Julie, the kids and Julie’s Mum arrived back from Calgary on Wednesday. I was at work and have no leave left Rob (Julie’s Mum’s Partner) drove to Gatwick to pick them up. I left work on the dot of 5:00pm so I could get home and see them after 11 days apart. Big hugs from everyone, it was great to see them again. Julie even said the house was tidy. “Did we have some viewing the house today?” No I tidied up because you were coming back!

The trip went well. The kids liked Calgary and Liam (12) said he would be happy to move there. He’s been quite cautious so far which is a good thing, but he was impressed by how much there was to do. Our little girl just enjoyed being fussed over by her Canadian aunty and would be happy wherever her family are. The in laws did another great job looking after everyone.

They went to Boo at the Zoo, up the tower (the kids terrified Grandma by jumping on the glass floor and pretending to fall to their deaths!), Banff, Drumheller, ice skating (indoors), and indoor climbing wall. They also looked around houses mainly in Okotoks. I thought we had ruled it out, as it’s quite far from Calgary and my commute would be quite long. However Julie feels she would settle there more easily and it’s much more picturesque, you can see the mountains. I saw they have some houses with there own landing strip and a hanger instead of a garage (or as well probably). All that for $2.5M! Bargain! So I’m researching travel time between Okotoks and Calgary now and online house shopping.

I’m doing all this before I actually get a definite written and dated job offer. There are delays from the employer. I’m told these are just HR admin things and they are still very keen but I want to see the paperwork. Also I need an offer to apply for a Temp Work Permit, won’t that be fun!

Our house price reduction has stimulated some interest and we have had a few viewers but no new offers. On Saturday we have what sounds like the perfect buyer. They want a place near the school on our doorstep, they are chain free and there are no houses nearer than ours. If we don’t tick all the boxes with this one I don’t think we ever will. The house hunting season is coming to an end pretty much so this may be our last chance this year and we may have to look at renting the house out for a while.

Still have fingers crossed like mad, but at least we are all together again.

SM

The phone call finally arrived (can phone calls arrive?). The offer was slightly more generous than I expected and the holidays were better by a week! There are a few more details to be resolved but pretty much the offer is on the table! It will have to be ratified by senior management, but my new boss (to be) feels that won’t be a problem. They want me to start on Jan 5th 2009! That’s just 11 weeks away !

In that time I have to arrange a Temp Work Permit (TWP), sell the house (fat chance), pack enough stuff to be going on with and fly to Calgary. It all seems very real now, scary real .

Julie, her Mum and the kids are heading to Calgary on 25th to let the kids have a look around and see what they are heading for. The flights are quite cheap at the moment but my flight in January will cost a fortune. Each day the flights for next week are getting cheaper, but will that happen in January during the skiing season? I can’t really take the chance so will have to pay through the nose.

To try and get the house sold we’ll reduce the price one more time and if that doesn’t work we’ll look at renting it out for a while. We don’t really want the hassle of a rented property 5,000 miles away but may have to.

I called my brother in hospital to give him the good news. He was very pleased for us and is setting himself a target of coming over to see us when he gets better. Considering he can’t get out of bed unaided at the moment, it’s quite an undertaking. I hope it might be a motivation for him.

I’m working in the City at the moment having been moved from Canary Wharf. It’s going well, I have managed to get parking for my scooter in the building so I can ride in and save £11 a day on the train. Today they had parade for the GB Olympic team from Mansion House to Trafalgar Square. Since it’s right next to my office so I nipped out to see them. I like working I the City, if you can call it work. I’m just filling in and helping out until my notice period ends. But I prefer the City to CW, more history and things going on. Although lots of the history is confined to blue plaques on walls saying what was there before a glass and concrete office block was put up. Still that’s much more than I’ll get in Calgary. Things in Alberta seem to be less than 100 years old or more than 65 Million years old.

SM

The update is just to say there isn't an update. The manager who I was going to talk to was off sick last week and it's Thanksgiving today. So tomorrow is the earliest we can start to rearrange the phone call. I was getting paranoid last week thinking it may all be falling through with the tumbling stock markets but the agents says they are still very interested.

Just when this is calming my nerves we get a letter from the council saying our next door neighbours have complained about our new decking. We are trying to sell the house and to make it more marketable we have added decking to the rear. They say it means we can overlook their garden and reduces their privacy. I suggest we raise the fence a bit but they say, "Don't you touch our fence!". It's actually on our land so is our fence. Well the planning officer came around today and said there is nothing wrong with the decking so yar boo sucks to the wicked bitch of the West. Still doesn't help with the house sale as any disputes have to be disclosed to prospective buyers. We may have to rent it out, I wonder if a drug rehab programme for serial offenders want to rent a 3 bed semi in Ware, that should please the neighbours!

I've had a few questions regarding my brother. He's out of ITU and HDU and is in an ordinary ward. He's making slow progress but is getting better. He'll be diabetic for the rest of his life with all that involves. He's getting out of bed on a regular basis now and can just about make it around his ward. He'll be in hospital for a few more months I expect.

Well updates later this week hopefully. Thanks for the support and advice, much appreciated.

SM

The job is spot on, just what I like doing, the company seems good and sound and the people I would be working with were great at the interviews, real 'house on fire' stuff. The fly in the ointment is the salary. I didn’t expect to get the same as I’m on working for a Bank in Canary Wharf London, but this offer is lower than I hoped for. The job comes with share options and share savings schemes which can add up to a potential extra income in a few years time, but that’s not money in the bank. I worked out what salary I would need in Canada to have the same disposable income as the UK. Cost of living (energy costs, shopping, rates etc) all seems to be similar. Canada is cheaper on house prices (therefore mortgage), gas (petrol) so I don’t need as high a salary to get comparable disposable income. But what I’m looking at is being about $20,000 down before tax. At the end of the year I don’t have that kind of money lying around, so we would need to economise.

That begs the question, “Why are we moving to Canada?” We both believe it would be a better environment for our children to grow up in and you can’t put a price on that. We would be getting a much larger house for our money which is also a plus. On the down side there is the stress, and expense of a move, visa applications, we are trying to sell out house at the worst time for 20 years, so renting it out maybe the only alternative with all the hassle that involves. We rented our flat in Reading out while we were in New Zealand. Financially it worked out well as its value increased, but dealing with agents from the other side of the world was a nightmare. My wife has said now the kids are both at school she might be able to go back to work part time which could make up some of the difference and this could also help her to settle in.

So we’ll be sitting down very soon to make the BIG decision.

SM

Well, after a lot of soul searching, deliberating and looking at each other saying "What are we going to do now?" we finally made some decisions.

What all this made us realise is that our ultimate goal is to move our family to Canada, so although we really wanted to be in Calgary,  we have come to the decision that Edmonton is the next step.  We have never been there, but then we had never been to Calgary either and loved it there so we may well find that Edmonton has the same effect on us.

So, a few weeks back we sent off the Edmonton application form along with the IQAS equivalency form and thankfully Edmonton have now contacted us to say that Andy can go through to the testing stage once they have received the rest of the paperwork, so we're probably looking at January for the testing.

So here we go again, hopefully better prepared and successful this time round.  All we can say is that we are not going to give up on our dream and if this doesn't work out we'll find another way of making it come true!! (hopefully plan c won't have to be thought of though!)

I have bitten the bullet and booked my second flight to Calgary. I'll be landing in Calgary on 13th. september. This will be the real job hunting trip and I’m trying to line up interviews in advance. I have two ‘agents’ working on this, and I’m about to chase them as soon as it’s late enough in Calgary. Is 6:00am too early?

This will really be a make or break trip. If I get no positive feedback then I’ll have start looking at jobs in the UK. I won’t be available for work until late January so it’s too soon to start looking yet, but by late September it’s probably worth beginning to start to think about the possibility of looking.

I’ll be staying with my brother-in-law and his wife in their lovely new house. They are moving in at the end of this month, so I don’t even have to help with the move!

The family has returned from THEIR holiday in France, they had a great time especially the kids. They were back only a couple of days before my wife went into hospital for an operation. I’m spending far too much time hanging around hospitals lately. The op’ went well and she’s back home but already doing too much work. The kids are away at grandma’s for a couple of days so it’s just the two of us.

We are still working on tidying up the house to make it more saleable. Just had new stair and landing carpet laid and are fitting a new toilet and basin in the downstairs cloakroom (what’s wrong with avocado anyway?!). All this on top of a £10K reduction in price and still not a sniff of a buyer. The market here is as dead as a dodo. The government might give a stamp duty holiday according to the papers, “No we won’t” says the government. But with such a weak government the papers are making up the policy at the moment.

I visited my brother at The Royal Hospital in Liverpool. The ward and staff are fantastic and he’s making steady progress with the odd set back. I heard today he’s managed to get out of bed and sit in a chair for a while, a big milestone. He’s due to leave Intensive Care and be moved to High Dependency, another milestone.

Well I’m off to pester agents, that’s what they are there for!

SM

Unfortunately things didn't go to plan in Calgary with the CPS tests, so at the moment we are back to the drawing board as it were.  We are obviously very disappointed (to say the least!!!) but we are not going to give up just yet.  We now have to look at other ways/jobs to get us there or wait 12 months for Andy to be able to try again (not ideal but one to consider).  While Andy was there he had a good look round Calgary, Cochrane and Okotoks and liked it all, so really this is the place we want to be, however, there are opportunities in Edmonton as well but as yet we haven't researched Edmonton to the degree that we have Calgary, so watch this space and let's see where we go from here!!!!

First of all thanks for the kind replies and PMs regarding my brother's health. He's been transferred to the Royal in Liverpool and is getting world class treatment. He's making slow progress but is heading in the right direction. Once again thanks.

This has taken my mind off Canada and one more distraction has been a Calgary IT agency. They get a very good write up by Eamonn, who has used them and I tried to register with them. However they require you to be located in Canada and have a visa. Try and get a visa without a job (or job offer). Joseph Heller would be laughing in his grave. On top of this our house sale is moving at less than a snails pace. First week, two couples looking round, second, one and third none. Now the fourth weekend and not a sniff. It would be a good time to view as the family have set off for France today and the chances of keeping the place clean and tidy increase exponentially with fewer feet to dirty it. Lots of other unrelated irritating things have occurred. A routine service for the car ends up costing £600. I have bought cars for less than that! Our front door has decided to stop closing. The locksmith (a genuine guy) says he can't fix it as that lock is no longer made and we may need to get a new front door! I have just set up a wireless router which went OK until I tried to login to work using a VPN (don't ask!). No luck. I call work, they say call Virgin Media. I call them and they say call Netgear (the router manufacturer). I call them and they say call my work. Is that Joe H I hear sniggering? Being able to login from home means I can work from home. Not being able means travelling to Canary Wharf, no fun there.

All in all I was beginning to cool on the idea of a move when we got good news from Calgary. My wife's brother and his wife have have been renting for a couple of years and have just had an offer accepted of a lovely house in the South of the city. Photos look great and it would be in our price range as well. Reminds us of why we are looking to move. Just the lift I needed.

I'll be booking my flight for the September job hunting trip next week. I hope to line up some proper job interviews and try to firm up the visa application side of things. So if you know of any firms looking for a Data Architect (don't ask), data modeller, business analyst, or even turner/miller/driller (no not that, I haven't done real work for about 20 years!) drop me line.

Nil desperandum.

SM

One thing that I was considering about a move to Canada was what to do when the inevitable happens and someone in the family gets ill or dies. I was of the opinion that I wouldn’t come back for funerals. I don’t know why I thought this, I don’t really mind funerals. Being from an Irish background funerals are generally celebrations of a life lived rather than morose affairs. Both my Mum and Dad have passed on now and my family all seem to be in good health.

But there I was making policy decisions when suddenly I get a call from my sister saying my brother had been taken into hospital. He has severe acute pancreatitis and was seriously ill. They gave him a 70% chance of living, but of course that means a 30% chance of dying. This was completely out of the blue, he’d been playing golf the day before. On Sunday I get on my scooter and in four hours I’m in Chester to see him. He’s in the High Dependency Unit but might get moved to an Intensive Care ward if he doesn’t improve. He would be moved to The Royal in Liverpool as they are the regional centre for Pancreas related illness, but they have no beds. I’m impressed by the care and treatment he’s getting in Chester but know he would be better off in Liverpool as that is the specialist unit for his condition. He looks as ill as he is, and has every kind of tube and monitor imaginable. Every time I go in he’s got more equipment around his bed. I’m really glad I can get to see him so quickly and know that if I was in Canada I would feel just the same and want to get there ASAP. So much for policy, emotion takes over when it happens for real and that’s when you know what you really want to do. The best laid plans of mice and men…

SM

We, that is Andy, Krysia and our two girls, have been planning our escape from Eastbourne to Calgary for a little while now. The girls are probably our major motivation for wanting to make the move, we constantly read and see on TV, murder after murder of youngsters in the UK, and we do not want our kids growing up in that sort of environment. Reading other blogs on the expat website and all the other research we have been doing has led us to believe that the way of life in Canada is a major improvement on that which we currently have, with Andy hopefully spending less time at work and more time at home!

Up to now it has been planning but next week we begin the serious stuff, the practicalities of the intended move.

As a currently serving Police officer, Andy is hoping to join the Calgary Police Service and next week he has a series of tests to complete, so this could be amongst the shortest blogs on this site!!!

(I am being told that hopefully that will not be the case.)

If all goes well we should know in 3 or 4 weeks whether this blog will end or continue!!!

So why not go back to NZ?

That was the question I was asked recently. I have indefinite PR as does my wife. My son was born there so has two passports! My daughter (5) would need some sort of visa but that shouldn’t be a problem.

So what’s wrong with NZ? In short, nothing! We loved out time there (1995-1998). We only left when my well paid contract with NZ Telecom was terminated with a permanent job offer at 75% of my previous wage. Still a good living wage but we would need to make some sacrifices. Number one being fewer (if any) trips back to the UK. I could have lived with that, but my wife couldn’t. She had missed her Mum since coming over and with our son arriving while there it had gotten worse. So we packed up and headed back in April 1998, (smart enough to get two summers in a row). I got contract work in IT again, we managed to scrape together a deposit and got on the property ladder again.

Whenever times got hard or I just got bored I would look at the PR in my passport and think about going back. I even went as far as paying to get the PR certificate transferred from my old expired passport into my new one. But it is so very far away and the family ties are just as strong. Economically NZ does not seem to make as much sense as Canada, the difference between average wage and average house price is just too great in NZ. It’s tempting to go there, no immigration problems, I still have contacts as Telecom so a job may not be too difficult, but no. It’s Canada or stay at home (home being UK for the time being).

I was riding to work this morning on my scooter (a 400cc Piaggio X8, not a push along toy) through a lovely part of rural England. I ride about 50km (30miles) from Ware Herts. to Canary Wharf in East London. You might imagine this is a grim ride through industrial squalor and yes it can be. An alternative route takes in small villages with Norman churches and old pubs, ancient forest (beware of the deer) and finally into the modern splendour of Canary Wharf. That’s one thing I know I’ll miss if we do make the move. England is very pretty, green and full of historic places. I ones lived in Wanborough Manor near Guildford which dates back to 1080 (or the church does) and I can’t imagine getting that amount of history in Calgary. Still Alberta does have amazing archaeological stuff going back millions of years.

I work about half way up One Canada Square, that’s the pointy one in the middle. I get views of the Thames from Tower Bridge to QE2 Bridge (if you have binoculars). While I was in Calgary I went up the Calgary Tower. I got a spectacular view of the Rockies, well actually I bought a post card put it by the window and squinted. The Rockies were out there somewhere in the mist and rain and occasionally you would glimpse them like giant ghosts teasing you by playing hide and seek. I suspect even on a clear day they would be too far away to see them at their best. We did a trip to Banff the day before we left just to prove to ourselves these mountains really did exist, well worth the trip.

I have a couple of agents lined up for job hunting in Calgary. Well one is a real agent, i.e. does job finding for IT people. The other is the MD of a SW development company who does some head hunting on the side. That seems quite common in Calgary (Canada at large maybe?). Both do not seem too keen on contacting companies with my resume (see not CV, but the proper Canadian term!) until they are sure I'm really commited to moving. I get the impression that they don't want to get a reputation for putting forward time wasters. Reputation seems very important there. As the wiki says personal contact makes all the difference in job hunting.

Despite this I have been trawling the web pages and have found a few jobs I could apply for. So my resume (there did it again!) has winged it way to one airline (already knocked back), and two oil/gas companies. I'm not sure what the reaction is when HR get an application for someone 7000km away and with no visa (yet). Mild laughter or side splitting ridicule? I'm honing my cover letter to make it sound like December is but a few weeks away. Actually I have a spreadsheet which calculates my time remaining. 20.86 weeks! But only 104 working days, if you can call this working! I'll follow up the application with a phone call, probably after Stampede as I hear not much gets done for 10 days! Do business men really go to work dressed as cowboys?

My company has been taken over and my department has reduced from a high of about 15 to just three of us. Most of the others have left the building but a few have found other places in the new organisation. Still I'm not complaining as the package will pay for my move to Canada.

Ah well, 834 hours and counting. Let's see what tomorrow brings

SM

I was in bed with the flu when my brother in law and his wife were over from Calgary for their first visit since moving there a couple of years ago. The extended family went out for lunch while I lay in bed moaning to myself. When my wife got back she said her brother had suggested we move to Canada.

“I’m Sure you would be all in favour I that (not)!" To my complete amazement she said it might be a good idea! Was this flu more serious than I thought? Was I imagining things? "What about your Mum?" She had been at the lunch as was all in favour as she wanted to move there as well. That's it I was having hallucinations.

Well it did make some sense in some ways. I had been informed my company would no longer require my services come December, and were offering me a small pile of money to piss off. Our children are 11 and 5 so it's a good time to move them. While certainly not hating England, we both hoped for a better environment for our children while they grew up. We live in leafy Hertfordshire and certainly not in the teenage hunting zone of London, but we close enough to worry.

So pretty much over night we start to look at the possibility of moving to Calgary. It was just a few weeks after that we headed down to Gatwick for our flight to Calgary. A nine hour delay didn't help, but we landed on 1st June 2008 ready for anything, well ready for bed actually. Our Sister in Law took the day off and showed us around. we had lunch we another Brit' ex pat who loved Calgary. Over the course of  a week I met up with a couple of job agents who were hopeful my qualifications and experience would be in demand, but didn't know much about the immigration procedure. We also looked at a couple of schools and generally got a feel for the place. What really impressed us was the housing. Compared to our three bedroom semi detached these places were palaces.

My wife had concerns about living in what she considered a big city. We looked at Cochrane and Okotoks but found them a bit too small and distant. But after a week we thought Calgary city would suit us fine and certainly save on my commute. We had lived in Auckland NZ for three years in the mid nineties and expected Calgary to be similar. They are both cities of about 1M people, fairly new, rapid recent growth. But they feel very different. Calgary has a real city centre where as Auckland’s city has little to offer but has several mini centres (Newmarket, Ponsonby and Parnell for example).  

We came home with no show stoppers. We could see ourselves living in Calgary and our children growing there, now to make it happen! First get a job offer, get a visa, and get over there.  Easy really.

We even went to the Canada Expo’ and weren’t put off!  That would make a good T-shirt!

We had a family holiday planned for end of July/start of August. My Mother in Law has taken my place while I plan a job hunting trip to Calgary in September or thereabouts. I don't have enough holiday for both.

There’s a long way to go yet and we may never make it. But eleven weeks after the shock announcement we are still on course.

SM