Life stories: 1999

 A year of moving  [Previous ¦ Next]

While we found our place in Dallas, we certainly didn't call Texas home and I started looking afield to our next step - I had a good job at Landmark however, more stable after being bought by giant Halliburton. So I found a job near London where lot a the new development in my area were happening; only problem is that it took me a year to execute the move, and we had to move to Houston in the meantime: Houston was really Landmark's headquarters and Dallas was a waning office, and try as I may, I couldn't get telecommuting to work even though communications were excellent (fast internet and hopping airplanes there like buses or trains elsewhere!).

So we move into an apartment in Houston near my workplace, in the vain idea I could walk to work (that happen until a few years later in California, where ironically car is king more than in Texas...). We had a lovely apartment manager from England, who we were to keep in touch wit hover the years. My main problem was that six months of the year in Houston was spent commuting to Bakersfield, on a project in central California, south of which I'd end up so soon after! It was however a successful data management project that earned me a raise and helped me get my job near London - I was stymied in my move as an expat, so I asked Landmark to hire me in England as a European citizen, and my recent raise roughly matched the difference in cost of living from Houston to London.

Presto! I was in Guildford southwest of London in a New York minute, and we found a lovely house to rent in Walton-on-Thames - it lay halfway between Sunbury (BP's global center harking back to WWI, where I worked so hard on a so-called Y2K project), and the Weybridge office of Landmark Halliburton in Brooklands (next to the race track now a shopping center, renowned for racer Malcolm Campbell and Vickers Aircraft whose legends I grew up with in Brisbane). We could afford this due to a real-estate quirk that turned into our favour: housing market was so hot near London, that the wealthy bought houses to invest rather than to live in, and that created a glut in the rental market that dropped rents to a level we could afford. So we rented a three bedroom house overlooking that which Julie Andrews grew up in, and we could never afford otherwise! We loved the Southeast as it's called there, walking along the rich network of pathways in the woods, visiting the rich manors opened to the public by the Heritage Trust, and visited Sandra's parents often as Cambridge lay only a couple hours up the motorway. Petra developed a close relationship with them at age two, which she never did unfortunately with my parents (they visited a whole four days in the year or so we were near London).