Slowly getting closer to residency
Trip Start
Aug 13, 2007
1
24
91
Trip End
Dec 31, 2008
Wellington,
New Zealand
Monday, October 8, 2007
On Tuesday, since Jill & Paul weren't catching the ferry until 2pm I met them and Graham for lunch, as I still had to go to work. Paul and Graham got up early to play golf, and Jill had a lazy morning in our apartment. Whilst we were at lunch, Graham got the phone call we've both been waiting for - the job offer from Telecom. Unfortunately I had to go back to work so we couldn't celebrate properly.
On Friday, Graham went to sign his employment contract. It's a permanent job, but he has signed a fixed term rolling contract until we sort out our permanent visas. Also on Friday, my works had 1st Friday of the month drinks at 4pm. Each month a different department comes up with a theme and then decorates the conference room and provides food and drink. This month it was Oktoberfest! I planned for Graham to meet me around 6pm and then we were going for a meal to celebrate his job, but that never happened. Instead, a few of us from my department ended up going to the pub to continue drinking and eventually we had a kebab and went to a disco! A good night!
Saturday wasn't too eventful as I had a hangover, but still made it to my gym induction and did a bit of shopping. Saturday shopping is great because the city centre always seems to be really quiet. In the evening, Jill and Paul returned from their mini break in Abel Tasman and we stayed up until 2am to watch the England v Australia rugby. We were so happy that we won, we opened the bottle of champagne that Jill & Paul had given us as a housewarming present. It's a bit surreal to be drinking champagne at 4am! A quick 4hr nap later and we were up again at 8am to watch the All Blacks lose to France!
Today was Graham's first day at work and it seemed to go ok. I'll provide more details once he's settled in a bit more. I went to the gym at lunchtime today, which is a new thing. My work has showers and changing facilities so that is always handy, and a lot of people tend to do some sort of exercise at lunch. Tomorrow I am playing indoor football, or as they call it over here, indoor soccer. Transpower has a good variety of sports teams, including soccer, netball, touch rugby and badminton. Well those are the ones I am interested in. They also have volleyball and squash I think.
This evening was spent completing our Expression of Interest. This is an online form (or paper if you want). It's the first step in the residency process. You have to enter a lot of details and based on what you enter, points are awarded. Once you submit your application you are put in a pool of applicants. There is a fortnightly draw of applications. Any applications with 140 points or more get drawn out and then after that, they pick out down the list until they fill the numbers (or at least that's how I think it works). The next draw is on Wednesday so we'll let you know how it goes!
