Wednesday 26 August 2009
Monday 24 August 2009
A quick catch-up
We've had a good week. We've been trying to make the most of Sid's last few days of freedom, as his course starts today. From today he will be studying from 6am to 12 noon at campus, then doing another 12 hours of study from home. So on Friday we went to Butler Park, which has fountains for kids to run around in. We also bumped into some other parents from Sid's course, which was great for me, as we're going for a formal dinner on Wednesday to meet everyone.
Butler Park On Saturday we drove out west to Lake Travis. The lake was very low as there's been a drought here this summer, but the landscape around there is beautiful. We stopped at a barbeque place and gawped at all the huuuuge houses around there!
The Boat House Grill
Lake Travis
Yesterday we were invited over to a Scottish family's house after church. They have a gorgeous house, and a pool which Esther loved! It was nice to spend time with people, though it's strange to think that all our social time at the moment is spent with people we don't yet know very well. I can't just plop myself down on the sofa and chat like I would with friends back home. Ah well, it's not bad, it's just different. And I know we have to go through this stage to get into good friendships. At least having both lived abroad before we knew we'd feel this way before we got here. It helps to remember that it gets better as you go on.
Our other news is that on Thursday we bought a car :) It's lovely! It's a 15 year old BMW, and the guy selling it lives way out of Austin and even though he'd had 18 (!) calls from people interested in it, no-one had managed to get out there to look at it! Some had tried and got lost. So Sid asked if he could bring it over to our place as we couldn't get there on a bus, and he agreed. We both liked it and he even went with Sid to the town hall to do the paperwork, which normally Sid would have had to do on his own. So we're enjoying adapting to Texan driving. I keep jerking my left arm into the door looking for the gear stick, but no major injuries or incidents so far :)
Hoping these photos work okay!
Thursday 13 August 2009
Our first week
A week ago Sid, Esther and I stumbled off a plane after a 25 hour journey and arrived at our new home. It was after midnight Texan time (6am-ish UK time) and our house had no furniture whatsoever (bar a fridge/freezer, cooker and broken dishwasher). Sid had ordered airbeds to be delivered, but we hadn't thought about batteries for the pump... So we ended up sleeping on the floor anyway!
A week further on, we now have a dining table, chairs (you can't know how important they are until you have to do without them!!!), 1 (disassembled) bed, crockery, cutlery (again, very very hard to live without!), washing machine and tumble dryer (not quite plumbed in yet), a desk and a hoover. Oh, and a phone and a borrowed internet connection :) (with permission!)
Still to get on our list: a kettle, a car, a sofa, toddler bed, bowls, little tables and lamps and things.
Austin seems like a really nice place. It's hot (close to 40C most days) but that's fine if you're indoors with air conditioning on. Everyone seems to be very friendly (even the people at the social security office!), and lots of people have offered us help and given us their number (inc a taxi driver and a student who sold us an office chair). Sid did 3 days of driving a big pick-up truck while we picked up furniture, and adjusted really well to the roads here.
We signed the lease for our house just over 24 hours before moving in (Sid was up all night emailing the landlord, scanning things and sorting out payment). It's 1 and a half times the size of our house in Chester, which is great :) Esther's really enjoying the extra space, and seems quite content to just play with her doll or read a book, or help me cleaning out cupboards. I've been doing lots of cleaning and trying to unpack things.
Sid's course starts on 24th August with a week-long bootcamp, so we've got a week left to finish sorting ourselves out. When he starts, it will be 80-90 hour weeks until Christmas. I think our biggest need right now is for a car, because so many other things can't happen until we get that. We tried to get to a Church on Sunday, but at that point didn't have internet access and had printed a very vague map whilst in Chester that wasn't good enough to get us there. So hopefully this week we'll get along there.
Sorry these are very random jumbled thoughts! I did write a very long post for the blog earlier in the week, but it disappeared into the ether just as I was about to send it... Hoping this one makes it!
A week further on, we now have a dining table, chairs (you can't know how important they are until you have to do without them!!!), 1 (disassembled) bed, crockery, cutlery (again, very very hard to live without!), washing machine and tumble dryer (not quite plumbed in yet), a desk and a hoover. Oh, and a phone and a borrowed internet connection :) (with permission!)
Still to get on our list: a kettle, a car, a sofa, toddler bed, bowls, little tables and lamps and things.
Austin seems like a really nice place. It's hot (close to 40C most days) but that's fine if you're indoors with air conditioning on. Everyone seems to be very friendly (even the people at the social security office!), and lots of people have offered us help and given us their number (inc a taxi driver and a student who sold us an office chair). Sid did 3 days of driving a big pick-up truck while we picked up furniture, and adjusted really well to the roads here.
We signed the lease for our house just over 24 hours before moving in (Sid was up all night emailing the landlord, scanning things and sorting out payment). It's 1 and a half times the size of our house in Chester, which is great :) Esther's really enjoying the extra space, and seems quite content to just play with her doll or read a book, or help me cleaning out cupboards. I've been doing lots of cleaning and trying to unpack things.
Sid's course starts on 24th August with a week-long bootcamp, so we've got a week left to finish sorting ourselves out. When he starts, it will be 80-90 hour weeks until Christmas. I think our biggest need right now is for a car, because so many other things can't happen until we get that. We tried to get to a Church on Sunday, but at that point didn't have internet access and had printed a very vague map whilst in Chester that wasn't good enough to get us there. So hopefully this week we'll get along there.
Sorry these are very random jumbled thoughts! I did write a very long post for the blog earlier in the week, but it disappeared into the ether just as I was about to send it... Hoping this one makes it!
Tuesday 4 August 2009
I love coincidences! I'm always on the look out for them, and when I see one it makes me ponder. I believe that God has a plan for each of our lives, and if at each oportunity we accept his plan rather than our own, it leads to far better things than we could ever have gained through our own plans. So when I see a coincidence, I believe God has put it there as a kind of signpost to say, "look over here! come this way!"
We've been trying to find a house in Austin on and off for a few months, but people told us there's no point looking much earlier than a week before we arrive. So we started again on Monday last week and found a few places that seemed to fit our criteria:
- 3 bedrooms (2 plus a study)
- maximum $900/month
- within cycling distance of Sid's campus (6 miles)
- not in an area with car theft problems
One of Sid's coursemates had offered to look at places for us and give us a report, take photos, etc. So we tried to set up viewings with our top 3. But one of them wanted long term renters, one realtor was on holiday and the owner never got back to us, one sent us a long credit history form and again we never heard back. So we went back to the drawing board and found one on Craigslist which had just been dropped to $900 a few hours earlier. We sent the info over to Liz and she viewed it on Thursday.
And it goes beyond all of our criteria :) It's several hundred square feet bigger than any of the houses I've been looking at, it looks really lovely (which at some point in my searching I'd given up on finding!), it's in a quiet cul-de-sac, with a very proactive landlord AND it's only 2 miles to campus!
But the funniest thing was the first line of Liz's email: "First of all, the neighbor who showed me the house is actually from Zambia. What an odd coincidence!" Living in Chester, you don't just bump into Zambians every day! Generally the only Zambians we've met here have been related to us and staying in our house! So the landlord gave this neighbour's details as a reference and as Sid chatted with him it turns out that not only is he from Zambia, but actually from Chingola, the town Sid is from! (Which means he will quite likely know Sid's mum and dad!)
I love how this has worked out! We'll be signing papers today or tomorrow and hopefully moving straight in when we arrive on Thursday. It's funny how all the other houses we'd seen were dead-ends, and this one seems to have a flashing neon light over it!
We've been trying to find a house in Austin on and off for a few months, but people told us there's no point looking much earlier than a week before we arrive. So we started again on Monday last week and found a few places that seemed to fit our criteria:
- 3 bedrooms (2 plus a study)
- maximum $900/month
- within cycling distance of Sid's campus (6 miles)
- not in an area with car theft problems
One of Sid's coursemates had offered to look at places for us and give us a report, take photos, etc. So we tried to set up viewings with our top 3. But one of them wanted long term renters, one realtor was on holiday and the owner never got back to us, one sent us a long credit history form and again we never heard back. So we went back to the drawing board and found one on Craigslist which had just been dropped to $900 a few hours earlier. We sent the info over to Liz and she viewed it on Thursday.
And it goes beyond all of our criteria :) It's several hundred square feet bigger than any of the houses I've been looking at, it looks really lovely (which at some point in my searching I'd given up on finding!), it's in a quiet cul-de-sac, with a very proactive landlord AND it's only 2 miles to campus!
But the funniest thing was the first line of Liz's email: "First of all, the neighbor who showed me the house is actually from Zambia. What an odd coincidence!" Living in Chester, you don't just bump into Zambians every day! Generally the only Zambians we've met here have been related to us and staying in our house! So the landlord gave this neighbour's details as a reference and as Sid chatted with him it turns out that not only is he from Zambia, but actually from Chingola, the town Sid is from! (Which means he will quite likely know Sid's mum and dad!)
I love how this has worked out! We'll be signing papers today or tomorrow and hopefully moving straight in when we arrive on Thursday. It's funny how all the other houses we'd seen were dead-ends, and this one seems to have a flashing neon light over it!
Sunday 2 August 2009
Four days to go
Woohooo! Four days till lift-off, and all I can say is God is good!! We got our house decluttered 6 months ago when we were planning to sell it. It didn't sell, but we were saying yesterday how glad we are not to be decluttering now! Sid and I both have tendencies towards last-minuteness, and I can just picture how these last days would have been if we hadn't decluttered back in January!!
We found some friends to rent our house from us - who want it furnished, so we can basically just walk out leaving all our furniture here.
We've been looking for somewhere to live, and have found a 3 bedroom house, in our budget, 2 miles from campus. One of Sid's coursemates went to see it and it looks great. So we're just getting that finalised.
Oh, and money! Somehow we have the $50,000 needed for a year of study! And visas.
We've had endless lists of things to do over the last few months, and God's given us the energy and motivation to do everything.
So now it's just packing and tying up loose ends. Over the last 6 years we've travelled quite a bit together, certainly enough to know that leaving it to the last minute is not a pleasant experience for either of us! So we decided not to be stressed this time round. Wednesday lunch is our cut off point after which there will be no packing, no to do lists, no last minute anything. We will be spending Wednesday afternoon and evening enjoying our last hours in Chester! Hurray :)
We found some friends to rent our house from us - who want it furnished, so we can basically just walk out leaving all our furniture here.
We've been looking for somewhere to live, and have found a 3 bedroom house, in our budget, 2 miles from campus. One of Sid's coursemates went to see it and it looks great. So we're just getting that finalised.
Oh, and money! Somehow we have the $50,000 needed for a year of study! And visas.
We've had endless lists of things to do over the last few months, and God's given us the energy and motivation to do everything.
So now it's just packing and tying up loose ends. Over the last 6 years we've travelled quite a bit together, certainly enough to know that leaving it to the last minute is not a pleasant experience for either of us! So we decided not to be stressed this time round. Wednesday lunch is our cut off point after which there will be no packing, no to do lists, no last minute anything. We will be spending Wednesday afternoon and evening enjoying our last hours in Chester! Hurray :)
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