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!
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