Yep, you read that right. Rich has joined the ranks of the Perth employed and is now an IT Consultant for DSC-IT. He's valiantly opted to commute by bike but rain has thwarted his attempts this week (well that's his excuse for getting me to drive him in!) So a second car is on the cards....
Off to bed now as it's late but will post more soon.
Tuesday 24 July 2007
Sunday 8 July 2007
It's been a while.......
Hi All
It's been a while since we updated the blog. Apologies, etc, etc but let me get on and tell you what we've been up to. Well, since Rich added the photos of our house to this blog we moved in 4 weeks to the day from when our offer was accepted! So a little quicker than how things went in the UK and we've now been here 4 weeks and 2 days. Isabel and Katie are really settled in their new home. Rich and I have done 90% of the unpacking, most of what's left is garage stuff and "lets just shove it in the spare room for the time being" stuff which will get done eventually :o)
We've finished moving our furniture around to fill in the large gaps that this house has provided and now have a long list of desirable things we'd like to buy as and when we can afford it. All donations gratefully received.....(!)
We've got very used to our new home now and particularly enjoy the fact that when we're at one end of the house and the girls at the other, it's still so peaceful! Having such a long house also has its drawbacks, particularly when unpacking a 100 or so boxes whose contents need to be carried from one end to the other. It also meant that on discovering that we had no loft insulation (gasp!) and were all freezing in the cold winter mornings (yes, it's true, it gets cold at night and before the sun comes out) it cost a lot more than a square 2 storey house to insulate. But hey, it's one of those things and we're now not shivering in 2 layers of clothes at night.
Four weeks down the line from the move, Rich has been busy job hunting (more of that in a moment), while I've been busy shopping, seeking out the variety of shopping centres to buy the food basics, furniture and general house stuff. Katie has become my number 1 shopping buddy, although her favourite question is "Mummy.... can we buy this?" Unfortunately for her, most of the time I say "no".
Shopping is a different experience here as it is the norm to haggle on price. You always, always ask for their best price and in most cases they'll knock some money off. Money here is different too - aside from it being dollars and cents - there's no paper stuff, only plastic "monopoly" notes plus coins. There's no 1 cent coin either, so if something is priced at 99 cents it gets rounded up to the dollar. It works both ways so for instance if a bill came to 9 dollars and 96 cents then you'd get the 5 cents change from a 10 dollar note.
As someone pointed out having plastic money means that if you do accidently leave some in your pockets then they don't disintegrate in the washing machine and you can take it to the beach without having to remember to leave it somewhere dry.
Some of you will know from our emails that we still don't have broadband. A strange concept for us especially when I tell you we've only had a phoneline for 10 days (a long and frustrating story). WA really does stand for Wait Awhile..... so we're currently dialled into the net via R's mobile phone, a useful add-on to his mobile contract and pretty cheap compared to UK prices.
Anyway, back to R's job hunting. He's been offered 4 jobs from 5 interviews (the fifth company said that if they had the right project they'd employ him but currently they couldn't place him in the firm), so finding a job isn't exactly a problem. Clearly he's a picky so and so but fingers crossed we'll have some great news later in the week.
Right folks. That's all for now. More news and photos coming soon.
It's been a while since we updated the blog. Apologies, etc, etc but let me get on and tell you what we've been up to. Well, since Rich added the photos of our house to this blog we moved in 4 weeks to the day from when our offer was accepted! So a little quicker than how things went in the UK and we've now been here 4 weeks and 2 days. Isabel and Katie are really settled in their new home. Rich and I have done 90% of the unpacking, most of what's left is garage stuff and "lets just shove it in the spare room for the time being" stuff which will get done eventually :o)
We've finished moving our furniture around to fill in the large gaps that this house has provided and now have a long list of desirable things we'd like to buy as and when we can afford it. All donations gratefully received.....(!)
We've got very used to our new home now and particularly enjoy the fact that when we're at one end of the house and the girls at the other, it's still so peaceful! Having such a long house also has its drawbacks, particularly when unpacking a 100 or so boxes whose contents need to be carried from one end to the other. It also meant that on discovering that we had no loft insulation (gasp!) and were all freezing in the cold winter mornings (yes, it's true, it gets cold at night and before the sun comes out) it cost a lot more than a square 2 storey house to insulate. But hey, it's one of those things and we're now not shivering in 2 layers of clothes at night.
Four weeks down the line from the move, Rich has been busy job hunting (more of that in a moment), while I've been busy shopping, seeking out the variety of shopping centres to buy the food basics, furniture and general house stuff. Katie has become my number 1 shopping buddy, although her favourite question is "Mummy.... can we buy this?" Unfortunately for her, most of the time I say "no".
Shopping is a different experience here as it is the norm to haggle on price. You always, always ask for their best price and in most cases they'll knock some money off. Money here is different too - aside from it being dollars and cents - there's no paper stuff, only plastic "monopoly" notes plus coins. There's no 1 cent coin either, so if something is priced at 99 cents it gets rounded up to the dollar. It works both ways so for instance if a bill came to 9 dollars and 96 cents then you'd get the 5 cents change from a 10 dollar note.
As someone pointed out having plastic money means that if you do accidently leave some in your pockets then they don't disintegrate in the washing machine and you can take it to the beach without having to remember to leave it somewhere dry.
Some of you will know from our emails that we still don't have broadband. A strange concept for us especially when I tell you we've only had a phoneline for 10 days (a long and frustrating story). WA really does stand for Wait Awhile..... so we're currently dialled into the net via R's mobile phone, a useful add-on to his mobile contract and pretty cheap compared to UK prices.
Anyway, back to R's job hunting. He's been offered 4 jobs from 5 interviews (the fifth company said that if they had the right project they'd employ him but currently they couldn't place him in the firm), so finding a job isn't exactly a problem. Clearly he's a picky so and so but fingers crossed we'll have some great news later in the week.
Right folks. That's all for now. More news and photos coming soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)