Selenay's Ramblings

Er, I can't quite believe my last post was in late July. Where did the last two months go?

Well, into work and house-hunting, probably.

( Job stuff )

And then there's...

( Housing stuff )

Overall, I'm doing well. I've had my ups and downs. I was really depressed the last couple of days, but it's possible that was the pre-drome for the migraine I had this morning. I've also been stressing myself out about the amount of money I'm spending on the flat. I know that I'm still within budget, I have the money, but I'm still managing to feel guilty about spending on "frivolous" things like the new sofa.

It's an Ektorp sofa. So it's a really inexpensive sofa. But I still had to talk myself into it, because why would I need something silly like a sofa? *slaps self*

I have finally managed to allow myself to order a nice telly (it will arrive on Friday, in plenty of time for Doctor Who) and I'm feeling a lot more positive today, which makes me suspect this week's blip was the migraine talking.

Getting into my own place will also make getting out to socialise much easier, which always helps. There's a community choir in the town I'm moving to, which I plan to join.

I got to Nine Worlds for a day in August, which was great, and I have plans for several conventions next year. paranoidangel and I went board gaming in Oxford a few weeks ago and plan to return soon. All my weekends in October are now filled with activities (Hamilton! Scotland! Tolkien exhibition!) but hopefully we'll manage it in November.

I'm excited about having so many fun things lined up in October.

femslashex is due next Saturday and Yuletide sign-ups will open soon, so I'm actually writing a bit for the first time in ages. Go me!

It's not always been easy, but it still feels like moving back is the right call for me. I miss my friends in Canada, but my support network here is bigger and feels more available. I'm less worried about my future here, which is ironic when Brexit is looming and the world is a trashfire.

Hopefully my next post will be written from the sofa in my own little flat. Wish me luck on the move!

I'm in England! In my parents' living room, to be precise, with a fluffy Annie cat snoozing beside me.

It wasn't the easiest few days. Supervising shippers to pack and load all my belongings was harder work than it sounds (I knew it would be, Dad was surprised) and there was a lot of rushing about for final details and stuff, so we were all running on fumes and very little sleep by the end.

The pet shipper picked up the cats on time and Dad and I made it to the airport with loads of time. The lovely H met us there for a final goodbye and send-off, which was brilliant.

And then our flight was delayed :-( Apparently a cabin crew member on the inbound flight was injured during the flight, so they had to wait for a replacement. As this was at around 11.30pm and the airport is miles from civilisation, it took a while for the replacement to arrive. We ended up departing over an hour late and arrived in London an hour late. Although, by the standards of my usual travel karma, this wasn't actually that bad.

And then the doors off the bridge broke. All the passengers were lining up on the bridge between plane and airport, which was all glass and rapidly getting very hot, and it took around 15 minutes to get the doors opened manually. I felt bad for all the passengers with connections!

After that, I hoped the day would be smoother. Dad was travelling with me and we got home around midday, did a bit of unpacking, and then dashed out to buy food before the cats arrived. When I got home from that, there was an email to say there was an issue with the cats' paperwork and they were being held in animal control.

Yeah, I might have started panicking then.

Thankfully it was an issue that could be resolved by my vet sending more paperwork through, but it was a terrifying few hours waiting to hear if they'd be allowed in. I nearly cried when I got the email to say they'd been cleared for entry! The pet shipper delivered them to the door at around 7pm (glad I opted for that - I was in no state to drive anywhere by then) and they were tired and a little stressed, but otherwise fine. Even Kate - I'd expected her to puke or have diarrhoea at some point, but nope. My kitty with a dodgy tummy was fine.

I kept them in one room for the first night and day, to give them time to adjust and calm down, and then Annie escaped so often that we gave in and allowed them into the main house. They're banned from the kitchen and bedrooms, and not allowed in the living room at night or when we're out, but they seem happy with that. They've adjusted and settled in far better than I was expecting!

I got a lot of admin type stuff done on Friday, so I now have a UK mobile number and a working library card. I have my priorities :-) And I got to spend the evening with my uncle, which was lovely. Just knowing that I don't need to cram an entire year of visiting into one evening is great!

My sister and brother in law are coming out for lunch today. BIL is a chef so I'm not at all intimidated by cooking for them. Nope! Please note that my dad retreated from all possibility of cooking for my BIL the moment I arrived. Well played, Dad.

Anyway, the move was stressful and exhausting, but I'm here and settling in and feeling happy about everything. My plan is to take the next couple of days slowly, catch up on my sleep, and generally recover from all the stress of the last few weeks. Then I can start dashing about visiting everyone and doing three million things I've missed doing.

But first, resting. With the BBC iPlayer, if I can figure out how Dad's telly works!

It's the last day at my current job and I'm sadder than expected. Not so much about the job - I'm really excited to not be doing this job because I'd been getting frustrated with doing the same thing for so long - but it's the people.

I'm going to miss my coworkers a lot. Yes, even the frustrating ones. I don't think you can spend eight hours a day, for almost ten years, with a group of people and not end up being friends with them. I've been used to coming into work and getting to spend time with friends every day. I won't be doing that any more, at least not with this particular group of people.

The actual leaving part hasn't really hit yet. I'm sure it won't really hit for a few days. At least I don't feel like I'm diving on a cliff, because my new job starts in a month so I'm between jobs rather than unemployed.

But saying goodbye to everyone is hitting, because we're promising to stay in touch but the reality is that often people don't. I hope that doesn't happen, at least with the people I'm closest to. I'm aware that it can, and it's sad. The last time I left a job, it was such a toxic place that I almost danced on my way out (even though I was also aware that I'd miss my friends there), but this job has never been toxic. It's been frustrating sometimes, very stressful at other times, but I've never dreaded going in and we've always found a way to laugh about the things happening around us. It's been the people who made it a good place to work and they've been good people. Walking out for the last time is going to be a very strange and unsettling feeling, I suspect.

Tomorrow I plan to sleep. A lot.

It's all official now, so I can announce this publicly - I have accepted an amazing job offer!

I'll be working in central London for a travel company as a data engineer. I start on July 30, so I've got a couple of weeks to get settled (and decompress and visit people) before I need to start.

The job is pretty much everything I wanted in a job. Great tech stack (Google cloud platform, most of their data warehousing is on BigQuery, lots of other nice tech), good people, interesting new industry. I'll be doing a mixture of data analysis, building dashboards/self-serve tools, revamping their ETL etc. so it's going to be an interesting role. I'll be their first data engineer (their data work has been done by people as side projects and "when there's ten minutes spare" until now) so there's going to be lots of room to shape the role and really make an impact. They have a dedicated training/conference budget for each person, Friday afternoons are reserved for non-project work (learning stuff, building a new tool because you think it'll be good to do - whatever seems like a good use of the time), and they seem to really invest in their people.

And the compensation package is pretty nice, too :-)

I told Boss S this morning and he's been really supportive and lovely, so that's brilliant. We're going to tell the team on Thursday in our regular team meeting, and then everything will be out in the open properly. My last day in my current role will be June 29.

But guys, I've found a super awesome new job! I'm not jumping off a cliff into the unknown when I move - there's a job waiting there for me! They're happy to wait until July 30 for me to start and they're actually excited and impressed by me? It's such a weird and amazing feeling. The work sounds interesting. The people I've spoken to have been lovely and I get a good feeling about working with them. The office is in a great location for my commute and they're flexible about start/finish times, plus they support working from home once a week.

And I get really really cool toys :-)

This whole "move back to England" plan is turning out to be an even better decision than I'd expected. I'll be back with my family, back home, and now I'm getting to make a fantastic career move, too. I'm so thrilled about all this :-)

(And yes, it's the job where I thought I'd screwed up the interview. Impostor syndrome is real, guys.)

We have sold a house!

We got an offer not far off our asking place, with a closing date that works for my moving date, so we're now doing all the legal stuff involved in a house sale. This included the house inspection yesterday, which pulled up a couple of things we have to do (most critically, the mast for the electrical wiring coming into the house is apparently about to fall off, so getting that fixed is high priority before it actually falls off and wrecks the electrics) but not as many as we'd half-feared.

Nothing to derail the sale, anyway. Phew.

And it means we don't have to do any more viewings! Hooray! The viewings were so not fun. Particularly the day we had three at totally different times, so we were in and out (and the cats were in and out of their crate) far too many times for one day. Urgh. But that stage is over and now we can focus on getting ready for the move.

I started applying for jobs a couple of weeks ago and somehow I'm already through to a second interview for one (actually typing this while I wait for the clock to tick round to the start of that) so that's going better than expected. This is a role that sounds really good, so fingers crossed for me? Even if I don't get it, the experience has been useful.

And I got my paperwork submitted for the Transfer of Residency, so I don't have to pay tax on my stuff when I move, so that's moving nicely. They say it should take two weeks or less and I've got six weeks from tomorrow, so that's loads of time.

This moving back to England thing is complicated and overwhelming at times, but it's starting to feel real in the good ways, too. I just don't plan to do another big move like this EVER AGAIN.

I've already talked about a lot of this on Twitter, but here it is for non-Twitterers (and in more coherent form for the Twitterers).

The good

Many items on my to do list have been checked off since my last progress report!

The really big items: shipping and flight have been booked!

The crew will be here to pack on July 9th and load into the container on July 10th. My flight will leave in the evening on July 11th, so I'll be wheels down and in England on July 12th. That's a big weight off my mind!

And the other big weight is the cats. They went to the vet last week to have their micro-chips read and their rabies shot administered. I'd been really nervous the chips might be unreadable (they're nearly ten years old, after all) and then they'd have to have new ones implanted, but thankfully they were easily read so that's sorted. I've now got their paperwork to a state where it just needs signing and dating in the week before we fly, so that's all looking good. The pet shipper will be able to book them onto my flight in a month.

And as a result of a lot of the activity below, I've done a lot of the pre-shipping decluttering and sorting, so I'm further along in this process than I thought I'd be at this point!

Now I just need to start applying for jobs :-)

The incredibly annoying and frustrating

House selling in Canada is *the worst*.

Our work to de-clutter/de-personalise/de-everything the house continued last week and through the weekend, but we have finally finished. I feel guilty that I couldn't contribute much during the week because I work, but at the same time, all my stuff has always been kept to my bedroom and bathroom. The rest of the house is my parents' so, apart from cleaning, there wasn't much I could actually contribute to that work.

My bedroom now looks like an empty echoey shell. It's actually pretty depressing. Nothing on the walls. My radio is allowed to be on the dresser, provided it's packed away before any viewings/open houses. My nightstand is allowed to hold my book and alarm clock at night, with the same provision. I'm planning to just clear that kind of stuff every morning, to make it easier in case there are last-minute viewings. And making my bed has to be made differently in the mornings to show off...I don't know what. Apparently I Do It Wrong.

I make my bed so it looks tidy and doesn't need remaking before bed so I can actually sleep in it. What a terrible concept.

I'm trying to tell myself it's a good thing to disconnect from the house, but frankly, sleeping in such a bare, unfriendly room is not the best feeling.

My closet now holds the bare minimum of clothing that absolutely must be hung, because they want to show off the size of it (by keeping it almost empty). I have insisted that I need to hang *some* clothes, because boxing up my shirts and blazers and storing them under the stairs will result in me looking crumpled and awful for work (and wasting time each morning trying to unbox and find them). The staging consultant has conceded that point.

The stager came for a visit yesterday to check on what we'd done. Helpfully, she turned up forty-five minutes early. Was that a test to see whether we're keeping the house showing-ready at all times? Who knows! She cheerfully sailed in and announced she'd brought some art (a butt-ugly cheap print from Walmart) to replace our awful painting that will keep the house from ever being sold. Mum and I have conceded on so many things, but we're holding the line on our paintings. They are not going into the shed. No fucking way.

Stager was Unhappy. Super Unhappy. Her incredibly cheap print was nasty and didn't actually blend with ANY OF THE OTHER ART OR DECORE IN THE HOUSE. If it hadn't been so awful, we might have given in...but no.

Edit: and the joke's on her. Apparently the realtor and the photographer love our painting and feel it's a great feature in that room :-D < / edit >

Stager did compliment us on how hard we'd worked and how much we'd transformed the house. Then she moved all our furniture around (although she has allowed us to have chairs you can watch telly from) and got annoyed that we still had personal effects out (loo roll! soap dishes! the lunch she'd interrupted! curtains!) even though we assured her they'd be put away for viewings and the open house.

Edit: another joke on her - the realtor and photographer moved the furniture back where we had it, because it looked ridiculous. Hahaha. < / edit >

She brought in some fake flowers and a huge glass bowl to stage things with, which is good, although she couldn't understand why we don't own huge glass bowls or keep flowers in the house. When we pointed out that glass bowls are just new sleeping places for the cats and one cat eats flowers (and steals fake ones to tear apart) she looked at us like we were aliens. Apparently she doesn't do cats and therefore has no idea what they're capable of.

The bowl and flowers will be put away except for viewings and open houses. This annoyed her (because she wants the house show-ready at all times) but for fuck's sake, we're supposed to get 24 hours notice so living in a show-ready house at all times shouldn't be necessary. Argh.

She gave us a long talk about how good her statistics are for getting closing within 30 days of putting a house on the market, HINT HINT, and she was not happy that we actually can't do that because we have shipping and flight dates and I have a job to finish, none of which can easily be brought forward just to make her stats look good.

Thankfully she left before Mum and I completely exploded on her. Wow, I do not like her.

The realtor called round without notice yesterday morning, and expressed outrage that we weren't there followed by shock that anyone would go to church on a Sunday. Hmm. She wanted to fit the lockbox and pick up the key. The lockbox has been fitted--on the porch railing, not on the doorknob where it would block off the keyhole and leave us locked out, phew--and she said she'd come back later for they key...but didn't. Ah well.

Today the photographs are being taken and then the house goes live on the website. There will be an open house on Sunday, which is incredibly inconvenient because I've got my biggest release since last September which will take approx. six hours, so I'll have to go into my empty office building rather than do it from home. ARGH.

Edit: realtor has realised Sunday is Mother's Day. Open house has been pushed back a week. Celebrations all round etc. < / edit >

What's next?

So, the house is now ready for viewings and the open house, so there's actually not much work on that front to do now. We're both relieved because we're exhausted and we need a break.

I have one job application I really want to do this week, because the closing date is soon and I might as well try, right? There are a couple of things I want to apply for next week due to closing dates. Other than that, I think we're planning to take things a bit easier for a few days. I'll be working most of the day on Sunday, but at least I'll be at home with snacks, tea, and kitty cuddles. I've booked some days off from May 18th and while I'm assuming there will be viewings, I'm hoping that I'll get some days at home to really dive into job applications. I also need to get all the paperwork together to put in my application for Transfer of Residency, the form that will allow me to bring my cats and belongings without paying duty on them.

I'm hoping to manage a day or two in my time off where Mum and I can get out and do something fun, because all job applications/paperwork and no fun will probably drive me up the wall.

But at least a huge chunk of stuff is done and my to do list is looking less intimidating. That's good progress, at least.

It's now less than three months and it's all starting to feel very real, which means that I'm cycling between being excited and being overwhelmed with everything. That's normal, right? I didn't really document this part the last time, so I don't know. Also, there were fewer moving parts to coordinate the last time, so maybe that's why I remember being calmer.

Anyway, Mum arrived from England last week, so things are starting to kick into gear now.

1) She's been talking to realtors and apparently she's picked one as of this morning. So the house should be going on the market soon.

2) The cats have been booked into the vet next weeks to have their microchips checked and their rabies shots administered (as long as the chips can be read - they'll need new chips if they can't be read).

3) We've zeroed in on move dates. The original plan I proposed last year was that I'd fly the day after my shipping left, because I thought it would be pretty near impossible to stay in the house when it was practically empty. Mum freaked at that (she wanted me around to finish stuff after the shipping left...) and I revised my plan to me leaving a week after the shipping. When we discussed this plan last week, Mum freaked and claimed she'd never said that because it will be totally impractical for me to stay in the house after my shipping leaves, what are you talking about you crazy girl? So I'm back to leaving the day after my shipping leaves, which is what I'd originally wanted :-)

4) I'm getting quotes from shipping companies - I've got a video survey with one booked tonight, another has my tentative packing list, and I'm waiting for replies from two others. When I've got quotes, I can book the date for that and then book my flight.

5) I'm tentatively looking at my shipping leaving on July 9th or 10th (depending on when the shipper can do it), so I'll fly on the 10th or 11th. It'll definitely be that week, anyway, and I have to arrive in England on a week day due to the cats. That means my latest flying date is July 12th.

6) OMG THAT'S LESS THAN THREE MONTHS AWAY OMG FLAIL AND PANIC.

7) Ahem.

8) I'm planning to leave my job on June 29th. It's a pay day, just before a long weekend, and it gives us a solid week to get the house cleared before the shippers arrive, so it seems like a good date to pick.

9) I still need to talk to an accountant about what do do with my pensions here and double-check that I don't need to do more than tell the CRA that I'm leaving, but I'll be trying to do that this week. It looks like I don't need to actually file taxes until next Feb as usual, which means I don't need to hang around here waiting for documents to arrive so I can do that. Phew!

10) We have a plan to handle my medication transition that will involve me taking a stash of Humira with me, so that's another big weight off.

Listing it all out, it sounds like everything is super under control and totally on schedule. And it probably is!

But. This is such a big process, with so many moving parts (house sale! shipping! cats!), and I'm definitely having freak-out moments when I panic about making all of that work. Oddly, my freak-outs about whether or not I'll find work and housing have largely tapered off. I feel much more confident about that side of things working out. Maybe I'll freak out about that again later?

It's the bit from the middle of June to the middle of July that I currently have panics about. I can honestly say that I'm really, REALLY looking forward to July 14th, when I'll wake up on a Saturday morning in my parents' spare room, with the cats mithering for food outside my door, because that's when the most intimidating parts will be over and it'll be a weekend so I can rest and sleep.

This really is the last time I make a trans-Atlantic move.

I mentioned in my last post that it's been a weirdly mild winter. So mild, in fact, that I went for two long walks early this week. Usually the weather isn't good enough to do that until April! They might be my only March walks (hopefully not), but that's still odd.

It did feel good to get outside and walk in the fresh air. I've missed that. I'm sure it's why I slept a bit better this week, despite having the kinds of days at work where breaks and finishing on time just don't happen.

Today I've got someone coming to fix the window. Last week, a new freezer arrived to replace the dead one. I thought the rule of threes might take effect (broken soffit, broken window, broken freezer) and things would stop breaking, but no. Last week, my furnace died. Thankfully we have a service plan so someone came out within a couple of hours and the repairs were covered by the plan rather than costing us EVEN MORE MONEY on a house we're selling soon. But it took the repair guy a long time to fix the furnace because it had died so spectacularly and he did comment that it's getting a bit old and might be due for replacement soon...

Argh. No, we're not replacing it. The new owners of this house can do that if they want.

One of my uncles in England was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few days ago. It's been caught incredibly early, because he's been getting regular check-ups, so he should make a full recovery.

(Any men reading this - please get yourself screened and checked regularly!)

The main reason he gets so much screening and checking done is because he has a severe form of osteogenesis imperfeta (brittle bones) and he's one of the oldest people with this type. He wasn't supposed to live past his teens, so his generation of people with it are the first to reach this age. Nobody knows what effect the disease will have on them as they age, so he gets lots of tests and baselines and screenings done as a precaution.

So thanks to the OI, his prostate cancer got picked up as early as this stuff can be. But the OI is also causing complications for treatment. Due to his fragile bones, radiotherapy is not recommended. They don't know for sure what effect it would have, but it can cause bone loss and his bones are weak enough already. It's not a risk they're willing to take.

Uncle P is 4'2" tall and has odd proportions due to his OI. The surgery for prostate cancer is done using robotics now, and the robotic arm is calibrated for 'normal' sized men and can't be adjusted to his size. Apparently the surgeon got very uncomfortable as he tried very hard to delicately talk around the fact that P is the wrong size for surgery. P found it rather amusing. If the surgeon knew P better, he'd know that P wouldn't take comments on his size (in this context) personally.

So the third option is the one they'll have to go with: doctors will create some kind of radioactive 'seeds' and implant them in the tumour. The seeds will kill the tumour from the inside over the course of a few months. It will take a few weeks to make the seeds and he'll need monitoring after they're implanted. P and his wife have a holiday booked in May so he'll start treatment in June. Apparently the cancer isn't doing anything exciting right now so they've got lots of time and the survival outcomes are excellent at this stage.

Even though I know he'll be fine, it's brought home to me how relieved I am to be moving back to England. Missing my family is the main reason I'm doing it, and this kind of illustrates it. My uncles (and parents) are getting older and things will happen. I don't want to regret all the time I didn't get to spend with them when things happen. I'm always picking and choosing which relatives I have time to see when I visit and there's never enough time for all of them, or for more than a couple of hours with the ones I do see. That's not enough to feel connected and it won't be enough when the time comes and I have to start saying goodbye to them. So I'm relieved to be going back, because I'll be able to see all these people I care about regularly, instead of maybe getting supper with them every other year.

I'm trying to find a less depressing note to finish on. Hmm. I finished a short fluffy Berena fic yesterday, so it looks like I might actually post fic soon. Go me!

I keep talking about this, but I'd really forgotten how much I love learning and how much that influenced by decision to go into IT as my career.

Last week, I remembered that my local library has a subscription to Lynda.com for all users, so I went over and poked around and set up an account. There were a surprising number of courses relevant to my interests and ambitions. I've just completed a beginner's Hadoop course, to support other things I want to take, and now I'm running through a data engineering basics course.

Er, apparently that's what I do. Huh. Listening to the descriptions of what a data engineer does, that fits my work very closely. It's never been the term used (my job title is senior programmer analyst, which is excitingly vague), but that's what I do every ay. I'd started to suspect that's how my job would be described on job ads and that's one of the terms I've been using when doing some scouting around about job prospects in London, but it's nice to have that confirmed and feel more confident about applying for those jobs.

I'd like to work on big data systems and play with cooler toys, although it sounds like my experience with RDBMS's will translate well enough to get me in the door for those jobs. I'm still doing some up-skilling to get myself into a better position for the job hunt. And I'm taking a look at some data science stuff, because that's where I'd like to start moving my career towards long-term.

Either ironically or coincidentally, I can't decide which, last week (the day after I started poking about on Lynda, in fact), my work set up a group plan for Pluralsight and gave me and a couple of colleagues access. Woohoo! ALL THE AWESOME IT COURSES ARE MINE.

There are some courses that are directly relevant to my current work, so I've been working on those. There's probably a dozen Oracle-specific courses plus an ITIL foundation course that is probably the ITIL training we keep getting promised and never actually get. I spent a fair bit of Friday on a PL/SQL fundementals course that was more useful than I expected. I picked up everything I know about PL/SQL from using it and reading books/hitting Google/hitting Stackoverflow whenever I needed to something I haven't done before. So even though I've been using it for nearly ten years and I consider myself fairly expert, this basics course showed me a few things I'd never seen before.

This is why I'd argue it's important for companies to fund training when developers are picking up new tools and languages. Supplement that with books/Google/Stackoverflow, but you need that core organised training to really use things well.

There are some more advanced courses around Oracle query tuning, star schema database design etc, plus some advanced SQL courses that talk about both SQL Server and Oracle that sound interesting and relevant, so I've got plenty to do for work training.

On my own time, I've been taking a Pluralsight course on basic Python (if I have access to the courses, why not?). I'd been teaching myself a bit already, because learning is fun and Python is fun, but it was good to go through this course and realise how much I've already absorbed. Unlike the other sources I've used, this course has been emphasising Python as an object-oriented language and explaining OOP theory as they introduce classes and so on.

The last time I used an OOP language was at uni, thirteen years ago (Java, C++, Smalltalk). Apparently I retained all that theory, because this part of the course has been more reminding me of OOP theory and teaching the Python syntax rather than introducing a whole new programming paradigm. It really is true that when you've learned a basic programming construct, it's pretty easy to pick it up in other languages.

The remaining modules are going to teach me entirely new things: how to deploy a webapp using Flask, and how to package up a stand-alone app using PyInstaller. I'm nerdily excited :-)

And after I've done that, I'm really excited about moving onto the more advanced courses and really digging into Python properly.

This is, actually, relevant to my discussion of data engineering and data science. Python is a skill that's called for a lot in both paths (there are entire libraries in Python for data science!), so I'm having fun learning something new that will hopefully pay off later in the year.

And hey, Pluralsight also has a whole bunch of courses in SQL Server and Microsoft Azure, so I can do a bit of cross-training to widen my net of possible jobs. After all, the important part is being used to dealing with data and an RDBMS. The differences between specific vendor distributions can be learned and adjusted to, it's the core understanding of what the hell all this stuff is and how to manage it that takes the time to learn.

(And yes, my Mac is still performing beautifully as a development platform. So far, I like PyCharm better than Spyder for my Python IDE, but we'll see. Both are much nicer than IDLE. And if I want to add some C# to my diet or try out yet another Python IDE, Visual Studio 2017 even has a MacOS version. My Mac is so great.)

I've been vaguely hinting for a while that there are some big changes coming and with the new year dawning, the time seems right to make the public announcement. After all, the new year is all about new things and fresh starts.

I'm moving back to England this year!

I've told the friends and family this most affects and now I'm telling you guys. I haven't told anyone at work yet, so if you know someone I work with or you're on my Facebook, please don't mention it unless it's on a post where I'm actually talking about the move and have privacy set for that?

It's a big move so you'll understand why I've taken a long time to consider it carefully and then took even longer to go public. I made the decision and told my parents in late September, but there's been a lot of talking and planning and research to do. Hence my brain being a bit scattered and frazzled lately.

The core reason for the move comes down to this: I miss my family.

I miss my home and a great many other things, but the biggest factor is my family. My UK friends and fandom are a part of my family, and having such a huge chunk of my heart always so far away has become intolerable. And if I'm going to make the move, it has to be sooner rather than later, for a lot of reasons. We'd always planned to sell the house I live in here this year, so doing the move now rather than a few years down the line is sensible (and makes me happier than waiting, which is a huge factor).

To answer the most common questions I've had:

1) Yes, I'm bringing the cats with me. I did a lot of research while I was making the decision and the cats were a big part of it. WIth the right paperwork and vaccinations, plus the help of a pet shipping company, they should be able to come on the same flight as me without any quarantine requirements.

2) I'll be staying with my parents initially, while I look for work and a permanent home, and then I hope to rent for a year or two (while I rebuild my credit history) before looking to get a mortgage and buy something. Yeah, I'm going to be a homeowner at some point, which I'd honestly given up on doing here in Canada.

3) I'll be looking for work in London and I'm actually pretty excited about the career advancement possibilities there that I just don't have in Nova Scotia. It's certainly helped me feeling like this is a good choice, because although I'm mainly doing this to be closer to family and friends, it will have the side-effect of getting my career moving again. (So, if you know any London-based companies looking for a senior database/ETL developer/data engineer with opportunities to move into big data, let me know!)

4) I probably won't live in London. I'll find somewhere not far from the parents (Buckinghamshire) and commute, to have the best of both worlds. I.e. London life and culture stuff, plus countryside and so forth to walk in, with family nearby. I've really missed public footpaths, fields and woods, and walking by the Thames. I've missed Friday nights at my uncle's house and lunches with Mum and Dad and being able to meet my sis in the city for supper regularly.

5) But hey, London friends, that means I'll be around to socialise a fair bit because I'll only be half an hour away on the train/Tube! And further afield UK friends: I will be visiting you. You've been warned.

6) The date isn't set yet, but I'll probably be getting on a plane in the second or third week in July. I'll know the date for sure sometime in April, I think.

It's a huge change and pretty intimidating from a logistical point of view, but I'm very excited. I'll get to be with my family more, which is the biggest thing. My sister is talking about starting a family and I don't want to miss any of it. I'll get to celebrate the big and little events with them. Over the last few years, it's become more obvious to me how much I miss them all and how much I've been missing out on, and I just can't do that anymore. Next Christmas, I'll get to be a part of their celebration (and if we lose power for a large chunk of the day, I'll be with people instead of sitting on my own in the dark).

Deciding to make the move has given me a kick up the backside to think about my career and start looking at next steps, which hasn't been easy where I'm currently living. I'm stagnating here. There just aren't the roles that I really want, so if I'm going to get my career moving in the right direction again, I'll have to leave Nova Scotia. Moving back to England will solve the career thing and the family thing in one move, so it makes a lot more sense than going to somewhere like Toronto.

I'm excited about all the possibilities opening up: going to more cons (yes, I plan to be at Redemption 19, VidUKon 2019, and I'm hopeful about making at least a one day appearance at Nine Worlds this year), travelling more to see friends around the UK and explore Europe, doing all the fun cultural stuff I've missed since I left. My list of things I want to do when I get back is *epic*.

The move won't solve every problem I have, I know that. I'll miss my friends here. There are things in the UK that suck in different ways to the things in Canada that suck. I'm not being unrealistic about this, I think. But I am hopeful that I'll cope better with the bad parts if I'm back in a country where my support network is stronger and wider.

Moving to Canada was the right choice in 2008. Moving home feels like the right choice for 2018. Expect me to wibble, wobble, and be utterly fucking terrified at times, but I'm also really excited. Hopefully a year from now, I'll be writing my first 2019 post from a happier, more fulfilled part of my life.