Coming Home

     Being unemployed in Kent is actually not that bad a gig, as gigs go.  I was having a good time geocaching - visiting my friends the sentinel steers, finding Napoleonic area forts and such, driving and traipsing around the beautiful countryside.  But getting a job to support myself and the family did not appear to be on the horizon.  Not that I wasn't trying.  There just were not that many openinigs, and I was not quite ready to start my own company there (or anywhere, for that matter).  So when my wife said she was going back to the U.S. in August and asked if I wanted to do so as well, the decision to "go home" was a rather easy one to make.  But go where?
     Pfizer's repatriation package would take us back to our point of origin, Ann Arbor, MI, or anywhere less expensive.  Ann Arbor is not exactly a hot-bed of employment opportunity.  In fact, the only hot-bed of opportunity for a wandering enzymologist that fits the "less expensive than going back to Ann Arbor" description is probably Boston, MA.  I had an interview (via Skype) with a small company there, but it did not lead to anything.  So we weighed our options - move to Boston directly, or go "back home" to Ann Arbor.
     In the end, Ann Arbor won out because my wife was able to re-capture her part-time teaching job at Washtenaw Community College, teaching general chemistry to nursing students, and her part-time clerk position at a local knitting supply store.  I got back in touch with my former colleagues at the University of Michigan and was invited to drop by when I got to town.  I also secured an interview with a medical writing company, so the decision was made.  We're going home.
     The logistics of going home are, in the abstract, quite simple.  I am the advance party, carrying some clohtes and a laptop computer.  I leave the UK on mid-July, rent a car and stay with friends in Ann Arbor.  I know the drill.  First, establish communications (get a cell phone number, establish a fresh Skype account).  Next, get a car and return the rental (2000 Honda Accord knick-named Swamp Critter).  Finally, find a place to live that is large enough to house everyone and stash our stuff.  Then there are the amenities of getting the home fitted with internet and cable television.  Skip the home phone.   While this is going on in the U.S., my wife ships the household goods , sells our little VW Golf (my Shuttle Craft) installs our daughter in the home of friends who will keep her while she finishes her last year of high school, and then flies back to the US to join me.  Simples.
     But we are still not home, entirely.  It will be hard to say we are home until we have steady jobs (I'm working temporarily with my former University colleagues, and my wife is on a quarter-to-quarter basis with the community college), and our daughter is home, and I have planted my first geocache.  Its taking so long because I want to build a fake birdhouse cache, and I just haven't gotten around to it.  Lets hope it doesn't become another parting gift....