Thanksgiving weekend

I don't think it dawned on me that we wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving this year like we normally do until probably Wednesday evening, when I was thinking of how most of my friends back home would be heading home for a nice four day weekend with the family and I was just getting ready for another day of work. Oh well...I do get more vacation days now that I'm a UK employee, so I suppose if I had realized it earlier, we could have made our own Thanksgiving weekend. As it was, though, I've had a pretty busy week at work and we're looking forward to getting into our own place and having our own stuff arrive (rather than corporate housing with rented furniture), so we'll have a belated Thanksgiving dinner when we're in our own place.

Speaking of which, our housing search has been successful and we're in the final stages of getting a lease signed on a nice place in Chiswick. It is a converted flat on the ground floor of a Victorian terraced home that has access to a nice sized garden in the back yard. A realtor in the States would probably list it as "charming" (if you've read Freakonomics, you know what I mean by that). It has a lot of personality and we're excited to move in and get settled. I'm posting a few pictures below...

This is a picture of the front of the house:



Here's the garden, as viewed from the kitchen window:

This is the main reception area (don't worry, we're not keeping the white furniture...we know better with two children):

Here's the kitchen, which is a pretty good size compared with several other places we looked at.

Finally, the children have been learning their Articles of Faith in Primary this year, but we decided as a family that we wanted to learn them together as well. They have really impressed us with how quickly and how well they are able to memorize, and it has been helpful to have discussions about what the words mean as we learn each new one.

Enjoy!



(hopefully my experimentation with YouTube works...let me know if you can't see the videos)

Moving update

Anne & the kids arrive in London tomorrow! We're all pretty excited.

They've had a great time in NJ visiting friends and attending church where we lived from 1996 to 2003. It seems like such a long time since we've lived there and it is a bit hard to believe that both kids were born there, now that we've lived in three (and now four) other places since then.

They all went to the American Girl store and the Build-a-Bear workshop in NYC today. They also went to Toys-R-Us. Isabelle got a cat for her American Girl doll and Chase got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and a "bad guy" to play with ("so they can fight each other").

Anne & the kids will get into London tomorrow evening and we'll move into a corporate apartment while (or "whilst" as they say here) we look for a place to live. We're supposed to meet with our relocation coordinator on Friday to go look at places in various neighborhoods that I've been scouting out over the past month or so during my weekends in London. We like Chiswick, Fulham, Hammersmith, and Clapham. There are some other places (St. John's Wood, South Kensington, Pimlico) where we'd love to live, but we'd also prefer to have a bit more space than a shoe box!

Here's one of the properties I liked, but it is pretty far from everything (way out in East Acton), so it might not work. Also turns out they have some pretty crummy schools in the neighborhood, despite how nice (and big for London!) the house is...

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.