Our First Blog Post

I've been meaning to start this blog since we first made the "big decision" to move to the Netherlands, but am just now finding time to set up the blogger account.  Kaeli and Avery are asleep, Bryan is having a Wii night with Eric, and I have to stay awake long enough to put clothes in the dryer.... hence, I've got a few moments to actually start this blog.

For those of you who didn't know we were moving and are just reading it now, I'm very sorry for not letting you know sooner.  It kind of came as a surprise, and life has been a whirlwind since we decided to accept the assignments.  Shell is transferring me to the Hague to start a new group in Shell Global Solutions - NL which will enable us to build Reliability Modeling and Dynamic Simulation (that's what I do now in the US) competency in our NL office.  Currently, all 5 of us that do RM/DS sit in Houston!  Bryan gets to continue his current job, just from the Shell Chemicals Rotterdam office.  Since his boss sits in Singapore, and his job is a global role, it really makes more sense for him to sit in Europe.  Then he can work with all timezones in a day without having to hold telecons at crazy hours.  So, big changes coming our way, but at least we don't have to come up a brand new job learning curve.  We feel pretty fortunate on that front!

If I were to give a full recap on our blog in a single posting it would take a while, and the laundry is almost done, so here's the brief version.  After we found out we were moving, we decided to sell the house (my assignment is officially 4 years, but we're expecting 3-4 years).  We put it on the market in October, expecting it to take a while to sell in today's market and economy.  Well, less than two weeks later, we had the house under contract and they wanted us out by December 5th.  We were able to push that back to December 15th, so this past Monday we closed on the house.  This meant that the movers came the previous Thursday and Friday to pack up most of our stuff for either sea shipment or storage (housing is a "little" smaller over there!).  Now, we are in a temporary apartment just around the corner from our first home.  Very strange to not only be in an apartment again after 5 years, but also to say goodbye to the house.  As Kaeli said, "I will miss it!"