September 11

I meant to write this yesterday but was lacking motivation for various reasons.

Yesterday of course was September 11 and six years after the World Trade Center tragedy. It is interesting to me that six years later I am in roughly the same place I was when this happened. In fact as with most people I am sure, I think how lucky my wife and I were during that time. Six years of course is not a significant milestone or anniversary though, but another point in our life when changes are about to occur.

You see on September 10th 2001, we were in the US, Chicago to be exact and getting on a plane to fly over to the UK to see my parents and so I could have some meetings with one of my clients. Initially our plans in the US whilst on holidays visiting my Sister and her family was to fly directly out of Boston’s Logan airport to the UK on September 11. I can’t say for sure if we would have been on any of the flights that actually flew into the World Trade Center, and of course the fact that we decided to go to Chicago three days earlier removes that entirely out of the equation, but sometimes you just think ‘how close we were’. I am sure that a lot of people have similar thoughts about that day.

I am sure that the vast amount of the population of this world also remembers that day.

I remember vividly watching the whole events unfold live on TV in my parents house in Pimlico, London only a few hours after actually landing at Heathrow from Chicago. I also remember saying to my family at the time that this is going to change the world as we know it. It was an obvious statement, but looking back now on the last six years, there is absolutely no doubt that it was spot on. This world has significantly changed, and I for one am not sure if it has changed for the better. Being in the UK after it happened for the next seven days was a very strange feeling. It seemed like the entire country was in a slump.

So much has changed since then in our own lives. We had our beautiful daughter, I shut down my business and we moved to the UK. I started work with one of my previous clients full-time. We purchased our first house and had our next addition to the family, our precious son.

Now six years later things are about to change for our own little part of this world, significantly. Hopefully to make things better for us in our life in the UK.

The original motivation for the upheaval that we went through was to make our life a lot simpler. Essentially to make a new start in a new country. There were our own causalities of the change, we left behind my wife’s side of the family as well as a lot of great friends. Life hasn’t been spectacular over here. It initially started simple, but inevitably became more complex over time. It is still more complex than I would like and the changes we are about to press forward with are designed to try and make it simpler once again. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t regret moving over here. We have seen a lot of things here that we would have never seen still being in Australia. We have been to Paris twice, Ireland, Venice and plan on a lot more travel.

One of the other reasons we decided to up sticks and move to the UK was because running my own business and working with the clients I had at the time meant I was not getting to see much of my family. Now here in the UK, I am actually seeing less of them due to travelling every week and being away from home on average two to three nights per week. This was definitely not part of the plan and it needs to change. I miss my family when I am away and want to get back to the position I was in originally when we arrived. I know some people like travelling, and at one point in my life I loved it also, but not any more. Not unless my family travels with me.

Anyhow, I am nervously looking forward to the next six years, but firmly believe we are making the right decisions in our life.

Updates to follow… at some point.

Travis

The Car Has Arrived!

So I picked up the new car yesterday and finally got rid of the BMWs. It is a HUGE weight that has now been lifted from both Kate and I not having them anymore. Not just because we now only have one car that parks nicely in the carport, but for all of the other issues that have been stressing us out over the last three years.

As soon as I arrived home yesterday we loaded the kids car seats into the back and went for a little drive.

Overall I was pretty happy with the level of service that I received from the car dealer Glyn Hopkins. The car was delivered clean and tidy, apart from a mark on the passenger dash that was obviously just a careless cleaner, all of the options were explained well enough.

Kate is doing the first shopping run this morning and will return with a review of how it faired. Of course knowing Colchester I can also imagine that it will be the first opportunity the rest of the community will have to inflict as much damage as they possibly can to it, so my fingers are crossed for getting away with only a car door ding.

Replacing BMWs – Done!

Update: Good news, the car came back untouched.

New Car on the Way

After looking through my recent posts, I feel I am falling into the negative thought processes again, so I thought I would throw in a positive post for a change.

After three looooong years of owning BMWs, we have finally gotten rid of both of them. BMWs are just not for us. From the moment we bought our first one, a 316 touring (second hand) they have just cost us soooo much money. Money we could have put to something of much better value then just cars. Not to mention in the town we live in, they appear to be targets for every greasy dickhead that walks past them. They have cost us a lot of money fixing the results of these anti-social weed rodents.

So, we have now bought a new Nissan NOTE that arrives on Saturday and have ‘part exchanged’ both the 5 and 3 series on it. I think we got a pretty good deal for the two of them, but of course I am sure we could have got more. The upside is that actually although we have financed the difference of the part exchange and the new car price, the monthly payments is actually less than what we would be paying for the two BMWs in petrol, insurance (quite high because of the neighbouring road turds) and maintenance.

We are both quite excited by the new car. I mean it is no luxury saloon or anything, but it is well built, has all of the safety gadgets we require and is quite cheap to run. Very spacious inside and we really don’t need two cars anymore.

So I will be posting a little bit more about the experience as we go. Looking forward to seeing how it goes with a long trip, maybe Holland or North France.

One of the funny things about when I took the car for a test drive… I felt like a total tosser driving it around, because the tester had all of these advertising slogans stuck all over it, the biggest being Nissan’s main slogan for the car ‘Because there is no greater adventure than having a family’ or something like that. He He.

3MusicStore Rips Off Customers

So I am a 3 UK customer, last Xmas I purchased two new Nokia N73’s on contract with what appeared to be a great deal of Unlimited* Internet Access, Unlimited* Skype Calls, Unlimited* MSN Messenger and a whole bunch of talk minutes and text messages. What was interesting was that this was the X-Series Silver package that actually was supposed to cost an extra £5 per month, on top of the usual contract fee, line rental etc.

The interesting part of that is that you also got £5 to spend per month on anything offered by 3’s online services, ie video, music etc. Well the music was great, the tracks that you could download were 99p each, perfect, I could download 5 tracks per month… all as part of my contract.

Very quietly, last month I think it was, the prices of the tracks went up to £1.29, which means that within the £5 you could only actually purchase three tracks, because four would push you over the £5. So then you don’t actually have anything that you can buy for the £1.13 left over. 3 now pockets that little bit of extra cash because the money does not carry forward to the next month. No wonder they didn’t mention anything about it. I mean sure, £1.13 is bugger all for me, and truth be told I never used all of the £5 per month anyway, just not enough new tracks coming out per month to purchase. But if you look at how many people have the same contract (I believe the other Gold contract rakes in a little more) and then multiply the £1.13 per month over an 18 month contract, they are making a reasonable amount for just simply increasing the price of the songs by 30p. It actually calculates to be an increase of 67p per track or almost double the original price.

Once again I am turned back from Digital Downloads to buying CDs and then ripping them to my phone. Higher audio quality and it is cheaper.

* Unlimited is actually the usual marketing crock of shit. There are limits on the service, but they claim that the unlimited term can be used because you are ‘not likely to go over the limit’. The unlimited internet is actually limited to 1Gb per month, Skype is limited to 5000 minutes per month and MSN Messenger is limited to 10,000 per month. I know that those limits are pretty high, and I don’t think I have ever come close to going over them, but it is definitely not ‘unlimited’.

Bourton On The Water

Recently when our friends Gerard, Janine and Matthew were out visiting from Australia, we took a trip across to the Cotswolds, which is one of the nicest parts of England. We met them in Stow-on-the-Wold and then drove to Bourton-on-the-Water to have some lunch. It was a nice day, but extremely cold.

One of the unfortunate things about the UK is that a lot of the pubs are actually owned by the beer breweries… not that uncommon I know, but in true brewery style, every pub they purchase is converted to look like an ‘Authentic English Pub’, complete with low wooden beams (often just façades on plaster board) and pictures of past times and memorabilia screwed onto every square inch of wall, and sometimes ceilings also… if the low beams allow enough head room of course.

Don’t get me wrong, in the main most of these pubs are quite nice to go to for drinking and eating and most have an excellent spread of food available. The people and staff are good value also. The problem is that because the food is usually formula fayre, i.e. you can go to any of say, the Greene King pubs and get exactly the same type of food and quality, it is this formula that means that the food is usually the equivalent of a McDonald’s meal in the processing stakes.

At the pub we went to in Bourton-on-the-Water, it was just this type of food. I went for Sausages in Onion Sauce on ‘Creamy’ Mash Potatoes. (usually quite a nice dish) The mash potatoes were a huge lump of re-hydrated white slop that quite frankly could have been used for filling holes in concrete. The sausages as I had expected were full of the sort of rubbish you would expect in dog meat (although quite tasty, the sausages not the dog meat… and by dog meat I don’t actually mean dog meat, but meat used to feed dogs).

The only saving grace of the food was that they made damn good chips.

Insults & Jokes

Life is strange sometimes!

What do you think or do when someone relatively close to you makes a joke about you possibly being a suspect in a serial killer case, but because you have lost a lot of weight and don’t own the same colour car as to what Police are looking for, you must not be a suspect?

I mean do you think that it is an insult because they have effectively ruled you out based on your car colour and weight only or that it is just a seriously bad taste joke?

Update: Thinking about it more, what could I or anybody do to make that thought come to mind in the first place? Is it because that person thinks you might just be capable of such an act or because they don’t think at all? Was it specifically directed towards you, or just because you might be an easy target and in reality that person would direct the joke at anybody who might fit the car colour and body weight profile.

I am sure that some would say that it is just a joke, but it is not the way I feel about it and I am not sure that I will be convinced otherwise. Some of course would probably say that it was meant to be some sort of compliment based on the amount of weight I had lost. Back-handed as it may seem.

Anyway I hope everyone else has a great Sunday, hopefully mine will get better.

Travis

Distress

Last Sunday our little lad fell in from what began as a cold, or so we initially thought. After some insistence the doctors agreed that he should be taken down to the hospital to be checked out properly. From that point he was immediately admitted to the children’s ward and began his stay. Hopefully he will be out tomorrow or at the latest Saturday.

The photo above was actually one of the better ones we took on Monday to send to our family who could not be with us here in Colchester during this time. For me however it was one of those periods in my life that proves a couple of things. Firstly how fragile life is (especially when you are only three months old), and secondly how much your kids actually mean to you. You sort of cruise through family life not really appreciating how much your kids mean to you until something happens that shows that they could possibly be taken out of your life. I know that sounds possibly over the top, but I guess it is not just thinking that they can be taken away from you, but also how much you end up worrying about their lives.

To see your child in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of them and clearly looking so unwell just breaks your heart. Especially with the fact that there is actually nothing you can do to make it better for them. You do feel helpless, and the only consolation is that they are being looked after by people who know what they are doing. The fact that our son was in hospital was both a comfort and a distressing feeling. It was clearly the best place for him during this time, but that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t want him to be in Hospital.

I love my kids and miss my wife, (Kate has been staying in Hospital with Heath) but know that we will go back to normal after this moment in time. However I also know that my life has changed again with a deeper concern for my kids. I hope the NHS reforms don’t decide, as is being discussed, that smaller A&E Hospitals should be closed in favour of larger regional specialist centres, because having the other half of my family only a couple of miles away made this whole incident almost bearable.

Anyhow I need to do some ironing.

 

Travis

 

Tree Stubble

I know “What The?”, try clicking on the pic and looking at the larger original, you will see what I mean.

Roses are Red… Or Pink

Another Day @ Castle Park

We all went for a little walk into town today, although the weather was looking downright nasty, it is one of those things like in Melbourne if you waited for the weather to turn nice you would never get anything done.

As you can see from the pic, the weather wasn’t that bad at all, but the sky had some serious grey clouds swirling, and it proved that it had the capacity to bucket down shortly after I took this picture with the entire throng of families running for shelter as the skies opened up. Of course ten minutes later the sky went sunny again and we headed off home. Trull-la-lul-la-laa.