What has been up

In fact a lot. Things have been moving at a slow and steady pace but there have been so many things, that I feel like a silt bearing river. Ready to dump everything :)

My work place moved to a different location. I had spent close to 2 years in the building (as had lots of colleagues). It was a very central location with shopping places and restaurants close by. It was a quaint little building too, with nothing funky or state of the art. But I liked the place a lot. Most importantly, it was walking distance from our home which gave me the daily dose of cardio on the way to and from work. Well... now with the move, I ended up taking a bus. Gone were the days of inhaling fresh air while listening to music at deafening volume and having the most relaxing 'me' time at the beginning of the day. I had to take a bus and seeing a lot of strange faces on my way to work. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with people. People don't work too well for me. Again I think that last sentence did not come across correctly. How to put it better .... I am a bit unsocial. Not in a very extreme way. I prefer being alone, I prefer no one talking to me... just like I prefer writing to talking about my thoughts. I am not sure if any of this is projecting me in the correct light *worries*.

Getting back to my original rouse, I have to deal with the bus driver, maneuver through the different charts and fare rates and specify mine (mind you all this in my Indian accent which gets a bit troublesome to the man behind the plexi glass). I have to get a seat and adjust with another person for the duration of the ride. (Yea maybe the other person also has to adjust with me :P) What do I mean by adjust you ask? Well.. just the human proximity at the minimum and body odour at the maximum :P 

Not to forget bus constitutes a dependency on an external entity. As a seasoned software professional dependency is something we are advised to avoid like a plague. And this dependency is a heavy one which makes us a tightly coupled system. Again a no no for a programming person. 

Now to take care of some of this, we decided to move closer to the bus station. An added advantage was the kid's day care was close to the coach station. So drop the kid, board the bus and we are all singing and dancing :) Moving houses is much more painful than the above mentioned lines.  It involved surfing for homes. Luckily I was recommended an apartment by a colleague. It was the first and only apartment we visited and we gladly liked it. We had kept the day care and the bus station as our light houses, and since the apartment was a stone's throw away from them, our decision was easy. K would have to forgo the luxury of just crossing a street to get to his work. In fact it was going to be 20 mins walk for him. How the tables were getting turned. The 'walker' sits in the bus and the 'non-walker' gets it.(So much now he is loving  it! Even though there is a shuttle drop,he prefers to walk!!!)   Finalising the house was just the tip of the ice berg. There was the whole lot of sorting, packing, booking a mover, moving, unpacking, arranging. Finally trying to settle in. The old house had seen the milestone of having our first child and all the preparation around it. She had spent her 2 gorgeous years there. We moved on to a new home to create new memories and experiences. 

As all of this was happening or about to happen, I was getting a bit bored at work. I was feeling un-challenged and felt my potential being under mined. That is when I started to look outside. I managed to secure a new offer. Well secure a new conditional offer subject to a whole lot of verification. The whole journey was a nightmare - we were changing homes, our work permits were up for renewal, I had a 12 week notice to serve, which I was 'persuaded' to kick start as soon as possible to make my joining in the new firm quicker. One box ticked, another was a question mark, one seemed close to a check while yet another seemed not OK. It was a veritable see-saw. I had the phenomenal support of K and the recruitment consultant with whom I was dealing. Without getting into too much details, the gravity of the situation could be summarized as being close to 'me ending up jobless'. Those were anxious days. Finally there was a glimmer of light at the end  of the tunnel. Things started falling into place with me being merely 2 weeks away from finishing my term in current office. Today was my last working day at the first company in the UK that hired me! It seems like the end of a monumental chapter. I was so new to the whole set up, I started at a very small firm at a role way below my qualification and experience. The company grew by leaps and bounds and is now a mid-size firm and in fact one of the top 3 companies of its domain in Europe and the biggest in the UK. I grew in roles and responsibilities and even secured a promotion! I was supported through my maternity leave and after with change of my working hours to part time. I had a chance to work with some great technical brains and awesome people from whom I learned a lot. I would have loved to continue but its better that some things are brought to an end before the bad parts start. So brimming with nostalgia today I bid adieu to the big flashy building that houses the growing firm.

In the midst of all this flux and  a couple of other happenings at both home, things were a bit too aberrant. I hope for some sort of consistency to return :)