10 Days?!

One of the more ridiculous regulations in California is that you have to get a California driving license within 10 days of becoming a resident. However, you need a Social Security Number to apply for a driving license. And... immigrants on work visas can't realistically apply for a Social Security Number until immigration information works its way from the INS computers into the Social Security computers... which takes about 10 days. And then you have to get an appointment with the DMV for a written test, after which (if you pass) you can make an appointment for a driving test (which might take another week or so). Can you see where I'm going here? It's a good job I haven't had any run-ins with the California Highway Patrol or anything, then, isn't it? So 26 days after entering California, we've now got appointments for our written tests with the DMV tomorrow. We've been studying the California Drivers Handbook, and taking various practice tests by way of preparation. Wish us luck. On a happier note, the delightful and ever-helpful Sherri has turned up a rental house that we really like, and we signed the rental agreement tonight. Tomorrow should see the agreement counter-signed by the owner, and we'll be set to move into somewhere more permanent than this corporate housing. More details when everything is signed and settled.

Check!?... Ker-ching!

I just found out that my bank charged me $40 for the checks they sent me recently. My precise words to them, when I called to find out what the unexpected $40 charge was, were "that's outrageous!"... but it didn't seem to have any impact. On a good note, though, I got home tonight to find my Social Security Number card had arrived. That's some kind of speed record. I only applied on Friday, which means they processed my application and printed and mailed out my SSN card in 2 business days. Respect! (well, more respect than I would normally bestow on a government department). They told us it would take up to 10 business days. This means, though, that the stink I created over medical cover was only for 2 and a half weeks of coverage... rather than the 4-6 weeks that we originally believed it would take to get an SSN. Although, where medical cover is involved, that really isn't the point. Now I've got my SSN, I'm in a position to get my driving licence... and much sooner than I was expecting, too. Better start reading my California Driver's Handbook.

Fall Came Early

The view from my desk is currently an uninterrupted view of the hills that separate most of the San Francisco Peninsula from the Pacific ocean. This is all going to change in a few months, as they build an office complex pretty-much directly in my line of view. They've only just started on the construction, and (oddly) one of the first things they've done is replant a number of mature trees into a kind of sanitised commercial-scale copse... on steroids. I only saw them physically move one of the trees, and unfortunately I didn't have a camera on me at the time (or, at least, it didn't occur to me that my cellphone has a camera built in). However, they used a tree spade larger than I have ever seen before - and larger than the tree spades that I've linked to in this article. This tree spade had 8 blades, and was pulled by a bulldozer. It can't be good for the trees, though. Over the next few months we're going to be keeping a close eye on them. This is the view from my desk (nice, huh?) The trees in the centre (center?) of this picture were all relocated over the weekend. They are looking distinctly brown. It looks like Autumn (fall?) came early.

A Frisco Morning

The Pilots on BA flights often talk about 'San Fran' when we're coming in to land at San Francisco. I've always wondered whether that's like talking about 'London Town', or whether it is something the locals also say. On Friday one of my colleagues (who's lived here for at least 3 years now) referred to it as 'San Fran', so I think the pilots are probably alright with that. The jury is still out on 'Frisco', though. And talking of the city, we popped in for a quick visit this morning. We were debating whether to go on Caltrain or whether to drive in. It would take about an hour and 20 minutes on Caltrain, and then we'd still end up in a corner of the city we didn't want to be, and have to get a bus (or one of the Streetcars) to where we wanted to be. So, given that it was Sunday morning and traffic should be quite light, we decided to drive. It was a really easy journey, and only took us 40 minutes to get to Fisherman's Wharf. Not bad, really. Yes, yes... I know Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 are the most horribly touristy areas of San Francisco, but we wanted somewhere familiar and easy - and there are a lot of things for Lucy to see and do. We'll work our way through to the more worthy sights and attractions as time goes on. We took Lucy on a merry-go-round on Pier 39. We weren't quite sure whether she would like it, but she seemed to think it was fantastic... so much so that there were a few minutes of grumpiness when we got off (mostly from Lucy) before we went to the end of the pier to see the sealions. There's actually a webcam on the Pier 39 website which shows pretty-much exactly where we were standing. And a passing stranger was kind enough to take our picture. Also, we now know that Lucy does an uncanny impression of a sealion.

Fry's Delight

There are some definite advantages to living here. One of them is the price and availability of electronics. Not only did we get a ludicrously cheap laptop the weekend we arrived here (we only paid $400 in the store... what you see on that linked web page might be different), but now that we've realised that the 256MB of memory it came with really isn't enough for Windows XP to run comfortably, we popped out shopping this afternoon to one of the three local Fry's stores (geek super-stores of enormouse proportions), and bought a 512MB laptop memory module no more than we could have found it on the Internet. ...and the laptop really appreciates it, too. Fry's is one of a (probably) small number of places on the planet where you can buy a fridge, a gas barbeque, a PC motherboard, a cordless telephone, a few DVDs and CDs, a plasma TV, a few electronics components (capacitors, resistors, etc) and a pack of goldfish crackers (the cheesey flavor), all at the same place. It's a nerdy shopping wonderland.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ..., 148, 149, 150... Check!

Almost every day something happens to connect us closer to day-to-day American life. On Thursday the checkbooks (check/cheque?) for my bank account arrived. As appears to be standard, they're perforated at the top rather than the left hand edge, and they have a 'memo' line near the bottom where you can make a note of what the check is for (I'm assuming that this will then appear on your bank statement... otherwise I don't see the point). I have a feeling that they don't like mailing them out too often (they arrived by UPS, which wouldn't have been the cheapest way to ship them)... so they sent me 5 checkbooks - a total of 150 checks. That should see me OK for a while. On Friday morning we'd waited the required 10 days for my immigration information to get into the Social Security system, so I went down to the Social Security office first thing in the morning (with the ever-helpful Sherri, our relocation consultant), to put in my application. Fortunately, my immigration information was all available, and the application went OK. I should have a Social Security number within a fortnight. It's going to take some time to get used to guns being a part of American life. Along with the 'Please Turn Off Your Cellphones' sign, and the 'No Smoking' sign, there was a 'No Firearms' sign... complete with stylised diagram for those without the ability or inclination to read. The security guard, though, was carrying a gun. He was a nice looking man in his late 50's or early 60's. His main contribution for the half-hour or so we were there was to wander around talking to people, and to tell someone to turn off their cellphone. The fact that he was carrying a gun can mean only one thing: that part of his job duties are, at some point and under certain circumstances, to kill someone. It'll take a long time to get used to this.

Fun, Fun, Fun... On The 101.

Well, I had my first brush with the law today. I was supposed to man the company booth at Linux World today. I needed to get there by 9:30am, so I was on the road by 8:00am. For 20 minutes, everything was fine. Then, while I was sat stationary in heavy traffic on 101, there was a loud bang as I suddenly became the front car in a 4-car pile-up. I called 911 (although they told me that someone else had already reported the accident), and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) arrived in about 10 minutes - which is impressive. Mine was the only drivable car, so they dealt with me first and sent me on my way. Things could have been worse. Nobody was injured. Also, it's the hire car so it will be relatively easy to sort out, and the damage really seems quite minor - just some damage to the rear bumper ("fender" if I'm going to start getting my vocabulary right). Surprisingly little damage for the noise it made. The CHP ('CHiPs', anyone?) were very good - they got there quickly, and they were helpful, friendly and efficient. Two of the cars were stuck blocking the middle lane of the 5-lane highway for about 10 minutes, though, so we may well have made it into the morning's traffic reports. Apparently this is some kind of rite of passage. People at work seem to think that it's all part of becoming a local. I've been initiated.

Medical Schmedical.

What's the one thing you don't want to be living and working in the U.S. without? That's right. Medical cover. Guess what hasn't been sorted out properly for our relocation? Right again. I'm currently some kind of non-person, not having a Social Security Number (SSN). I can't apply for an SSN until my immigration information has filtered its way through the system to the Social Security department. The wisdom on this (from people who are paid to know these things) is that it takes up to 10 working days... so on Friday (10 working days since we arrived) I'm off to the Social Security office to apply for an SSN. Then it will take another couple of weeks before I get mailed my Social Security card, and consequently know my number. Until then, I'm in some kind of limbo. The SSN is key to taxation, so I knew I wouldn't be able to go onto the company payroll until I had one - I'd been warned of that. However, what everybody seems to have missed is that I'm also not on the system for Medical cover either. We only found out about this a few days ago, and the immediate advice from the medical system administrators was to pay for any medical treatment up front, and it would be reimbursed once I'm on the system. It's handy, then, that I brought a few hundred thousand dollars with me to cover medical care during this period in the event of something serious happening to one of us. Oh, that's right... I didn't. It's genuinely surprising to me that something as totally unacceptable as this could happen, especially when the company handles so many international transfers that there's a whole department dedicated to the logistics. However, after a lot of negotiation on my behalf by my direct boss and the local staffing representative, it has finally been sorted out. I'm still not actually covered by the US system - it is, apparently, too difficult to do that. I'm now covered by the 'international' version of the UK coverage that I was on before I left the UK. So now we're free to get sick.

Car Dealers of the World Unite!

It seems that car dealers in America all went to the same training school. Friday afternoon and Saturday morning we spent at Stevens Creek, which is where all the local car dealers seem to have congregated. We've only got the rental car for a couple of weeks, so we needed to quickly get a car - and we need to get something that can take us safely up to Lake Tahoe during the snow (which is several months every year). We had two criteria: 4 wheel drive (for the snow), and less than $10,000. We'd looked on sites like cars.com and SF Chronicle to find out what we should expect. So why did every car dealer try to sell us something for more than $15,000? They even said things like "this is around your price range"... No... It ISN'T. We'd spent quite a time in the Mitsubishi dealer, because they seemed to have a few that might meet our criteria. In the end - and after a non-starter where they tried to sell us a car with a $18,000 ticket price but didn't tell us the price until after we'd test driven it - we bought a cheaper (and smaller) Montero Sport. We still ended up spending a little more than our budget. My, but it's big. Still, we'll feel safe driving in the snow. After we'd signed the paperwork to buy the car, we had to arrange insurance and get a cashier's check (bankers draft) before we could drive it away. We got insurance sorted out and had proof faxed to the dealer, but we didn't get to the bank until 1:15pm, only to find that all CitiBank branches close at 1:00pm. Surprisingly, when we went back to the dealer to tell them that we wouldn't have the money until Monday morning, they let us drive it away anyway, on the promise that we'd come back on Monday morning with the check. That's very trusting of them.

Moving Money Around

Fortunately, I have two colleagues in the UK who have both lived in California for within the last few years (both British colleagues... they'd both moved to California and come back again after a couple of years). They had a variety of advice before we left, and some of that was to do with banking. The key is knowing that Citibank in the UK will open foreign currency accounts, and will maintain them without charges so long as you keep a total of at least £2000 (or currency equivalent) in your accounts with them. As far as I can tell, they're the only bank that will give you a foreign currency account without monthly charges. So, back in May I opened both Sterling and Dollar accounts with them in preparation for moving out here. Using the magic of online banking, it's possible to move money between the Sterling and Dollar accounts without commission or charges (which is pretty good in itself). Then, the real bonus in terms of utility is that you can transfer money from the Dollar account into any US based Citibank account free of charge. I managed to open a Citibank checking account in the US before we moved out here (that's another story, though), so I was all set. The surprising thing about moving money between the UK and US Citibank accounts is that it's instantaneous. Seconds after doing the transfer from the UK Citibank online system, the money showed up in the US Citibank online system. It's a modern banking miracle.

It Begins...

Like all blogs, this starts with good intentions. The intention is to keep this up to date with how we're getting on now that we're in California. This is a public blog, so there'll be some things that are deliberately omitted. Anyway, let's see how it turns out... ARRIVAL British Airways Club World has to be experienced. Specifically, it has to be experienced on an 11 hour flight with a toddler. The ludicrous amount of floor-space and the lie-flat beds meant that the journey wasn't too painful. Thankfully, Lucy was able to sleep for quite a lot of the journey. Strangely, Merlot was checked in at the normal check-in desk along with our luggage. He was taken away and we didn't see him again until we got to the baggage hall at San Francisco, where he was already waiting quietly in his box by the time we got through immigration. We had fun trying to fit all of our luggage into the car that had been booked to take us from the airport to the apartment. Some Tetris skills were put to use, and eventually everything (alive or luggage) was loaded - Becky and I were under a small pile of belongings, but at least we were on our way. APARTMENT The apartment is in a gated community. It's slightly odd to have to use a remote opener (like a car central locking remote) to open the gates to drive in and out of the apartment complex. The complex is very pleasant, with a lot of trees, and with well maintained garden areas. There are also a couple of swimming pools and a gym. The apartment itself is a spacious 2 bedroom apartment - plenty big enough for us for a few weeks while our household belongings bob their way across the Atlantic. JET LAG Saturday morning was an early one, with Lucy waking up at 2:30am, and Becky and I doing shifts throughout the early hours. Sunday morning was more normal. By Monday we were all getting into the swing of the new timezone. SETTLING IN We've got a 'Settling In' service, which is like having a Personal Assistant for various necessary tasks: the very helpful Sherri. Our first meeting with Sherri was on Saturday morning, where she brought a pile of paperwork which explained everything from where the shops were, to who the sports teams were and how to apply for a driving licence. Then we went on an area tour with her to try to orient us a little. She ultimately dropped us off at the car hire location, and we were on our own. It gave us what we needed to do the first set of necessary shopping... which included a visit to Best Buy, where we got the bargain-tastic laptop that I'm now using to type this. ROUTINE Now we're trying to settle into a normal routine. It's Tuesday, and it's now beginning to feel like we've got all of the mundane provisions that you take for granted but miss when you haven't got. Issues like exactly what time to set the alarm, and how long it takes to drive to work now have to settle down and become second nature. NEXT STEPS Things still to be done include getting a Social Security Number (for me); getting driving licences; getting credit cards and mobile phones; buying a car or two; finding a house or flat to rent, and probably a whole lot more. Still, it'll take a very long time before the novelty of driving to work in the California sunshine wears off...