Friday, February 19, 2010

got. there.

i like this year. it is full of good things already, and we are only in february. i got married, i got my australian residency and now, two weeks later, i have got myself a fine new job to go to. it is a good one too, not just one of your run-of-the-mill crap jobs. it is just the kind of stuff i want to do, and i hope it works out well.

it is at a water engineering consultancy that primarily does flood modelling and analysis. i have got a couple of friends from university who work with this sort of stuff and i have been envious of them for a long time now. i start on march 1st and i pretty much cannot wait. it is a five week temporary contract to start with, so i need to do well if they are going to keep me on. time to work hard! i haven't worked for over six months, so i am really eager to get started.

i have got such a good run so far this year and it feels like everything is just falling into place. they are pretty humble things, just having a nice home and a job, but it is all i am really asking for right now. i just want to save money, get my career going and get into a normal life with rachel. that sort of standard grown-up's life you know. maybe in the future i can get myself some actual ambitions.

henry rollins is coming to sydney in april. i don't have tickets yet, but i really really want to go. i think he is a really interesting character, he's got a lot of opinions presented in a 'different' way and is also extremely funny. i don't care too much for his music; granted, i haven't heard too much of it, but it is not nearly as exciting as his spoken word stuff. on the album think tank, he's got a long piece called airport hell which is basically a 14 minute rant about how stupid people are and how obvious that is at airports. it always makes me laugh out loud when i hear it and i can't help thinking about it whenever i'm at the airport. you can find it on grooveshark. check it out!

the mountain goats are also coming to sydney in april. i predict april to be an awesome month. the latest tmg album, the life of the world to come, is really good and you should get it.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

i'm tired of the old shit, let the new shit begin

i wrote this when i was in auckland last november. i did not post it because i wanted to get everything over with first. now that everything is over with (high five!), i have a couple of short notes to post. here is one. for the record, we ended up having our wedding at leura cascades in the blue mountains, two hours west of sydney. there are some pictures on facebook. i might post some here one day, or i can send some to you if you ask me. we also got awesome rings with a meteorite inlay. the family illnesses ended up not great but could have been infinitely worse.

2 nov 2009

so the last few days have been quite overwhelming. a lot of things are up in the air and could end up being either good or catastrophic.

i prefer good.

i have had one of my biggest breakdowns in many years, though thankfully i calmed down quicker than expected. i am in new zealand. i booked the ticket about 25 hours before i departed. yes, this is visa and immigration business and they never fail to disappoint.

also stirring things up have been multiple sudden health problems in my fiancé's family, but it is not really my place to talk about, so i will leave it.

yes, fiancé! there are good things happening too, although if your idea of good is me moving back to sweden (and if so, i certainly appreciate the thought!), you might be disappointed. but yes, some sort of marriage event is coming up. it is incredibly awesome, but also feels just a little bit strange. i never thought i would get married, never thought i was the marrying kind, but when rachel asked i just felt that marrying her was something i really wanted to do. i did not expect that, did not see that feeling coming, and that makes it all the more amazing. i have never thought about how my ideal wedding would be, except my casual thought about how the only way i was getting married would be in vegas and it would be an elvis wedding. and that is not a bad idea, although somewhat impractical at the moment. also i never really had any relation to elvis, except that i like the song "a little less conversation".

some things i might want at my wedding are good music, not too many people and a kickass cake. but i might also skip any wedding event business and put the money into an awesome trip instead. these are both viable options. i don't want to spend too much money on it anyway. oh, and it just occurred to me that rings are an essential part of the wedding thing. i want something simple but sleek. i am not a bling man. not openly, anyway. and certainly not every day of my life, which is how often i will be wearing the ring.

so yeah, a lot going on. ups and downs. i hope the downs straighten themselves out soon.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

new beginnings

guys i am starting up this blog again! I will try to make updates now and then and not leaving it for two years and stuff like that.

so i am just going to go through a little bit about what's been happening in my life lately. not the last two years though, that would be too much of an essay that i'm sure no one would get through. but the last few months have been pretty rough and also pretty exciting, and the day before yesterday i reached a new milestone in my life that i feel will make everything a lot easier in the future. i have been on my toes for months, nervous about the future, not sure what would happen and never really able to relax. but now! everything has worked out and i am relaxed and i don't feel guilty all the time and i can do stuff like updating this blog!

so the tl;dr version is that 1. i got australian residency. 2. i got married.

the long version starts with me coming back to sydney from sweden in mid-august. i had finished my six months at veolia in sydney and was looking for a new job, but did not have a work visa and would need sponsorship from an employer. i had done that with veolia, so i thought i would be able to again, but it was not to be. in october rachel and i decided to get married, and in early november we were going on holiday to melbourne and then my parents were coming to visit from sweden for the first time. now, my tourist visa was going to run out just before this, so i wanted to get it extended, but the immigration officer i met with was not forthcoming and pretty much told me to leave the country and come back. so i did.

i went to new zealand for five days, checked out auckland and some places around there. got back in australia, had a bit of a scare at the airport but it all worked out. now, time to work on the visa and plan the wedding. we decided to get married on january 2nd because it was an awesomely nerdy date (and we are both nerds): 20100102! palindrome date! win! we chose leura cascades, up in the blue mountains west of sydney, as our location. i might write more about the wedding in the future, mostly because i found some wedding-related blog posts by other people very helpful, but right now the visa bit is a lot more fresh in my memory and i want to get that out of my system.

the visa application procedure is really comprehensive, difficult, invasive, condescending and expensive. they want a bazillion certified copies of documents from both me and my partner. they also want evidence that we are in a "genuine and continuing relationship", meaning we have to prove that we share finances, that other people view us as a couple socially, the nature of our relationship and commitment to each other...a lot of detailed stuff. this is really hard to prove. who shares finances when they don't know if they'll be able to live permanently in the country together? ok so that was pretty nerve-wrecking stuff. but the real doozy is that they want a statutory declaration from both of you describing how you distribute housework in your relationship. yes, really! because this matters as to whether you are in a genuine relationship or not. they also want you to describe how you support each other "financially, emotionally and physically". yes really! they also want evidence that you kept in contact during times you spent apart, which for us meant all the e-mails we have written to each other. now, we wrote to each other pretty much every day and we have been apart for more than a year in total, so you can imagine how many e-mails there are. let's just say that i used up all our printer paper, went to buy 500 more sheets and then used up them as well the same day.

so in the end we had an application that probably weighed more than 5 kilos. i wish we had a scale at home, it would have been fun to know. on thursday, we went to lodge the application and have the interview. i had been really nervous for a long time, but as we got closer to the lodging date i felt better. we had a really good application, very comprehensive and well organised and i was pretty sure we were going to be fine. still, it's hard to relax when the entire future you've planned for yourselves is on the line.

we got a very friendly and reasonable case officer, who was very happy about how well our application was organised. we had everything ready...birth certificates, passport copies, statutory declarations to left and right, a photo album, health checks, you name it. and after about an hour of handing over documents and being interviewed, i got the visa granted on the spot! it was amazingly exciting and i didn't know what to do with myself. i got there, i got my residency in australia, i can stay as long as i want to, i can finally work, i can leave and come back as many times as i want to, i can start my future. it feels like a new beginning, a new chapter of my life, where everything becomes easier. i have been worrying about this for so long and now it is all over. and i won.