New post if this random internet connection holds on long enough....

Well.

Where have YOU been?

We’ve been busy. We’ve been unable to locate reliable internet. We’re still working on that. We’ll probably end up having to pay some small fortune to get internet in our home.

Oh. We moved.

We went from having absolutely free housing to having to pay half the month’s rent plus all utilities. This happened because we were unwilling to live in the places that were going for the rent our employers were offering.

We now live in a nice place. Too nice.

It’s so nice that there are no locals living here. Only expats. That doesn’t make it nice it’s just my way of saying we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Our laundry is done for us. Not by us.

We have at least one, if not two, security guards posted around the apartment complex 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We have a swimming pool.

We have satellite TV. (7 whole channels!)

We have two bedrooms, three beds and two bathrooms.

The bathrooms have little tiny showers.

The little tiny showers have rock floors.

Like little pebbles. They’re pokey. Kind of weird.

We have air conditioning.

Three air conditioners in a little tiny place. One in each bedroom and one in the main room.

Even when the air conditioning is turned off its way cooler than the house we were in previously.

We have a garden view. A very nice view.

We moved in on Saturday. Moving entailed packing our five duffel bags again and loading them into the company truck along with our computers, frying pan, pot and other sundries and driving to the new place.

One must take great care when visiting us not to fall in the pool. So we took great care when moving our stuff down a flight of stairs and past the pool not to drop our stuff in the pool.

We succeeded.

With the move we lost out on having a DVD player but we’re able to rig Nicole’s computer to play DVDs on our new, larger, TV (that has satellite included! 7 channels!)

We are about a 10-15 minute walk (all downhill) to the town centre. In the town centre is a couple of shopping malls. A supermarket. A bunch of coffee shops. A movie theatre. A McDonalds. A KFC. A Pizza Hut and other mo’ better sounding restaurants. We’re quite far from work now. Probably a 20 minute taxi ride but are happy to be able to walk to town and walk to the ocean. Albeit the ocean near here is a port. It’s still the ocean though.

Nicole had both of her feet swell up on Friday. That was weird. She’s so sick all the time. She cried.

But she got to go home half a day early.

She’s happier now that her feet are of normal size and she gets to live in a “too nice” place and sleep in a comfortable bed. With air conditioning blowing if she so chooses.

We actually want people to visit us now. Looking at the other places and living in mold/mildew land we were going to tell people NOT to visit us that we would just visit them somewhere. Now, with this place we think it would be a nice relaxing holiday to come visit us. We’ll even let you use the giant pool and turn on the AC if you bring us treats.

We’re probably going to be coming to the US in June. (Maybe April but unlikely). We need to get 36 hours of CE by the end of December. We have… none.

There is a conference in Las Vegas in April but they only offer 24 hours of CE max and we would have to take off work to do it and we could only stay for a few days so that one looks like its not such a good idea.

In June we have a two week break so we can do a conference then. Unfortunately its in Washington, DC and will be very expensive so we’re still looking for other choices (December?) but it seems like we might need to do that one. So if you want to visit us before Christmas that would be one way to do it. Meet us in DC.

We still owe a lot of people a lot of emails but we are unable to access our email at work and this Saturday was moving day so we weren’t able to go to a internet/coffee shop.

Work starts for real tomorrow and we should start settling into a routine. That routine will include emailing/skyping/phoning people. So look forward to that.