Category: Blog

The past week has seen the completion of a couple of key tasks in my pre-travel plan as well as the end of a couple of era’s.

Yesterday saw the successful passing of three key milestones in work projects . The first was the move of half our city office staff into a brand new two level office that was built for us in Wiri, the remainder of the staff move this coming weekend and the city office will be no more. The second was the ‘go-live’ of a new Cisco VoIP phone solution into the new office and the third was the relocation of the remainder of our city server room to the new site. These projects have been very stressful and have consumed most of my waking hours for the past few weeks. Making these milestones means I can finish work at the end of October, as planned, and walk away knowing that most of the work has been successful.

Sadly my successor has yet to be appointed and I will have to consult for a few days before I leave New Zealand to hand over. Then again I will probably need the money, so some silver lining 🙂

This morning I completed moving and unpacking my office at the new site, this will be the first time in 14 years that I have not worked in the CBD and really is the end of an era. Much as I hate the traffic I am going to miss working in town.

The real era ending happening was, Aiden, my third and youngest child (he is 18 next weekend) went flatting yesterday and I am now an empty nester.  He has moved into a shared house with a friend of my older children and I am really pleased his first flatting experience is with older, experienced, flatters and I have trust that he will be looked after.

I do have mixed feelings about him leaving.  He had to find somewhere to live before I sold the house and left the country and I am glad he has gone where he has gone.  I am also glad that that he has gone a couple of months before I do so we can both get used to him flatting and I can help out if needed and know he is OK. However, my baby has all grown up and left the nest and that is a big moment to ponder.

Though he has effectively been living at his girlfriends for months and probably only slept here once in the past 8 or 9 weeks, he did come home every day after work (and left me his dishes and washing !) and last night the house felt empty.

 

The Panasonic GF1 was the preferred choice of camera for my travels, it has the full manual control and inter-changeable lens features of a DSLR, packaged into something not much larger and heavier than a standard point and shoot.

Sadly they don’t make them any more so I had to pick one up second hand. Fingers crossed no issues !  At least the 20mm 1.7 lens is new.

 

 

At the weekend I purchased my home for at least the first half of 2012, it doesn’t look like much, but I won’t be taking a lot with me.

There have been a few good sales on recently so I am buying things I think I will need when the price is right, but am not compromising on what I want. I was stoked when the pack I wanted was on sale at 40% off  🙂

or maybe I am just tired.

I do not like the text editor used for writing posts, cannot see how to change the font from NTR to ariel, nor can I work out how to manage line spacing more effectively.

It took me three attempts to work out how to create separate menu items for blogs and a gallery, but I think I have it sussed now.

Blog created September 2011.

The “Plan” is very loose. quit work, travel for a bit, pick up work if required to travel some more, return to New Zealand in a couple of years.

For the past eight or nine years I have sort of planned on celebrating my 50th birthday in Europe. The early thinking was to train hard and then enter the Trans-Alps mountain bike race, followed by a touring holiday. However I have just not had time on the bike to consider that sort of activity in the next twelve months, but what the heck, I am going anyway.

I have resigned from work and finish up on the 28th Oct,  at the completion of a couple of large projects. I have two months in New Zealand with the aim to sell my house, settle up assets and get things in order with my family before leaving for Singapore on Dec 27.

I have booked a flight to Kuching in Malaysian Borneo for Dec 30th and aim to spend new year there. From there the world is my oyster…..

Wont be too many more posts after this one until things start to happen, and I work out how this blogging thing works !

Phil