• We moved house to Castlerock. We knew this was likely for Katherine (she spent her first year at UU living in Portstewart and had been looking for somewhere new), but I didn't think I'd be moving back to NI just yet. Unfortunately we're still trying to sell the house in Norwich. :(
• Simon and I sold Black Cat. Really couldn't have predicted that this time last year.
• I got a new job with 3PAR in Belfast. I suppose that relates to the BCN sale, but if you'd asked me last year if I'd be looking for a new job, let alone have one, this year I'd have said no!

All in all I think I'm in a better place than I was last year. 5:30 starts are painful (it's 2 hours door to door with trains at 6am or 8am and nothing in between), but at least I get to come home to Katherine rather than an empty house, and it's nice to be working in an office again rather than on my own. We will eventually get the Castlerock house sorted (there are still lots of things in boxes, the TV isn't even hooked up, the wireless coverage is patchy in the study, the kitchen isn't quite finished yet, the living room is barely started yet, need I go on?). And I'm sure it'll stop raining for at least one day during the year. Please?

On Wednesday 17th October the majority of my belongings will leave Norwich, to arrive in Castlerock at some point the next week (exact day to be confirmed). I will then start work for 3par as a software developer in Belfast on Monday 29th. It's been 6 years since we moved to Norwich and I'll be sad to leave it, and all the friends I've made here, behind. I'd have stayed a bit longer but 3par were keen for me to get started. I imagine I'll be in the Fat Cat on Saturday 13th if people are around. And I expect visited in NI once we get settled in!

Following many months of faff, today Katherine and I completed on a house in Castlerock. I say Katherine and I, but really I did very little. She started looking after she'd started at UU, before we knew Black Cat was going to be sold. My sole involvement was to be dragged round a few places (including this one) when I was back in April.

The initial plan was that Norwich would remain our "home" and this would be somewhere that Katherine would be able to live during term time, that I could also work from now and then. Given recent events it'll no doubt become "home" and we'll leave Norwich. To that end I've been looking at the job market back in NI. I've found (and applied for) a few things in Belfast, all software development roles. I may even have an interview; had a phone call today that felt very much like a phone interview and ended with talk of getting a formal interview sorted for when I'm next over.

All scary stuff. Belfast is a bit far for a commute, so I may end up living there during the week. Or I might not get anything in NI and have to look further afield. Anyone know anything going in Derry? That may be a more managable daily journey.

So. In a month's time I become unemployed. Which is something I couldn't have predicted a year ago. This is going to mean a lot of changes for me, most of which I haven't really been able to even start to plan until the news was out in the open. Scary stuff.