Growing

Esther is growing! She now sports a shiny new tooth...

She is also now quite capable of being elsewhere to the place in which she was put. I left her on her changing mat for about a minute, and found her here...

New House!

So, we moved house. We now have an extra bedroom for all those children that seem to be around here!

I thought before the whole process kicked off I'd get a picture of the girls' room at the old place. This was Lydia settling down to sleep.

The day we got the keys for the new house. Excitement all round!

Ahead of the move, we got all the childrens' clothes and other storage things down from the loft.

Maybe we need two houses :(

 

Moving day - oh dear, snow. The only weekend of the year when it snows.

Thanks to help from a lot of family and friends, we managed to move with pretty much only this van. Yeah, I got to drive a van. Awesome.

Despite having A LOT of help (thanks very much), moving day is still tiring and stressful.

Nevertheless, it's pleasing to have a new house.

 Another pleasing thing about the house is that it's ours...

So the girls can have pink walls in their room 

We can hide washing machines in another room, and have our dishwasher back

 and I can cut massive holes in the ceiling to give us a rather safer means of accessing all that gubbins in the loft.

The view from our bedroom window.

The girls settle in to their new bedroom. Lydia also made the switch to her big girl bed.

and we can now resume with all the usual stuff of life! Settled just in time for Naomi's birthday!

Moving

So, we're moving house soon - to here, just around the corner. Mainly so we can have an extra bedroom for the impending child. We get the keys tomorrow, so our house is now starting to resemble a warehouse once again:

Naomi finishing off her Hama Bead project in a sea of boxes

All very exciting!

As a side note, we are still looking for a tenant for our other house in Aberdeen. Details here - please let us know if you're interested.

Crawling

Miriam has now more or less figured out a crawling and shuffling combination that means she is no longer such a frustrated baby. Hurray!

101

Here I am on day two of my new job. As is the way with such things it's a bit of a slow start, but as it's the reason for our move to Stirling I thought it would be worth a bit of an update on how it's going.

I'm based in the Division of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling. My job title seems to be up for debate - I've been referred to as Senior Research Fellow, Senior Research Assistant or simply Research Fellow depending on where you look. It's probably enough to say that it's a research position and there seems to be quite a bit of freedom with what I do with it. I'm initially working on a project related to the optimisation of airport operations, looking at questions like "what's the best way to allocate planes to gates to reduce taxiing time, reduce crowding on the passenger side and meet constraints to do with plane sizes and so on". Specifically I'm looking at all manner of things to do with evolutionary algorithms and the broader field of metaheuristics (that is, general problem solving algorithms). All very interesting stuff. I've had a chat with a few of the other researchers here and it sounds like there are a lot of possibilities ahead.

I'm based in room 4B 101. This means that I'm on floor 4, of the B corridor (the university is mostly contained in one long snake-like building, with an A and a B corridor along it), and in Room 101 (so if I mysteriously disappear it'll be no surprise...) I've spent the past day or so figuring out who does what and where things are, as well as catching up on some reading and writing that got postponed by the busyness of the last couple of weeks at Loughborough. I also caught up with my good friend Paul Godley who's also just started a job as a software developer at the university.

For now I'm sharing an office with a handful of other people - a couple of research students and a visiting prof. I'm told that other than one guy, all of them will be moving on by the end of the summer so there's potentially much change ahead. I've commented before about how Loughborough's campus were quite nice: Stirling's is also pretty good. Here's the view from my desk:

Also, the morning commute is quite pleasant. About 15 minutes on the bike through a mixture of countryside and housing.

I also get to cross over a railway line (the main one to Perth from here) which you might guess is quite pleasing for me.

One of the other things about Stirling is the you never really escape the scenery, so there's usually quite a diverse mixture of fairly plain looking houses with nice mountains behind:

If you look closely at this picture there's also a Scotland flag. One of three immediately nearby!

This is the view from our bedroom window...

I thought I'd round off with a couple of unrelated pictures. Firstly, here are the girls in a shopping trolley. Yes, we went to a supermarket at 5.30pm on a SUNDAY! One small joy of being in Scotland again (when we first moved to Loughborough we wanted to get ingredients to make a cake on a Sunday night and drove around for a considerable time trying to work out why the supermarkets were all closed).

Here's a removal truck. Mainly for advertising purposes because these guys were great.

The lorry driver was particularly kind and gave Naomi some money to buy an ice cream when she was going through a brief period of sadness.

Dinner on moving day was outside...

Lastly, I quite enjoyed this box as packed by the removal guys. This could have been written on nearly everything we own!

Addendum:

I've now received my official ID card. I went for the "cat that got the cream" pose on this one, which seems to have worked out pretty well :)

The Move

It is now three days till we begin our move.  On Tuesday our packers will arrive and pack everything we own then load it onto a big truck before driving north.  On the Wednesday (due to driving regulations they won't/can't do it all in one day) they will arrive in Stirling with all our stuff, where (as long as everything has gone to plan) we will already be in the new house.

Lots of people have been asking me how we are getting on with everything and how we are feeling about it all so here is a brief summary...

I don't really feel like we are moving house nearly as soon as we are.  We haven't really had to pack anything so the house just looks and feels like normal.  I have felt vaguely stressed that I should be doing "something" for weeks now and I think this is in no small part because lots of the practical things associated with moving are going to be done at the last minute by someone else!  I am starting to feel like things are happening as we have taken down the stair gates and are starting to put the house back to normal in the hope that we can get back as much of our deposit as possible. I am also in operation "use up all the food" so that we don't end up spoiling lots of frozen (or even chilled) food on the long drive north.

We are both quite sad about lots of things we will need to leave behind.  We have come to love and value our church and all the great people there.  We have both really enjoyed serving in our various ways and it will be sad tomorrow to know it will be our last Sunday there (at least as regular attenders, I am sure we will be back to visit).  I love all the wee groups that the girls and I attend and will be sad to leave them behind too. I really enjoy the physical place of Loughborough too, it is a lovely wee place to walk around and apart from the lack of nearby ocean it has some lovely countryside next to the town that has helped this provincial lass from Scotland cope while living in the big bad country of England!!

We are also sad to leave behind the house we are in just now.  There's plenty wrong with it but it is a good size and we have some good neighbours and one of my best friends lives right across the street.  Along with being nice and close to town there is a lot to be said for where we are.  Just a shame that it's not nearly so convenient for Sandy's new job!

As for what we're going to, I'd say that we are an appropriate mix of excited and apprehensive.  We don't know that much about what the future holds, not even in terms of day to day.  We just need to get there and find out.  I am worried that Naomi will miss her friends a lot and I know I will but I also know we'll make lots of new friends in Stirling, we are both chatty types of people.

I am excited for having my family grow up in Scotland, I don't know if I ever really felt all that Scottish before but as soon as you took me out my home country I have felt it acutely and I am really pleased my family will grow up in that environment too!

We are excited for finding a new church and new people and new ways of helping. We worry that Open Heaven has been so good for us that we've been spoiled and our next church won't be able to live up to what we've become accustomed but I suspect we're realistic and pragmatic enough to manage all right wherever we end up and it might even end up being even better!

So we are apprehensive but, as I keep reminding myself  a little over 2.5 years ago we moved to a place called Loughborough where we didn't really know anyone and didn't really know what we would be doing or with who, and that seems to have worked out pretty well for us! Just look at how sad we are to be leaving!

The next few days are likely to be increasingly hectic as we finish getting ready for and the go through with the move but once we've unloaded a few boxes we might even get to slow down a bit as we won't have all our various groups and meetings to attend!

See you in Scotland!

Lasts

We're starting to have our "last" things in Loughborough. Last Sunday was what's likely to be my last stint on van driving for the church. This is great, aside from being a simple job that's really appreciated, you also get to drive a van! Here it is fully loaded up to take around to Mountfields School, the venue for our church.

I'm sure (alright, I know) there are really good reasons for blurring out numberplates!  My main motivation today was humour though.

Today is likely to have been my last stint doing AV stuff as part of the Sunday gathering - the next few weeks I'm going to be trying to give practice to the new recruits on the team so while I can be around to help (not that they really need it - both the guys are doing just fine).

My last cell group is coming up fast - we've only being going about a year or so but we've had some really good nights and it's been a real pleasure to join these guys on their different journeys. The last couple of months we've had a really worthwhile dig through a book on science and God's creation (most of us being scientists, engineers or simply interested in such things), and more importantly we've all been able to prayerfully support each other with coming uncertainty and difficult things we've encountered.

We're really going to miss being here - and how much Loughborough has been a part of us is reflected in the huge number of "lasts" that are coming over the next couple of weeks.

Stirling

Most of you will know about this already, but we thought it would still be helpful to post something about it. We're going to be moving to Stirling in a little under a month.

Why?

Well - in short I've got a new job there. In long, my long term plan is to get a permanent job lecturing and teaching in a computing department, and ideally in Scotland. These don't come up all that much, particularly when counting only places that are interested in the research I do, so when one came up at the University of Stirling a couple of months ago I applied. (I also wasn't sure whether my contract at Loughborough would last beyond the summer at that point) As it turns out, I didn't get the job, but they offered me a 5 year contract doing research. It's with a well-known research group, in an interesting area, where I can grow quite a bit more, and importantly it's in a computing department so I can have chances to get some more teaching experience. From a career perspective it would be quite silly not to take it: most academics I've spoken to, including my supervisor here at Loughborough, agree, though it's a shame to move as I'm quite enjoying the work here and as it turns out some money had become available to extend my contract for a bit (though nothing like 5 years' worth).

Where to?

Here's a link to the house we've rented. It's quite well placed, about halfway between the university and the city centre. It's a really nice house (as most places in Stirling seem to be!) but the downside is that it's going to swallow most of my pay rise. Easy come easy go.

How do we feel?

Very mixed. We're very sad to be leaving our friends and church here, and it is a bit of an unknown for us. At the same time - exciting new job, much closer to family and friends up north. I nearly didn't take the job for several reasons, but in the end we asked for God's peace on the right decision and felt more peaceful about the move , so we're going.

I feel like more should be said, but that's pretty much all there is to it!

Miscellany

Another assortment of pictures from the last couple of weeks...

The new house is much nearer to many people in our church. An extra bonus is that one the weeks I'm driving the van, it's now parked five minutes away instead of twenty! The first experience here was even better though, thanks to a late night session, the last guy who used it parked it right outside the house, so I got a bit more time that morning. Here it is in all its glory from our living room window.

Naomi is adding new words every day now, and a favourite of the moment it "AAAT", or as most people call it, "hat". Here she is sporting mine.

We got this shower curtain from thinkgeek.com, and I picked it up from America in July (thanks to Rick for holding it for me). We saved it for the new house. Chic or what?

One of the only negatives of the new house was that it didn't come with a shed, but the weekend after we moved we were given one! It was pretty old and rotten, but also huge - 10'x6' - so I cut it down to a more sensible size and in doing so removed most of the rotten bits. In the end all it cost was a new roll of roof felt, some preservative and two big posts to hold the floor together. Much appreciated!

No comment!

Mummy's bump is now apparently quite comfortable.

Moving

So, this week has mostly been spent moving into our new house.

The place on King Street (the white one here if you're interested) was chosen by us mainly for being available at a reasonable price when we appealed to churches in Loughborough to help us find somewhere to live. Our landlords, Rich and Caroline, are also part of Open Heaven (Rich is now in my cell group), are very nice people and very good as landlords. (so if you want a house, then ask them for it!) It had been a bit of a shot in the dark - we signed the lease without having seen it as I wanted to minimise the number of thousand-mile round trips necessary before the move south. The house was a little smaller than our Aberdeen one, but quite suited to our needs. Unfortunately, with another child coming, and the expected deluge of visitors, it's just a bit too small for us, so we've got a larger place.

Here's Naomi's room prior to the move. I took a picture so she could see what her first room looked like...

Naomi was very good at helping pack. I gave her a big pile of plastic coathangers and she went back and forth, one at a time, putting them into a Shore Porters box (yes, we kept them from last time). Once that was done, the empty wardrobe seemed a most appealing place to be. Can you spot the child?

Oh, there she is!

On moving day, Naomi had a good run about in the new house. Lots of space and new things to explore!

 

Now the house is full of boxes and furniture. Thanks to Jim for borrowing a work van to do the move, numerous other helpers for carrying stuff, and the people at Beacon Road for temporarily storing our extra cupboards and shelves.

Our dinner table awaits clearing, so mealtimes are currently a bit informal...

However, there are plenty of places to sit, stand and climb...

The new house is near to a new park, with TWO slides. This is much appreciated.

 Last night, I went to the old house to finish cleaning and tidying up prior to handing back the keys. Here's Naomi's room in cleared form:

...and the rest of the house:

 

So, farewell house, we were very appreciative to have you as our first family home. I close with Naomi helping to set up the stair gate in the new house.

Not related to moving at all - our date night last week was accompanied by U-Build-It Monopoly. This is a little different to the normal game: you assemble the board so you can make the game shorter or longer depending on all the streets you include, and instead of houses and hotels, the buildings are a bit fancier. very fun :)

By the way, this week the students are back in Loughborough, and they are EVERYWHERE! Campus is a tad busy again today.