relocation

M. is due with her baby any minute now, so at some point there may be a hiatus, but for now, she's got a lot to say about what her family is thinking about.  You can read her bio here. This week I did some very hard work for this class.  I have to admit, it wasn't anything exactly on the homework, but there is a hard decision my family needs to make and this class has allowed me to approach it from a new angle and I think opened up the discussion more between me and my husband. Basically, we have to decide whether to stay in Maryland, where we have a lot of friends, a pleasant house and…

Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons - inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place...you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table. Because as little as each of us likes to admit it, it is. There will be many migrations in…

My possessions arrived today. Until today, I felt I had escaped my previous life, but now, with all these items here, I feel trapped. I feel that my past has found me once again, that I've not escaped at all. There's something to be said for walking out of an undesirable life with just the clothes on one's back. Sitting here in this beautiful spacious flat -- the most beautiful place I've ever lived -- hemmed in by 100 boxes of books, clothes, books, parrot cages and toys, and yet more books, I wish I'd just walked out and boarded the plane, carrying nothing at all. With my luck, if I'd…

By the time this publishes, I will be on the plane with my parrots somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean (hopefully not in it!), flying to Frankfurt! So while I am preoccupied with doing that, I thought I would write this list to amuse you (and to remind you that I am thinking about all of you, even while relocating); Why I WILL miss living in NYC: NYC's vibrant cash economy, which made it possible (barely) for me to pay my rent without having a "real job." As much as I love Seattle (my home), I am well aware that I could not have survived in Seattle if I had to rely on their cash economy.…

Here's how I will know that I and the birds are home at last.

Today is far more stressful than it deserves to be. I spent a good part of today either bleeding all over my apartment (one of my lories bit me) or on the telephone, talking with the police department, trying to determine if my "good citizen certificate" is ready to pick up. Even though I saw at least two police officers with desks that had functioning telephones on them while I was there, I was told there are no telephones into that office. WTF? After being bounced a dozen times between operator 2231 and operator 174 (or whatever their names were), my throbbing finger wrapped in half a roll…

Things are moving really quickly now, and of course, I also had several emergencies I had to take care of, plus I have several other things I must do, such as must notify my DonorsChoose prize winners, and finish rewrites on a Nature piece that are overdue. (I've never missed a deadline before, so this alone is extremely stressful). So basically, my stress levels are still extremely high, but I've just traded one source of stressors for another. All last week was a nightmare, since I had been calling all the East Coast offices of USFWS -- as many as a dozen phone calls per day, trying to…

In one week and two days, I will be in Germany, beginning my new life as an American expat. Even though I thought I'd be more likely to live in the UK, in Finland, Iceland, or even on one of the South Pacific Islands where my research birds are found, I would be lying if I told you that I am not excited to relocate to Germany. I always thought I'd end up living overseas as an expat, even when I was a child. Despite my excitement about my impending move, I am also extremely stressed out. I have spent the past couple days trying to find my CITES permit, which was mailed to me last Wednesday,…

This week has not gone very well, probably because I've been ill since Sunday with some sort of illness that makes me vomit a lot. Last week, I thought I had everything figured out, but this week, I've been confronted by an increasingly complex tangle of paperwork and problems and with having to make decisions about how to spend huge sums of money (well, huge sums in the view of this unemployed scientist). All the while, I am reminded how intelligent I was to resist the pressure put on me to relocate anywhere unless I knew I had a job first. Here's a list of everything that has gone wrong so…

The good news is that things are really falling into place now -- something I thought would never ever happen. First, I walked through icy winds and a light dusting of snow to bring my ailing lory to my veterinarian, Simon Starkey, on Thursday morning to get blood drawn so they could look again to see if she's diabetic. The blood tests came back Friday morning, showing that she had blood glucose levels that were twice the normal values, which is something that can result from stress or from mild diabetes. Since she was so ill when I initially brought her in (yay, for poverty for making me…

Today was another day spent entirely on the telephone, talking to people and clearing up my misunderstandings (or theirs) about this moving process. If you hate telephones, as I do, then today is one of those days that you avoid for as long as possible. Originally, I was going to reward myself for sticking to my telephone plan by going out for a beer after wards, but I cannot do this because I have to bring my sick yellow-bibbed lory to the veterinarian tomorrow morning to see if she's really diabetic, and then develop a treatment plan to keep her alive and healthy. The first thing this…

Today was a breakthrough because I view everything very differently than I did yesterday or three days ago, and because I made significant progress towards my goal. In fact, I made so much progress today that I even decided upon a tentative target departure week that I am working towards (I've even narrowed my departure down to three days within that week). But more about that later; let me tell you what I've managed to accomplish today. First, I called my USFWS agent, Katherine, and I learned that I have my CITES permit (she gave me the CITES permit number, which I need to begin working…

After experiencing astonishing frustration levels, I decided that relocating overseas is just like finishing the PhD, except it's far more confusing and there's no clear authority figure (like an adviser, a departmental chair or a dean) to appeal to when everything goes to hell. But I have to do what I did in grad school: I have to (somehow) control the USFWS and the USDA instead of allowing them to control me. In this situation, this requires that I spend a lot of time researching every possible angle involved with the export and import process and become as expert as all the agents and…

I was so upset about the likelihood that I would spend the next six months (or probably longer) trapped in a bureaucratic cesspool of confusion and conflicting information whilst spending thousands of dollars on rent, penalties and veterinary bills, that I was ready to do something drastic. So I called USFWS. The USFWS computerized telephone voice warned me that they are experiencing "significant delays" in processing CITES permit applications for birds, so I expected I'd only be able to talk to a real person after appealing to my congresscritter, Charlie Rangell, who is under investigation…

The representative from the moving company is coming tomorrow evening to look over the things I plan to move so he can write an estimate for how much the move will cost and help me get the paperwork taken care of. Needless to say, I've been busy doing other things, so the place is as messy as it was one week ago, although the mess is distributed much differently than it was then. I checked my apartment mailbox yesterday and was surprised to find a letter from USFWS regarding my application for CITES permits for the birds (don't they read their own instructions regarding mailing addresses…

Not much to report today except, as I expected, the USFWS has still not responded to my application for CITES permits for my birds. So as I predicted, I am panicking. Instead of going out for a beer or two tonight to relieve my stress, I am at home and now I am suffering intense foot cramps that have almost paralyzed my feet and make me want to scream. Is it time for some codeine-based pain relief or maybe just some alcohol? The moving company representative had to reschedule visiting my apartment to look at my things until Friday evening next week. It sounds like the company where he works…

You might not know this, but I am planning to leave America and move overseas -- permanently. There are a lot of reasons I am doing this, not the least of which is the fact that I am in love with a British scientist and that, even as a child growing up in a farming community, I always took it for granted that I would relocate overseas (it just took a helluva lot longer to accomplish than I ever thought it would). Originally, I thought I'd be moving to Finland -- comparatively easy for me since I'm Finnish and I've fallen in love with that beautiful country, the people and the language.…