Move week

So two weeks since my last post, but apparently nobody noticed anyway, so I guess this is just for me for now.

This week is the week we begin our move to England. We're pretty excited about it, but it seems like there is just so much still left to do. Movers get here on Wednesday to pack the part of our stuff that is going overseas, then Thursday for the stuff going into storage. They'll be back on Friday to load everything onto the truck(s). Then it's four to six weeks until we see stuff in London.

In the mean time, I head back to the UK on Tuesday, while Anne & the kids start out on Saturday, stopping in NJ for a few days to visit friends we haven't seen in about four years. They'll join me next Thursday in London and we'll hopefully be able to start looking for a place to live on Friday. Busy, busy.

Today was the Primary program at church. The kids did such a good job. Chase was really sick, but had been practicing his part and really wanted to be there. He could barely keep his eyes open on the stand, but he stood up and did his best to sing every song, though he had to keep reaching for tissues for his runny nose. When his turn came, he delivered his part (including a recital of the 10th Article of Faith, which is his favorite, probably because he likes to say "paradisiacal") flawlessly and eloquently. Isabelle also did a great job and you could really tell she was singing out and that she had really made an effort to memorize all the songs. Isabelle invited her Kindergarten teacher from last year, something she had wanted to do last year, but then left it until the last minute when it was too late. This year, she remembered several weeks ago and invited her.

Carson was here for the weekend, and we enjoyed having him visit. He got to spend a lot of time with Isabelle and Chase, and Chase especially liked showing off his skills on the play yard out back with such an attentive audience. Carson and I watched part of the Cal game last night and decided that in a way, it is good that Cal has been playing so poorly the last three weeks because now we don't have to worry about the expense of traveling to Pasadena next January. Between Mark's wedding and a Rose Bowl, that could have been a pretty expensive month, especially from the UK!

Anyway, that's the latest from here.

How do I get started again?

So how do you start blogging again when it has been over a year and a half since your last post?

So much has happened in the last 18 months that the only way I can think of to get started up again is just to start posting bullet points and hope that gets the habit started again...

• Finally got off my crutches (as you know from my last post)


• Continued rehabbing my knee both in physical therapy and by working out in the gym at school


• Finished business school classes on Thursday


• Started work with Mercer Management Consulting the following Monday and was staffed on a case the next day (in retrospect, I should have taken a little bit of time off first)


• Graduated business school two Fridays later


• Finished our new house and moved in - pretty close to the scheduled end date


• Anne and I celebrated 10 years of marriage in August of 2006. We took a weeklong Caribbean cruise in October to celebrate


• Isabelle started school for the first time and loved it. Chase started preschool and loved it as well.


• Worked on an airline case for first nine months on the job. Met and worked with some great people and weathered some pretty dicey situations with a client in difficult financial straits, but in the end, the outcome for our work and the client's prospects was quite favorable.


• Got a dog (inherited Maggie from my parents, since she was needing some attention from a house full of kids)


• Took the whole family to a family reunion in Knoxville, TN to watch the Cal - Tennessee game with 108,000 screaming fans at Neyland stadium. What an experience! (and what a horrible loss!)


• Anne finally got her giant Christmas tree (seriously - it's like 16 feet tall and requires like 8 boxes of ornaments, two ladders, and an extra rider on your homeowners' insurance policy to decorate!)


• Went from airline work to retail work around the first of the year and have been there ever since...oh, and the client is in England, so I've been flying back and forth between London and Dallas twice a month since February!


• Mercer Management Consulting combined with several of its sister companies and rebranded under the name Oliver Wyman, the namesake of one of the sister legacy firms and actually one of the firms that Mercer had acquired several years earlier.


• Took a ten day family vacation to Kauai with cousins, aunts, and uncles, and had a blast - again!


• Made the trip (by myself this time) out to Berkeley to watch Cal exact revenge on Tennessee for the pounding they endured at their hands last year


• Have recently decided to transfer to the London office for a year or two - more on that later...

Anyway, hopefully that will get me started again - maybe in my next few posts I can come back and fill in some of the blanks, but for now, I'll just add a photo taken during our Kauai trip this past summer...