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Chronicle of the process of moving from USA to Mexico
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Meanwhile Back At The Ranch...
The blog has been renamed MoveToMexico200x.
Stan, Mummadog and I arrived on Sunday afternoon and will return to Denver this afternoon. Tomorrow morning (Wed 9/29/2004) I will be on a plane to SFO. I will be visiting my former employer Embarcadero Systems to investigate the possibility of rejoing the company as a field engineer.
The ranch is now equipped with high speed internet provided by Wyoming Wireless. An antenna dish has been mounted on the roof and points at a relay station on one of the foothills of a nearby mountain range about 4 or 5 miles away. Packets are then relayed to another access point in the downtown area of Wheatland where a T1 circuit is installed.
Response time is good.
The blog has been renamed MoveToMexico200x.
Stan, Mummadog and I arrived on Sunday afternoon and will return to Denver this afternoon. Tomorrow morning (Wed 9/29/2004) I will be on a plane to SFO. I will be visiting my former employer Embarcadero Systems to investigate the possibility of rejoing the company as a field engineer.
The ranch is now equipped with high speed internet provided by Wyoming Wireless. An antenna dish has been mounted on the roof and points at a relay station on one of the foothills of a nearby mountain range about 4 or 5 miles away. Packets are then relayed to another access point in the downtown area of Wheatland where a T1 circuit is installed.
Response time is good.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
In case you hadn't heard Stan, Mummadog and I did not and are not moving to Mexico in 2004. I guess I will need to change the name of the BLOG.
A reality check in June raised some serious concerns. One in particular was the impact of the high temperatures and humidity on the MummaDog as well as ourselves. The temperature reports sometimes indicate "100 degrees, feels like 115".
We decided not to proceed with the move to Merida as planned, at least not immediately. In the meantime we had accepted an offer on the house and I had quit my job. Perhaps we could have backed out of the house sale but it would have been ugly and we decided to move forward.
We considered renting in the Bay Area but had trouble finding a house that felt good. We saw some hell holes along the way.
Ultimately we opted to move to Denver thinking that it was easy to find a nice house in a historic area of Denver for somewhat less than what we would take out of the house in California.
The real estate listing pictures on the internet suggested that we could pick a house with the color of granite counter top that we liked best. Our realtor indicated that it was a buyers market and that we could easily find a house and close in 10 days.
What we found was a very hot sellers market in the historic areas where the 1920's bungalows exist. Good houses are quite expensive and it was tough to find a good house at all. Houses that look great on a web page often turned out to be very near the corner of very busy streets or other serious defects.
Good houses get snapped up very fast. We had one big disappointment early on with a really nice and unique house that appeared to meet our requirements very well. Unfortunately it had sold the morning that we first saw it. We put in a backup offer that was well over the ask price but to no avail.
We also found a lot of "Franken Houses". Real scary places that had been overbuilt with funky construction add on's that in some cases nearly consumed all of the yard space.
Later in the process we put in an offer on a big modern house. That night we had a very bad case of buyers remorse. The puchase decision was perhaps driven by our desperation over finding a place with some privacy and quiet and other factors and by our perceived pressure to find something before out realtor left on vacation.
In remorse mode, we felt that we would be slaves to that house and be its caretakers rather than it being a house that suited our needs well. The house looked great with the furniture that it was shown with but our furniture would not have looked so good there. We would have needed to heat and pay taxes on the big house and pay the expensive water bill on the big lot.
Fortunately the offer had not been formally accepted by the 7pm timeout. After a very stressful and sleepless night we breathed a very heavy sign of relief to find that we were not in a binding contract on the house.
We continued to look at houses on the MLS listing sites. We had literally reviewed 100's of houses and driven to many of them for a pre-scan before bringing our realtor out for a showing.
Somewhere about this time we became concerned about getting jobs and the issue of buying a house in Denver without knowing where in Denver we would actually work.
Originally we thought there was an abundance of work in the Denver Technical Center (DTC) area. Perhaps this is true but we also observed that jobs were scattered over a wide area of metropolitan Denver.
Another concern was the fussy nature of employment qualifications for many positions we were seeing. For example: 3+ years of .NET and J2EE and UML and SDLC, etc, etc, etc.
We got paranoid about finding work and employment location and decided to back off somewhat from the house search and to put the employment search into high gear.
One thing that has really saved our sanity is the visits to Mona and Clark's ranch up in Wheatland Wyoming, a 2.5 hour drive north of Denver.
The Wyoming sunsets over the pond behind the house are spectacular.
It is a great place to read and relax. On one of the 4 trips up we helped saw, split and collect several truck loads of wood to heat the house for winter. Clark did most of the hard work.
Back at the rental house in Denver, I installed a cable modem yesterday and we at long last have high speed internet. I setup a wireless network and the VOIP box from Vonage onto the network so that we now also have a regular telephone rather than cell phones only. For the last 5 weeks or so we have been using a slow GPRS/Edge wireless network card. Cable is a huge improvement.
Stan received a job offer in the mail yesterday and will start work on Thursday at 6am in the Network Operations Center. He will work a 4 days on (Wed to Sat) and 3 days off (Sun to Tue) cycle.
I tenatively have an interview next week with a company that makes equipment for collecting and packaging blood donations. They are especially interested in my background with barcodes.
I am also exploring the possibility of being a field engineer for my previous employer back in California with the possibility that I could be based in Denver and work remotely with some limited travel to logistical operation sites as needed.
Things have a way of working out. At least thats what they tell me.
The option of moving to Mexico is delayed but not dead. It might still be Merida or it could be somewhere in the state of Guanajuato where the weather is somewhere between San Diego and the Bay Area.
Best regards to anyone/everyone who happens to be reading this.
A reality check in June raised some serious concerns. One in particular was the impact of the high temperatures and humidity on the MummaDog as well as ourselves. The temperature reports sometimes indicate "100 degrees, feels like 115".
We decided not to proceed with the move to Merida as planned, at least not immediately. In the meantime we had accepted an offer on the house and I had quit my job. Perhaps we could have backed out of the house sale but it would have been ugly and we decided to move forward.
We considered renting in the Bay Area but had trouble finding a house that felt good. We saw some hell holes along the way.
Ultimately we opted to move to Denver thinking that it was easy to find a nice house in a historic area of Denver for somewhat less than what we would take out of the house in California.
The real estate listing pictures on the internet suggested that we could pick a house with the color of granite counter top that we liked best. Our realtor indicated that it was a buyers market and that we could easily find a house and close in 10 days.
What we found was a very hot sellers market in the historic areas where the 1920's bungalows exist. Good houses are quite expensive and it was tough to find a good house at all. Houses that look great on a web page often turned out to be very near the corner of very busy streets or other serious defects.
Good houses get snapped up very fast. We had one big disappointment early on with a really nice and unique house that appeared to meet our requirements very well. Unfortunately it had sold the morning that we first saw it. We put in a backup offer that was well over the ask price but to no avail.
We also found a lot of "Franken Houses". Real scary places that had been overbuilt with funky construction add on's that in some cases nearly consumed all of the yard space.
Later in the process we put in an offer on a big modern house. That night we had a very bad case of buyers remorse. The puchase decision was perhaps driven by our desperation over finding a place with some privacy and quiet and other factors and by our perceived pressure to find something before out realtor left on vacation.
In remorse mode, we felt that we would be slaves to that house and be its caretakers rather than it being a house that suited our needs well. The house looked great with the furniture that it was shown with but our furniture would not have looked so good there. We would have needed to heat and pay taxes on the big house and pay the expensive water bill on the big lot.
Fortunately the offer had not been formally accepted by the 7pm timeout. After a very stressful and sleepless night we breathed a very heavy sign of relief to find that we were not in a binding contract on the house.
We continued to look at houses on the MLS listing sites. We had literally reviewed 100's of houses and driven to many of them for a pre-scan before bringing our realtor out for a showing.
Somewhere about this time we became concerned about getting jobs and the issue of buying a house in Denver without knowing where in Denver we would actually work.
Originally we thought there was an abundance of work in the Denver Technical Center (DTC) area. Perhaps this is true but we also observed that jobs were scattered over a wide area of metropolitan Denver.
Another concern was the fussy nature of employment qualifications for many positions we were seeing. For example: 3+ years of .NET and J2EE and UML and SDLC, etc, etc, etc.
We got paranoid about finding work and employment location and decided to back off somewhat from the house search and to put the employment search into high gear.
One thing that has really saved our sanity is the visits to Mona and Clark's ranch up in Wheatland Wyoming, a 2.5 hour drive north of Denver.
The Wyoming sunsets over the pond behind the house are spectacular.
It is a great place to read and relax. On one of the 4 trips up we helped saw, split and collect several truck loads of wood to heat the house for winter. Clark did most of the hard work.
Back at the rental house in Denver, I installed a cable modem yesterday and we at long last have high speed internet. I setup a wireless network and the VOIP box from Vonage onto the network so that we now also have a regular telephone rather than cell phones only. For the last 5 weeks or so we have been using a slow GPRS/Edge wireless network card. Cable is a huge improvement.
Stan received a job offer in the mail yesterday and will start work on Thursday at 6am in the Network Operations Center. He will work a 4 days on (Wed to Sat) and 3 days off (Sun to Tue) cycle.
I tenatively have an interview next week with a company that makes equipment for collecting and packaging blood donations. They are especially interested in my background with barcodes.
I am also exploring the possibility of being a field engineer for my previous employer back in California with the possibility that I could be based in Denver and work remotely with some limited travel to logistical operation sites as needed.
Things have a way of working out. At least thats what they tell me.
The option of moving to Mexico is delayed but not dead. It might still be Merida or it could be somewhere in the state of Guanajuato where the weather is somewhere between San Diego and the Bay Area.
Best regards to anyone/everyone who happens to be reading this.
