Settling-in is not easy …

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--> good thing for lovely coffee breaks! 
(this cup of coffee was on par with the best I've had in Florence, and it was just a little cafe I wandered into to escape the cold wind)

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Wow – so many things, that we take for granted as ‘part of life’ need to be done over, when moving. Leaving aside for now the myriad of new things that need to be set up in my personal life, one would think that at work I could slide right in since I am after all just transferring from one location to the next. But no, I am now an employee of our Australian entity, so as a ‘new’ employee, I have to create my work environment all over.  This means new accounts that must be set up, ordering and installing software, getting used to a PC all over again (I had moved to a MAC years ago, and going back to Windows … Windows7 mind you,  not Windows XP … is not for the faint of heart), getting a new conference bridge account, a new corporate credit card account, new tunneling account … the list goes on.

Not fun  : ( 

Oh well. I see it as an investment towards the payoff, which is the reward of being here for two years.

It had not occurred to me to set up voicemail on my new cell phone, since Apple kindly did a restore from the cloud of everything that was on my US phone and so the phone and acted looked the same. Except … no voicemail … I was wondering why these numbers that I did not recognize (and of course I would not recognize them, they are Australian numbers) kept calling me and not leaving voicemail. So now that is set up as well.

The big nut is finding a place to live. The houses in Melbourne are smaller than what we are used in the US and more expensive. Because we did not have the luxury of time to go on a house-hunting trip before we packed up and left, about 90% of our furniture has been sealed into a shipping container and delivered to the dock, awaiting its ship. I joke with my husband that maybe we can rent that shipping container and set it up on the sidewalk in front of our new house. That way when we want to use one of our many sofas or armchairs, we can just go out and sit in the container.  More on houses soon …