T Minus Four Weeks

Today marks exactly four weeks prior to my start date in London.

Despite two weeks away (a week at the corporate mothership learning my new job and then a week at the in-laws for Christmas) we have made great progress on the London prep. I have booked tickets for us and the cats (flying out Jan 23), we have temporary housing, we have a storage locker for the stuff that is staying and are getting moving estimates for the stuff that's coming, and we've picked out what is what for each of those categories. We have started packing the non-essential stuff that we are leaving behind, and Mary is shifting into "clean the freezer out" mode. It's starting to get real!

The two trips were very successful in their own rights as well. The work trip was mainly to introduce me to my new job and team, and went well. There are a lot of interesting projects going on, and I really enjoyed talking with all the folks I met. I also got re-introduced to the joys of recreational math via Project Euler and will likely be using that to refresh my Perl skills. I haven't used it in a while, and even when I did I allowed myself to succumb to the laziness that Perl inspires rather than keeping myself disciplined into writing decent code. The new group uses a lot of well-structured Perl, so hopefully that will shame me into behaving.

Christmas was fun, and it was nice to see my in-laws. It's always a pretty chill affair, and we were able to relax and chat and unwind from all of the London madness. Per our request for folks to avoid durable goods we got mostly gift cards, though we did get a bunch of travel books for England and Europe which we plan to use quite extensively.