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

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 one 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

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