welcome...

...to yet another one of my blogs. i think i will use this one as my main blog, since i am losing count of how many i actually have floating around in cyberspace. between myspace, the nest, wordpress, and other blogger accounts...what more could there be to say?!? apparently, there must be, or else i wouldn't keep insisting on starting these blogs!

so, for those of you that know me, and my wonderful hubby, michael (aka mike), you know that we are getting ready to live one of our dreams. and for those of you that don't, i will let you in our little secret: we are planning to move to new zealand in october 2008. hmmm...let's rewind a fair bit.

a little history, sparing you many details: mike and i started dating in november 2004. we got engaged in a cave in new zealand in 2006 while on vacation there for 3 weeks. we got married on october 27, 2007 at greenbank farm on whidbey island, washington. one the best days of our lives. it was wonderful, and the perfect way to begin our lives together. i consider us to be a true craigslist success story...you can find an apartment, a car, a job, and a husband on craigslist! hahaha.

when we first started dating, i remember mike telling me that he has always thought about living in new zealand. he is a filmmaker, and peter jackson is one of his heros. (he has told me this, and he wrote it in the "heros" section of his myspace page!) he would love to work for this brilliant man at some point in this life. he has been researching this possibility longer than he has known me.

at the beginning of our relationship, he asked me if i would ever consider moving to nz. i told him that as long as i can practice as a pharmacist there, i would love to live abroad. i was born and raised in california. except for a couple summers in virginia during college, i have been either in southern or northern california. so, the seed was planted, and we really started considering making this dream a reality.

fast forward to september 2006. we were so excited to finally be going on our trip to nz for 3 weeks. it is the first time i have ever used my passport. i was a little nervous of the long flight. we had a direct flight from san francisco to auckland, and it was great. i did take some ativan, but really, i had nothing to worry about. i was comfortable, and we made it there safe and sound. we traveled from auckland to wellington, took the ferry over to picton, and made it as far as christchurch before we ran out of time and had to come home. the second day we were there, mike proposed. i was surprised, and beyond happy. he told me that he had wanted to wait till the end of the trip to propose, but he didn't want to have to worry about the ring in his pocket the whole time! one of the best parts of the trip was the fact that we didn't tell anyone the good news till we got home, so we shared this little secret between us for the rest of our vacation. i think that was sweet.

well, i think we always thought moving to nz was a pipe dream...and then we went there, and we knew we had to come back and stay a while. so immediately, we started planning our strategy for moving. initially, we wanted to move in 2007. however, we nixed this idea since we had a wedding to plan, and i wanted to have at least 2 years of official pharmacist work experience to bring to the table before we left the united states. also, i wanted to have a nice financial cushion saved before we bid our lives in the bay area goodbye.

we sent our expression of interest to the nz immigration office on 1 october 2007. we immediately heard back with an invitation to apply under the skilled migrant category. we then started to get all our paperwork and evidence prepared. this included fbi background checks, a hefty 30 page medical release form (we had to have blood tests, chest x-rays, urine analyses, and a complete physical), past/present work experience evidence, documents of our relationship (marriage certificate and proof that we were living together for at least a year), passports, birth certificates. it was a little scary to send our lives and identities through the mail to the nz immigration branch in london. we sent that off on 8 february 2008, and it was received on 16 february 2008.

and then we heard nothing....we waited...with as much patience as we could muster. we diligently checked the processing times website almost daily for updates. not a peep till 11 april 2008. there was a message stating that they are processing the applications through 27 february 2008. we were pretty ecstatic. i know, even though it was a small step forward, at least we were definitely moving forward. the next step was to be assigned a case officer, and have a real contact person working on our application. we were expecting to wait a month or two just to be assigned a case officer....so, i braced myself for more waiting. (if you know me at all, you know that i absolutely detest waiting....i guess i don't have this virtue!)

however, yesterday, 21 april 2008, mike received an email from our case officer (co) from london. he asked for a few more items to document his current work status, and more proof of the length of our relationship. and he asked to set up a phone interview. mike hustled to retrieve all the supporting documents requested. thank goodness we had everything handy that he needed, and mike emailed him all the scans of the documents. this morning we received another email from our co, asking us to send the original documents via snail mail. also, he told us that he will call for the phone interview on thursday at 3pm london time.

we are so much closer to getting a final decision than i thought we would be at this point. i am excited. i have to keep reminding myself that it can still take up to 3 months to get a final answer from nz. till then, we are anxiously waiting for what our future could be.