I need a project plan

Sad as it seems, I have come to realise that I need a project plan. Yes, a proper one, with Gantt charts and everything, otherwise I won't get anything done this summer.

A day or two ago I took a quick look on the net for project planners that were easy to use (I have bad bad bad memories of Microsoft PWA from when I was gainfully employed) and more importantly free. For now I am using iTeamwork, which is fairly basic but does the job. No Gantt charts, but otherwise it keeps me on track! I can add projects with sub-tasks and it reminds me of what I'm supposed to be doing when I log in each morning. I'm the sort of person who needs to do lots of small things that can be ticked off as I go, rather than one mammoth task, so it really does help to break things down in a visual form like this.

Thanks to the beauty of the project plan, I've been more productive for the last two days than for the last two weeks. More packing boxes have been bought, more stuff has been packed, more stuff has been binned, I joined the gym and actually visited it, and I even made good headway learning Cyrillic. I can now pronounce and understand words like and . The first one might come in more useful if we get to Russia and I want to order some wine, but if I want to discuss any actresses while we're there I'll need the other one too!

A sense of community

With being off work during the day now, I'm really noticing how much of a sense of community there is in Sydenham. I did know this anyway, just from watching people greet each other on the bus, but it's much more apparent now that I see the "daytime" people going about their business.

The post office this morning was all bustle, but I was the only person in the queue who wasn't chatting to whoever was next to them. The women behind the counter seemed to know everybody, and the one who dealt with me was very friendly and chatty. Next I went to the bakery for a couple of sausage rolls, and watched the woman in front of me chat with the staff like they were old friends. After that I took a quick trip to the Mace across the road, and again everybody seemed to know each other. It felt like a real community, and I liked that feeling. I love being able to walk down the road and nod hello to familiar faces, or even talk to them. It doesn't matter that we don't really know each other - it's just the sense that everyone belongs here. It's not something I experienced at all while living in south Belfast, before I bought my house here - I suppose having such a transient student population kills any chance of that community feeling building up. I can see why residents of areas such as the Holy Lands are so upset at what has happened to what was once their community...

The joy of laptops

I just got my first laptop about three weeks ago. I never had any particular desire to own one before - I have my PC upstairs, and Skry and I can sit side by side on our computers and play games, surf the internet, work, whatever we happen to be doing. No big deal. But when I handed in my notice at work about six weeks ago, I realised that I had some holiday pay coming to me, and I decided to spend it on a laptop.

After a surprisingly short amount of humming and hawing, I went for an Acer Travelmate, and I'm happy with my choice (apart from it having Windows Vista pre-installed - memory hog or what?!). Large clear screen, built-in webcam, all the usual features that one might expect, and it's very slim and light too.

What surprises me is how much I am using this thing. I imagined that I was buying a replacement for my soon-to-be-turned-into-a-fileserver PC, and the laptop would spend most of its time hooked up to a docking station in the computer room. Not so! It has been a permanent fixture on the dining table since I brought it home. I can surf and watch the soaps at the same time, Skry uses it to display recipes when he's cooking, I can Skype friends and relatives in foreign lands without having to put down whatever I'm doing - it is just so handy. And of course I can cart it about if I want to as well. Tonight I watched a whole episode of Grey's Anatomy with the laptop perched on the toilet seat while I lay back in a bubble bath with a glass of wine. Nice....!

In other words, laptops are the way forward. Go get one. Now.

It gets worse

I just got a letter through the door - a heart-felt plea from the woman and little girl asking to please try and get Freyja back. There were drawings of her and heart shapes and their address and phone number.

Obviously I can't take the cat back now that she is settled and happy in her new home (and she is happy - I checked - she is chasing pigeons up trees and coming back in to be pampered when she's tired), so I called round to their house to tell them to give up hope. There was nobody home, but I left a little framed picture of Freyja for them to remember her by. Then I phoned the woman to tell her that the cat wasn't coming back. She started to cry! I feel so guilty, even though I couldn't have known that this would happen. She said that it was the first time that her daughter had experienced having a pet, and they both loved Freyja, and they couldn't even say goodbye because they didn't know she was going away.

I can't believe I made a complete stranger cry, and no doubt her daughter too. I feel awful.

Cat-related guilt

There was a knock on the door at lunchtime today. A woman and a little girl were standing there, and the first thing they asked was, "Do you have a cat called Freyja?". We said that we used to, but she was living somewhere else now, and their faces just fell. The little girl looked like she was about to burst into tears. It seems that the mystery of where Freyja went every day when we let her out has been solved - she was coming to them for her breakfast first thing in the morning, and just hanging out for the rest of the day being petted and eating their tomatoes.

We did explain that she had gone to another family who were really excited about getting her, but I feel terrible. The woman asked if there was any chance we could get the cat back so she could go and live with them instead. If we had known beforehand that she was going there, I could have just let them take her straight away, but it's a bit late now. I don't know how well that would have worked anyway, because it would have been very hard for us to stop letting Freyja into our own house when she scratched on the door, but we certainly could have at least considered it. Oh well, what's done is done and I am happy that she's in a good home now - it was just so hard to see that little girl's sad face.

I might call round to their house with a photograph or something, just so they can remember her. Maybe that would just make it worse, I don't know. Gaaah!

19 minutes a day? I don't think so

So it turns out that the 19 minutes a day is totally unachieveable, at least in this house. We let it get far too squalid over the last few weeks, and 19 minutes barely makes a dent. It took me 45 minutes in the bathroom alone! I think that plan is only for people who already have a sparkling clean house, and possibly a maid.

I did make a dent on the packing, though, albeit a small one. Yesterday I looked on the internet for self-storage places locally, and found Belfast Self Storage just a couple of miles up the motorway from here. I nipped round yesterday morning and got a selection of boxes and some packing tape. Since then I have filled five boxes with books, one with bed linen and blankets, and one with childhood memorabilia that I'd be really sorry to lose.

By that point it was becoming obvious that I had more boxes than would fit in my car to take back to the storage facility, but there may be a solution to that as well. Pickfords had seen that I submitted a request for storage information on their site, and phoned to get more details from me. We are most likely going to go with them for shipping to New Zealand, and it turns out that they can also collect boxes now and store them for us until we're ready to leave. A rep is coming over next week to look at how much we have in the house that will be coming with us, and go through our options. It would be so handy to have someone just come and take the stuff rather than having to hire a Man with a Van to ferry it about. I'll wait and see what their prices are like, but this is promising.

Keep your house sparkling, in 19 minutes a day

I have a problem. The plan for the month of July was to get the house cleared out, re-painted and re-carpeted, in order to put it on the market in August. So far, none of this has happened. It has actually descended into squalour over the last few weeks, as we have both become very lazy about keeping on top of the housework.

Maybe the internet can save me. I found a site that promises I can keep a sparkling house in a mere 19 minutes a day. Here's what I have to do:
kitchen - 4 1/2 minutes a day
bathroom - 2 minutes a day
bedroom - 6 1/2 minutes a day
living areas - 6 minutes a day

Personally I think the bedroom should be closer to 2 and the kitchen should be way more than 4 1/2, but I might give this plan a go anyway. At the very least the house will be a bit tidier!

It won't help with the general clutter around the place, though. For that I need some sturdy boxes and an off-site storage facility. And possibly a skip.

Freyja moves out

A sad day for me - I no longer own any cats. Freyja went to her new home today. Before Aggelos and his daughters came to pick her up, I gave her a special treat: a tomato. She loves tomatoes. Check out the video here.

Help My Baby Live site outed as a hoax

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this site, Help My Baby Live. The idea is that a young cash-strapped couple are saying they'll abort their baby unless we, the public, give them enough money to bring it up properly. They are asking for $50,000 - as I write, the site lists $13,200 in donations and has 70 days left before time runs out.

Snopes has now listed it as a hoax. I don't know how they came to that decision, because there really isn't any proof either way, but it certainly smells like a hoax to me. Even if it is for real there is something terribly wrong with the whole setup. I hope that people will stop donating to them now (if they really have been), because even if it is for real and there really is some couple out there who are using their foetus as emotional blackmail, they should be ostracized on general principles, not helped out with money for nothing.

As an aside, I am watching Britain's Next Top Model, and one of the hopefuls has "Queen Bitch" tattooed on her leg. Why would anyone do that?!

Rain, sleeping in, and more jewellery

There was more rain last night - really heavy, tropical monsoon type rain at about 3am. We stood in the open doorway and looked out at it for a bit, and if I didn't know there were loads of slugs in the garden I would have gone out and danced in it. It was that sort of rain.

Once again I slept in until lunchtime, too. I am going to have to be careful about getting into that bad habit, because I'll end up wasting half of every day and I don't want to do that. It's fine this week because I am treating myself to a week's holiday, but I'll need to find a more productive routine for the rest of the summer.

I have been very productive with the jewellery, though - lots of new pieces made up in the last couple of days. I think I'm going to be fine for this market stall at the end of the month.

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig...

I am taking my jewellery to St.George's market in Belfast on the 28th of this month! A friend forwarded me an email about trans '07 saying that they were looking for "businesses and artists of all shapes and sizes to show off their skills and skills, as part of a very special Saturday Market". I shot off an email a couple of days ago to ask if jewellery fitted the bill, and apparently it does.

I don't have many details yet, but I know that the table will be 8 foot by 4 foot and I will need enough products to fill it. I have quite a lot already but I have never tried laying them all out together, and I haven't a clue how I should be presenting this stuff. I'm going to get down there this Friday morning and see what the other jewellers do. This is a fantastic opportunity for me, but I so obviously don't have a clue what I'm doing yet :)

So is this what skiving feels like?

It hasn't quite sunk in with me yet that I am now self-employed, mainly because I have no real business plan or goals. Must work on those! But for the moment it just feels like I'm on holiday. Yesterday I did make some more jewellery, using a stack of beads that arrived in the post, and today I renewed my car tax, but that's about it so far. It's a good thing that I have some savings to see me through the summer, because I'd be on the breadline in about a week if I had to fund myself this way.

The jewellery is loads of fun, though. It's amazing how excited I got when I found some amazonite beads which I'd forgotten I ordered. I had never seen amazonite before, and it turns out to be a lovely milky green colour which I think would look great with black and silver. I only got a sample size bag of those particular beads this time around, but I was still able to make a (what I think is) very pretty bracelet with them. (The darker green is a semi-precious stone called green aventurine, and the purple is amethyst).

It turns out that stacks of different beads in little plastic bags make me slobber with delight. I could play with this kind of stuff all day. I am so lucky that right now I have the chance to do that!

My work leaving do - and Flora moves house

I had my work leaving do in Katy Daly's last night. It was fantastic, loads of people came out and there was much hugging and cheek-kissing and promises of email addresses being exchanged. I tottered home at about midnight but the rest of them headed next door to the Limelight for music and dancing. I bet there are a few sore heads this morning!

Photos from the evening are here - they are mostly just me hugging people, so maybe not the most exciting, but they're still nice to have.

There are also photos here of my last ever night out with my Business Market team (best team ever!) on Thursday, when we went to Ryan's for dinner and then Lavery's for pool.




I also said a tearful goodbye to Flora this morning. She has gone to live with Mark and Helen in Banbridge. I felt awful putting her into the cat carrier when she was mewing and looking pitifully out through the bars, but I'm sure she will settle into her new home without too much trauma. I hope so, anyway!

My last day at work

Today is my last day of gainful employment before the summer of doing whatever I please commences. I have very mixed emotions about the whole thing! Obviously it is fantastic to be able to take the summer off, and I have lots planned, for example my jewellery business, and setting up a website design company, and tarting up the house before getting it sold. We are looking forward to a belated honeymoon as well! But I am really going to miss the people I work with. Hopefully I'll be able to stay in touch with most people, and if we're lucky some of my friends will make the trip to New Zealand once we settle in. But it's going to be a huge life change after ten years in this place!

I'm also pretty cut up about having to re-home my cats, but at least I know they are going to good people who will treat them well. It's for the best, it's just going to be a wrench to hand them over. *sigh*

So I quit my job

I couldn't contain myself any longer - today I told everyone at work that I am leaving. Last night I had emailed my manager, who is out on sick leave at the moment, so technically I had already handed in my notice, but today I went to her manager and told him in person. His reaction was one of surprise and envy, which I think will be the most common one we get!

I do enjoy my job, and I work with some fantastic people, but I'm really looking forward to having some time off too. I finish on June 29th, which is only four weeks away. I'm sure it will fly by.

I got my visa!

I got a letter from NZIS today - my visa is "Approved in Principle"! At last!

The only things left to do now are pay the £105 levy and send my passport to London to get the visa stickers put into it. I am so relieved. It took nearly a full year to get to this point, but at last I'm past the final hurdle, assuming that I get the passport to London before the end of November.

Skry still has to get his police reports re-done, and have his telephone interview, but hopefully that will go as smoothly as mine did.

Now that it's official, I have also handed in my notice at work, and will be finished there by the end of June. Looking forward to a summer of doing my own thing...

Skry's not sick after all

Well this is nothing that we didn't already know, but the NZIS doctors have said that Skry isn't sick after all. He sent over the results of the blood tests, and they are happy that he's in good health and he doesn't need to have the ultrasound. This is a huge relief to both of us, of course, and also means that he doesn't have the expense and further delays of more tests. Great news.

At last, things are moving!

On Monday I got a phone call from NZIS in London. Apparently I do have a case officer, and she emailed me nearly three weeks ago, but I never got the mail. She arranged a telephone interview for me for Tuesday, and forwarded the mail a second time. Once I got it, I realised why it had been junked the first time - the sender name and subject line looked exactly like spam. I wish they had put "NZIS" somewhere in there. Anyway, the email said that I need to get a different type of police certificate. Apparently the PSNI (Northern Ireland police force) don't check the national database, just the local one. And I also need to send a recent payslip from work, as apparently my reference letter didn't have a date on it.

Yesterday lunchtime I had the telephone interview. The woman was very pleasant and didn't ask anything that I had no answer for, but I wish she had been able to tell me how I did. She can't tell me anything until I send in the missing documentation. Still, I can't see how I wouldn't at least get a work-to-residence visa if not full PR straight away.

Skry had his blood tests yesterday, too. At least they're out of the way now - just the ultrasound scan to go - and hopefully he'll soon be able to get going again with his own application.

Skry's medicals

Skry saw the hepatologist today. He didn't say much except that he needs to have more blood tests and an upper body ultrasound scan to rule out anything nasty. The doctor said that if he had to guess at a diagnosis it would be "fatty liver", which is relatively common in young men and not hugely serious. Unfortunately it's hard to test for that, so they have to test for lots of other things and rule them out, instead.

Still waiting - and more blood tests needed.

I haven't heard anything at all from NZIS about my application. That's better than the situation Skry is in, though - he heard back from them about a week ago, and they aren't happy with his medical results and want an explanation or further information before March 30th. The results he got on the liver function test way back in October were way out of line from what would be expected in a normal healthy adult.

This is a bit worrying for us, of course, because the doctor he spoke to last week can't explain what's wrong with him (if anything), which is why he has to have further tests. He has an appointment with a hepatologist next week, more blood tests will probably be needed, and after that we'll just have to wait and see what the expert says. There is something called Gilbert's Syndrome - a harmless genetic condition - which can cause the liver function tests to give strange results, so we're hoping that Skry is diagnosed with that and it's nothing more serious.

Obviously Skry's health is the most important thing in all this. We are both hoping that there is nothing actually wrong with him. But it would be a real blow for both of us if he is diagnosed with something that would stop us getting our visas. I can't think what that might be, because he seems in perfect health and does not seem to be suffering from anything that would be a burden to their health system, but we'll just have to wait and see.