Sunday, 27 July 2008

So where is Hamilton again?

Most of you have probably heard of Hamilton... but aren't entirely sure where it is. Well, it's on the North Island to start with, about an hour and a half south of the bottom of the Auckland sprawl. It's in a region called the Waikato, named after the Waikato River, which is NZ's longest river (which is to say, not very long!). The area is very much farming country - there's at least one huge dairy processing plant just outside Hamilton. The town itself has somewhere around 150 000 people, so it's a reasonable size without being big.
The company I'll be working for has their offices in Hamilton CBD, in one of the biggest buildings there - the building has 11 floors I think, and they're in level 9. From there, apparently you can see to the big mountains in the middle of the North Island - Mt Ruapehu and others. When I was there, it was raining, so we couldn't see much at all! To the west, the coast is about a 45 minute drive while to the east, the coast is slightly further. To the north, Auckland is about 90 minutes away, or the (apparently) beautiful Coromandel Peninsula is about the same distance north-east. So all up, Hamilton is pretty central to some nice stuff. I guess we'll have some exploring to do once we get there :D

Saturday, 26 July 2008

The moving planner

Well that's what I feel like my job is at the moment. It's like planning a shot-gun wedding (not that I 've had any experience doing that), but it feels a bit like we're getting married in 6 weeks time with all the different things that need to get options explored, quotes made, bookings made, addresses changed etc.

Surprisingly looking at all the stuff that I had on my to do list for the past week (well since lunchtime Tuesday when we knew we were definitely going), I haven't done too bad. We've organised a combined birthday party/farewell party; applied for Joanna's passport; renewed Peter's passport; got a roadworthy for the car, cleaned it, taken photos of it and put an ad on the internet to sell it; I've got appointments with a number of shipping companies next week coming out to give in-home quotes to pack and ship our stuff; we've set up this blog. The only thing that was on my to do list for this past week that I haven't done is organise cancellation of my gym membership, which I can easily do any day I go to the gym.

The things that can't be done yet that we are eager to have sorted are confirmed dates for our flights and the shipping of our stuff. Unfortunately flights have to wait until Peter and Joanna's passports arrive and shipping has to wait until we get the quotes next week and send them off to the company for them to choose which one to use (they are paying for it).

Friday, 25 July 2008

Are you happy?

I realise that our decision to move to NZ might seem very quick and unexpected, but this isn't the case, so I thought I might fill you in on how we got to where we are.

The possibility of moving overseas to work for a few years has been at the back of our mind for a number of year now. This initially came about because the reality for Peter, if he wanted to stay in academia, is that he would have to find a position overseas after UQ. This is because the academic job market in his field in Australia is still shrinking, not growing, as they are still recovering from the dot-com crash all those years ago. And as some of you are aware we nearly moved to Singapore just before Ben was born to take a job at a university there.

Most of you would know that we like traveling and have done a bit since we have been married, including the whole working holiday kind of thing (China Christmas holidays 2003/2004). We like the idea of living in a different country for a while, it means we can see stuff that we would normally only see if we spent big bucks on a international holiday, but we can spread it out into lots of weekend trips. This is an especially attractive way to do it with the kids.

NZ isn't too far, in our thinking as far as the frequency of seeing our family we don't think it will be much different to if we moved to Melbourne or some other part of Australia (Hamilton is closer than Perth to Brisbane!!)

All this doesn't mean we won't miss our family and friends a lot. So although we are happy and excited about going, there is a lot we are going to miss.

Thursday, 24 July 2008

We are going!!! (watch out NZ)

Well after only starting to consider moving to NZ a couple of months ago, we are already in the throes of madly organising to leave at the start of September. Peter has got a job and now we need to pack up life here and move. We are excited about going, but during the day I can get a bit overwhelmed by all that needs to happen in the next few weeks. We plan to post on this blog regularly from now on, so if you want to know what we are up to you can visit here and find out all our goss.

Wednesday, 23 July 2008

Hello hello hello...

Well, as you are probably aware by now, we are going to be moving to Hamilton, New Zealand in the next few weeks. This blog is going to be our place to share thoughts and experiences, photos and videos, and anything else we think of.
The most useful way to keep track of the blog will be to subscribe to it using whatever RSS reader you like. "A what reader?" I hear you ask... the basic idea is that you subscribe to any number of feeds (from other blogs, news sites etc) and then each time one of them is updated, your reader will notify you and you can read the content. There's oodles of readers out there, depending what you want. If you want it in your email client, try using Thunderbird for your mail. If you want it in your browser, Firefox with the Sage extension is pretty nice. And if you want it portable across computers, get a (free) account with Google and use their Reader on whatever browser you like.
And if you're still confused, UQ has a neat summary here. Otherwise Google it!

Over the next few weeks we'll be updating this as we get closer to actually moving.