Wednesday, August 24, 2005

New Zealand Residency Progress...

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Some good news has come via the New Zealand Immigration offices... We have been granted a 2 year Work to Residency visa!! We're super excited and have already been hammering out a plan on achieving our full residency. We anticipate spending next winter in Antarctica with me leaving at Winfly to step into a job in New Zealand. Once I have been employed in that job for three months we can apply for our full residency!
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Winfly is HERE!...

OY! Winfly is here and and half way over. New people are running around and all smiley and happy and you just wanna choke them! It's a hard thing to deal with these folks after you've been down here and isolated and really got things just the way you want and then that first plane lands and all hell breaks loose!
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Winfly is also the return of the sun and an actual sunrise...
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So it's not all bad, we did get a LOT of package mail in and so Heather and I have plenty of Farscape, SG1 and Six Feet Under to watch. Here's a picture of me on the right in the mailroom sorting mail...
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Still, it's a weird time and a bit of an adjustment. We're now reduced down to one room until we leave but that does force us to pack up a lot of our stuff and makes it easier for our eventual departure now scheduled for October 17th.
Some good news has come via the New Zealand Immigration offices...

Monday, August 15, 2005

August and Winfly is just a few days away...

WOW! I can hardly believe it's August and that Winfly, the time when we get our first flights of the winter, is just a few days away! OY!! A lot has been happening in our lives:

First, there was a crazy hall party two weekends ago that just kind of happened. We were invited over to dorm 155 for drinks with a few friends and that seems to have been the plan for nearly everyone in that dorm so it didn't take long for things to turn into a full blown hall party with lots of mischief! Here's a picture of Heather dancing up a storm in our friend Tony's disco room...
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and here's a picture of us together...
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So that was two weekends ago... This last weekend we got notice from the New Zealand Immigration Service that they will be granting us a two year Work To Residency visa! We've got three months to claim the visa, which we'll do first thing off the Ice in October and then we'll have two years in which I'll have to get a job in NZ with a NZ company that is considered "skilled employment", which basically means it's employment that applies to my education or previous job experience. Once I've held the job for three months we can apply for our residency, so we're practically there! WHOOO HOOO!! Sorry, no photographic evidence of that weekends festivities!
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Oh, and as for the potential job in Port Hueneme... Well, in typical Raytheon fashion the powers-that-be have failed to make a decision on anything and, in turn, failed to tell us anything. I got an unofficial email from one of our bosses noting that the subject was supposed to come up at a recent meeting and didn't and his advice was to make other plans because it likely wasn't going to happen this year.
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Still no official word, but Heather and I have vowed to only wait until Friday and then take ourselves off the list. Part of me actually hopes they do get it together and then are left with NOBODY to fill the positions! Would serve them right!