Charlene posted about our one month as Londonites anniversary on her blog the other day (see “A Month of London“). It's hard to believe that we've been here a month, especially when I look at the rubble filled office I'm in, or the rubble filled backyard we have, or the rubble filled garage that currently has about 100 boxes and precisely 0 cars in it, but it's definately a month now.
So what's so good about London anyhow? Well there's loads of things.
Our house in Ajax closed two weeks ago, and that let us pay off all of our debts. No credit card debts, no line of credit, nothing. Everything in our house is paid for now. That was the one thing they didn't tell us about when we bought our first house…we had nothing, and it took a lot of money to get things like fridges, stoves, washers, dryers, dishwashers, air conditioners, couches, chairs, tables, and places to put things.
Then Kaylin came along and we needed cribs and blankets, and strollers, and clothes, and toys (and toys and toys and toys).
It added up, and we built a nice little debt. Not crushing, or paralyzing, but it was a decent amount of debt. It's all gone now. Bye bye debt.
Second is my job. I feel like InfoTech is still new enough that I can make a significant contribution. I also feel like I've found my niche in the department. I'm the official “web guy”.
Everyone else is a software developer, but I never set out to make software, I set out to create web pages. Most of the guys in my department would be just as happy creating an application as they would building a website, but I can't imagine doing anything else. Databases have no use to me unless they're attached to a website, and C# is a means to an end, not an application language of its own to me.
Secretly, sometimes they baffle me with terms like “compile” and “instatiate”, so I turn it around by talking about Box models, beacons and DOM models…mwah ha ha ha ha HA!
Of course the promotion to manager is a big change. I have a couple more people reporting to me than before, and whereas we had a ton of ongoing long term projects at TSN, here at InfoTech it's 2 week chunks of projects. There's a lot more schedule juggling and figuring out who does what when and how long it should take them. Plus if my estimates are off…DISASTER!!!
This weekend the first project that I really spearheaded goes up. We're redoing the home page, and I took the opportunity to hack the home page apart and rebuild it in my image. Clean HTML and CSS…it's a beautiful thing, and just phase one in my evil plan for world domination!
Our lack of debt and my job aren't the only things I love here in London.
My mom and dad are close by, which has meant babysitting (we went and saw a movie last weekend and actually shopped for clothes by ourselves one night!). I have friends in London, Ryan and I try to make it out for lunch once a week, and Kaylin has been out to play with Paige and Cordy a couple of times now.
Best of all is the drive to work (Charlene insists I can't call it a commute because it's less than 10 minutes). I'm so close now that I can come home for lunch, and I've done that a couple of times. In the month that we've been in London I've only missed dinner once, and that was because of a late night at work, but I'm always home by 6:15 at the latest, usually closer to 5:30.
Yep, this London life is a pretty good thing.