Now that was a long pause, wasn't it? Well, yes... but there's a reason!
I am now in the UK. Having waited six months for the cat passports for Biscotte and Pie, Psycho and I figured everything was ready. We'd visited the UK to have a look around Bournemouth, where we were headed, but the town really sucked. Badly. So we'd had another look around and figured that somewhere near Brighton would be good: still on the coast, plenty of work nearby and a much, much nicer place. Heck, the people even smile...
So we found a little bungalow for rent and started everything moving, timing things to be here at the start of April. Unfortunately, the rental agency wanted a reference and, when I called to ask my landlord for one, I found out he'd just died. This made getting a reference somewhat more difficult and caused us a lot of delays. In the end, faxing over six months of bank statements with rent payments on them solved the difficulty (supposedly proving that I'm trustworthy) and we were finally able to close the deal.
Then the moving fun began: we'd already been packing stuff in preparation, but since we'd been delayed by about two weeks, we'd had to start unpacking it again to be able to live normally. I contacted the movers and sorted them out, but with only three days to get everything arranged, packed and ready! Nightmare. So I then spent two days furiously packing, rushing around trying to organise important stuff before leaving and getting the cats' passports ready before the movers came and helped us by stuffing everything that wasn't ready into boxes. They really were excellent.
We rushed over to sign for the bungalow and, on Saturday 16 April, we moved in. Unfortunately, we didn't have any of our stuff: it was all due to arrive on Tuesday morning. So we spent several days surviving on Pot Noodles, sleeping on a tiny mattress and getting by on the minimum possible before delivery. Everything arrived safely, which is great news: there were only two movers, so I did a lot of the carrying while Psycho looked after Biscotte. Of course, two weeks later, our living room is still full of boxes...
So here we are. We have a bungalow, we have furniture, we have the fridge, microwave, mini-oven, washing machine and everything else. We have a second-hand car to replace the work one that I had to give back (that's another nightmare I shall have to recount). We're living in a lovely area in Lancing with everything handy - shops, pubs, train station, swimming pool and fifteen minutes' walk to the beach.
Life is good.