Images by John 'K'

I think someone has it in for me.

 

My family have been here 2 weeks now, and the afternoon before we were to take Gemma and her boyfriend back to the airport to fly back to the UK, one of my daughters managed to block the toilet and have it flood the house (as along with being blocked, it wouldn’t stop flushing). Fortunately it’s covered by the property insurance and we are renting, but it means that for the next week or so we will have a procession of clean up people, contractors, decorators, capet fitters and assorted others while the damaged areas are stripped down, sanitized, dried out, repaired, and finally redecorated!

 

On top of all of that, my other daughter has lost her phone. We suspected that  it’d been packed up with the stuff that’s gone back to the UK with Gemma and her boyfriend, but seems that wasn’t the case, so we’ve no idea what happened there.

 

 

AUGH

We’ve been here for almost a week now, and apart from a few issues (not show-stoppers, but causing/caused some angst), all seems to be going well thus far.

 

I have to admit that I’m a little worried about Gemma being in charge of our house back in the UK – I hope she can get past the ‘lets rebel against the parents’ frame of mind she seems to be in and treat the opportunity to live rent free in someone else’s house with some respect. Hopefully she’ll show that my fears are unjustified.

 

I had my first day back in at work properly today – bit of a shock after 2 weeks with my attention fixed on other things. Lots of stuff to catch up with. Everyone else has been dropped at a nearby theme park for the day – I’ll be collecting them later (hopefully they’ll all be worn out but happy).

 

We have a BBQ to cater for tomorrow – at least I shouldn’t have to cook in the rain (unlike the last one I did back in the UK). There’ll also be a few less people to cook for, so will hopefully have some time away from the grill to mingle. 🙂

 

Things seem to be slowly coming together. If I could only get Jan to look a bit more at the positives and gloss over some of the negatives, and if I could convince Sarah and Paula to think for themselves a bit and do a bit more around the house to help, things would be great.

 

Oh well – what is life without a few challenges…….

We got back into the US on the afternoon of Saturday August 6, 2005. After a bit of a delay in immigration (big queues – Virgin landed after BA), we collected our 14 cases and headed off to the rental car place to collectr our 2 cars (one hastily booked the day before after we realised that there was no way on earth that we’d get 14 cases and 6 people into one people-carrier/mini-van).

 

We headed home, and after a slight detour (I took us north up 101 as opposed to south – oops), we got home a bit after 5pm. After unpacking the cars and a few settling in activities, we headed out to Red Robin for a meal before retiring to bed.

 

Sunday was a day of unpacking and furniture shopping (where we spent more than I intended, but have some very nice stuff being delivered), and then Monday was spent on the first phase of getting my family integrated into society here. My daughters were taken to school to get them registered – Sarah could have gone to college but chose to do a final high school year and then do college next year, and Paula starts High School as a freshman….. so long as we can get their vaccination details sorted out. We found that our doctor hadn’t supplied up-to-date records for them so the school authority had a problem with that. Some frantic late night phone calls back to the UK got most of that sorted, but there’s still some ‘top-up’ stuff needed that we’ll have to get done here.

 

Yesterday was spent doing more school stuff, and getting Jan and the girls sorted with Mobile phones (the whole mobile phone thing works totally differently with regards to billing and usage plans). I also got to act as taxi driver for Gemma and her boyfriend (Luke) who are here on a 2 week holiday. They wanted to go into San Francisco, and I thought it better that they were taken in than have them get lost on public transport, so I kissed goodbye to 4 hours of my day!

 

Today Paula has an english test at the high school to see where she should be placed academically, and we should see the first batch of furniture delivered…… fun fun fun.

 

I’ll need to go back to work to get a rest!

It’s now a little over a day before I start my journey back to the UK to be reunited with my family after 4 months apart, and then once I get there it’ll be 7 more days before we travel back to the US to soart our new life properly here.

 

I’m at the point where I am looking forward to this so much that I can’t focus properly on work, and I’m also so nervous that I keep worrying that there’s something I was supposed to have ready for our return that I haven’t done, but I guess anything like that will be relatively easy to correct.

 

I know the next couple of weeks are going to be chaotic for various reasons, but it’ll be great to be back together again.

 

I have to admit though that I’m still worried about the idea that we’re not all coming back to live here, but that was Gemma’s decision and she’ll have to live with the challenges it brings. At least she has a bit of a support network around her, and assuming I can sort her computer out next week, we’ll be able to keep in touch easily.

 

We’re all going to face challenges. As well as what Gemma is facing, my two youngest will have to make new friends and settle into a new school with all the problems that brings. My wife will have the fun of not being able to work for at least 3 months, and will be far from the rest of her family (and I know that she’s going to have a hard time with that as she’s a very family-focussed person), and I’m going to have to make sure I scale down the time I sepnd doing work stuff (as I’ve somewhat let it take over during the past 8 months).  Added to that, our eldest daughter and her family will be loosing part of the support network that they have depended on until now, so I hope they’ll be OK.

 

This is going to be an exciting time for us, but also a difficult time, and I hope we manage to work through the difficulties. Assuming we can, I feel the life we have in the US will be much better than the one we had in the UK.

 

 

As I write this, it’s less than 3 days before I head back to the UK, and 10 days beforewe all fly back to the US as a family. I know there will be a lot of stuff to deal with in the coming weeks – dealing with the arrival of our stuff that’s being shipped from the UK, buying new stuff for the house, working out how to get all the extra stuff my family has to the new house when we have a limited number of cases we can use, and other such stuff, but there’s an end in sight now.

 

It’s been a long 8 months. This last 4 months has been especially hard as I’ve not been able to see any of my family in person, and while it’s been nice being able to chat with them over MSN (with audio and video), it’s not the same as being with them.

 

Lets just hope that we find that it’s all worth it! 🙂