Recently in Moving to the states Category

Yesterday was the second anniversary of moving to the States. The time has really flown by and so much has happened since our move. This now means that if we ever did go back to the UK then Kristen would have to go through the whole visa process again, which means the move is even more unlikely! I'll write a longer post up later but right now we're enjoying a secluded getaway in Hocking Hill's. It's unlikely we'll go out from the cabin as the "road" up to the cabin has many potcaverns in them (too big to be called holes) and the car makes a funny noise every time we go over them. (I did manage to get 3 geocaches yesterday whilst Kristen was getting supplies though!)

Victor from Immigration Tales interviewed me earlier on in the week over skype and my immigration memory from the uk is now online. If you've ever wondered what I sound like (and like british accents) then go and check it out. Hopefully there are some useful tips for people in the same situation. A couple of websites that I would recommend are Visa Journey for information on the visa process and also MSN expats mailing list and also there are my posts on moving to the states.
There are also several other interviews that have already been posted with some really fascinating stories.

Oh - and keep an eye out on In The Trenches for my next interview about my life and career as a techie (which hasn't actually been recorded yet.....

We had the misfortune to have to claim for our kitchen table that we moved to the states. The table top had cracked in the move. We filled out the paperwork for the claim and 3 days later got the response back :"We regret to advise that we have to decline payment of your claim for the following reason:The table is not noted on your completed proposal form or on any of the attached sheets, therefore you have not paid to cover the item and cannot claim for it under your marine insurance policy."

My response back was something along the lines of "what part of H1 - Table do you not understand?" although I was a bit more polite.

Today we got an email saying the cheque had been approved.Makes me wonder how many people give up on their claims as they receive a standard form letter.

Chilling Effects is a good site about receiving/sending a cease and desist letter. Basically you post the letter you receive to the site for other people to take note - should have used it when I said that I would not recommend that people use HamridingSimpson estate agents in Congleton

Finally - our house sold today and the money was transferred into our account or it would have done if the annoying solicitors hadn't employed a sneaky trick to hang onto the money for an extra day. We had previously told them (several times) our account details at the bank but today they sent an email to us giving a summary of the house balance (less the estate agents and their fees) and asking us if we really wanted the money paid into our account that we had previously told them. So we've sent them a snotty letter asking for the money to be paid into our account immediately.
The whole house selling saga has been a right pain with lots of hassles with estate agents who lie and do not work for our best interests by telling people to put in an extremely low offer on the house as it is overpriced whilst at the same time telling us that there would be no problem selling the house at the price we were listing at and then having the cheek to tell us that they were trying to protect our higher price as long as they could - for less than 24 hours after they became our agent.
I would suggest anyone who wants to sell a house in the congleton area to stay away from HamRidingSimpson.

We heard back from the Estate Agents today to say that the survey didn't show up anything that the buyer wasn't happy with so the sale is proceeding. In disappointing news we got a letter from the solicitors asking for the deeds for the house and the inventory - something we gave them about 5 months ago. After calling them they admitted they had lost the papers but found them after sending the letter to us. This is good news as I didn't want to delay the proceedings by having to get another inventory done and get the paperwork back to the UK. Oh, and if you are looking for a solicitor, find one who uses email so you don't have to rely on snail mail for correspondance (or the time difference on phone calls)

I phoned the moving company up this afternoon as we had a letter saying that our contents were due to arrive at the end of May and our stuff is now sitting in a box on the pier in New York. They were talking about delivering it to us in two weeks and I had to remind them that they were putting it in storage until we had a job and a house. Good job I mentioned that as I would have not been happy if they turned up one morning with a big truck!

We now have a new estate agent for our 3 bedroom semi-detached house for sale in Congleton. The old estate agent was useless and only came up with an (absurdly low) offer on the final day that he had the agreement. The new agent seems to be more proactive so we will see how it goes.

Now that we've actually moved to the States, new posts on the move and our new life will be under the "Settling in" category as opposed to "Moving to the States" category. This will probably only affect those of you who are looking at the category archives. Regular rss readers and website readers will not be affected.

Well I woke up at 3am this morning and I didn't really try to get back to sleep as the alarm clock was set for 4.15 this morning to get ready for the drive to the airport. It was a quick check of email to make sure we hadn't had any important emails come in and then it was time to shut the computer network down, pack it in the hand luggage and let the cats out for their last roam around the house. They all seemed to be very suspicious that I was letting them out of their room AND they were hungry as we were not allowed to feed them last night so needless to say they were making their feelings heard.
(seeing as though this post is pretty long, the rest of it is in the more section)

Well about the only thing left in the house is the furniture AND the broadband connection :-)
The pickfords movers came at 9.10 this morning (slightly early) and got stuck in pretty quickly. We had 43 boxes (i think we had allowed for 44) and they had finished by 12.10pm. The box-to-tea ratio was not bad at 22:1. They could have had more but the packed ALL the mugs so I've not even got a mug to drink coffee from between now and Wednesday morning. That will have to be rectified if I am going to be awake to get to the airport.
I gave away all my motorbike stuff on the freecycle mailing list. One guy was extremely thankful and took everything I had (apart from the helmet and gloves which had gone mouldy). Then this afternoon a mechanic came round to collect the motorbike. After a couple of minutes fiddling with the choke and a boost from a special battery pack he had the bike running. He wasn't able to drive it away because as soon as the booster pack was disconnected the bike died, but I was very impressed that it started up. He had to bash the brakes with a brick (which promptly split in two) to release them as they had siezed up a bit and after pumping up the tires (with an electric pump) he wheeled the bike down the lane. I was very sad to see it go as I had many a happy mile on it and seeing him getting it started to easily I wish I had flogged it for more money.

The freecycle network was quite neat as last night I deleted all the content on Boring Bulb Blog and recreated articles on all the things I had to give away. Then sent an email out to the list and people could comment if they wanted the things. That way everyone knew what was left. As I received comments I moved the category from Free to Gone and the url that I gave out only contained the Free items. It worked out really well - thanks MT

We had a celebratory meal out at The Plough at lunchtime which was nice. Kristen had a duck wrap and I had a steak and onion baguette. Mine wasn't as nice as I remembered from the Friday lunchtimes at Siemens - partly because it didn't have gravy on it and partly because a lot of the steak had fat/gristle in it. The bits that didn't were nice though. Kristen wanted to go to this pub as we had often driven past it but never stopped so now was a good time.

Got a letter from the tv licensing company today asking me to "send the balance of 0.00 together with this letter.....Please make cheques payable to..."
I am so tempted to do this just to see what would happen.

As part of our clearout we're selling our 4 hobbit standee on ebay. Check the description as I had to ensure we were totally covered...... :-)
We managed to sell our Sky Digibox last weekend and 2 X-Files series 1 dvd box sets. The weird thing is that the opened (but new) box set sold for more than the shrinkwrapped box set!

After my post about Animal Airlines being a bunch of cowboys I get the following amusing email from them. Spelling mistakes left untouched :-)

DEAR MR/MRS. HELSBY - YOU REALLY ARE DEARS,
WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS - FOR JOINING OUR 'COMPLAINTS CLUB' - I AM SURE YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST MEMBERS IN OVER 40 YEARS. HOWEVER, DON'T GET TOO EXCITED BECAUSE,SADLEY, YOU WILL BE DISSAPOINTED TO HEAR THAT WE SIMPLY CAN'T FIND ANY OTHERS WILLING TO JOIN YOU BOTH. BUT HOLD-ON IN THERE, LETS SEE WHAT THE NEXT 40 YEARS BRINGS - YOU NEVER KNOW!
AS YOU ARE BOTH THE VERY 'FIRST' MEMBERS TO THE CLUB WE HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE YOU 'HONARY LIFE MEMBERS' AND I HOPE YOU WILL BOTH ACCEPT THIS INVITATION IN THE SPIRIT IT IS INTENDED.
BON VOYAGE,
TONY

Animal Airlines really seem to be a cowboy company and are really unorganised and I really recommend avoiding them.
I'd be intrigued to see if anyone has had any success with importing their cats to the states with them. We fly out on the 20th April (hooray!) and are having major hassles getting straight answers out of "animal airlines" who are meant to be the people to send the cats with.
We are flying continental from Manchester to Columbus Ohio and have been quoted £1500 for the three cats by continental who say we need to go via animal airlines. However animal airlines gave us a quote for £735 but when we tried to book it they then bumped the price up by £135 by saying we needed to have the cats sent to cincinatti (and we would have to pick them up from there - a 3 hours drive from Columbus). When we reluctantly decided to try that route, the price went up ANOTHER 3% as we wanted to pay by credit card - NOW they are saying that they could decide to use Continental and we might have to pay that - but they'd decide on the day - oh and we'd have to throw the cats out of the airplane window as they can't be dropped off at the airport until an hour *after* our flight has left. The fact that a quote (which is meant to be legally binding) has increased in value by £135 is just not right and I wonder if trading standards would have something to say.......
This company seem to make the rules up as they go along and I just don't trust them - but £1500 is VERY expensive for three cats and I'm not sure we can afford that with everything else we have to pay out in the first weeks of moving.
The whole experience is really frustrating. Kristen managed to speak to another company this afternoon who said that they had had a lot of people coming to them after getting the runaround from Animal Airlines and who had not been very happy with their service.
(Hopefully this rant will get a high rating in google as I couldn't find much on them in google (which is a bad sign by itself))

you start spelling colour as color (or it could just be i've been doing too much html coding where it is spell it as color)

4 phone calls, 3 departments and a very hard to understand voicemessage I have found the Importation of Pets and Other Animals into the United States page (this page also has information on birds, dogs,monkeys and turtles) which states "Pet cats are subject to inspection at ports of entry for evidence of infectious diseases that can be transmitted to humans (zoonotics). If a cat appears to be ill, further examination by a licensed veterinarian might be required. There is no rabies vaccination requirement for cats. Following entry into the United States, all cats are subject to state and local vaccination requirements. Looks like we don't need any further documentation as far as the states are concerned. The airline needs some paperwork too though.....
That zoonotics makes a nice word-of-the-day.

Well the move is a step closer tonight due to the fact that the viewer scheduled for tonight actually showed up! The one that was meant to have come this morning had the decency to let us know that they had to postphone the meeting but the two before that just never showed up :-( We're going to give the estate agent Kristen's mobile number so they can at least ring us to say if they are going to be delayed or need to cancel.

Three bedroom semi-detached property in Congleton, Cheshire, UK benefiting from gas central heating, good sized gardens, off-road parking and garage. The Rightmove website has all the details or you can see the Timothy Brown estate agents site too. I had posted one of these urls a while back but I missed out a quote so the link never actually appeared on the page even though it was in the code so here it is again.

This 3KWatt Voltage converter may be handy for running the computers and stuff when we move to the states. This site also has lots of smaller sizes too. Bookmarked for later use.

People keep asking how the move is going. The fact that I'm still here should give them a clue really :-) Having said that I think the market is improving as we have had a couple of visitors around to look and yesterday my parents put an offer into a house (not mine unfortunately) that was accepted so they are now looking forward to moving yet again. Hopefully this will be the last time they move though (and the last time I'll be asked to move loads and loads of large potted plants)

The good news is that my green card has now arrived at home, the bad news is that it isn't green. Weird eh?

I got home from work last night and volunteered to help paint our kitchen ready for part of it to be tiled this morning. It now looks really good but does need at least one more coat of paint. My arm and fingers ache from pushing on the roller though. Hopefully all the paint and tiling and tidying up will be done before a viewer comes round on Saturday.

The real green card has now arrived at my american residence (ooh sounds posh) AND it came with an official welcome to the united states letter. I'm quite impressed at the speed this has arrived - less than 3 weeks after my entrance to the states (with one of those weeks being christmas/new year)

Hooray! Earlier than expected, my visa has arrived at the office. I must say it looks fairly impressive. Hopefully I don't get delayed at immigration for too long.

If you are interested in our weekend experience of the visa then click on the more button that follows

At long last, a Very Important Letter arrived in the post this morning - . We're not sure if it is a coincidence that the letter was sent from the embassy (and arrives here two days later in FirstClass mail) the day after that Kristen's parents contacted their senator to see what was going on but it does seem very suspicious that the letter has finally come through (but it was quick work once the phone call was made). Hopefully we won't be the uk equivalent of Blunkett's nanny and appear in American newspapers as someone fasttracking visa forms as this has been anything but the fast track.
The interview and medical exam is next Friday. As my surname starts with H I get to see the doc before the interview - at 8am in the morning.....something tells me this could be a long day.
There is a possibility that we could then fly out to america on holiday for christmas, but looking at the prices, if we flew back on the 2nd Jan, the prices start from £3000 each - yep, 3grand. If we fly back the day before, it drops to a respectable £700 each - but thats still a fortune.

Anyone want to buy a house in Congleton? Our house is now online for purchase.