One down, one to go

After what has seemed like forever, Annalie has handed in her penultimate Masters assignment She ended up doing a bit of a rewrite in the last week but she's reasonably satisfied with the result and is just glad to have got it out of the way. There's still the dissertation left to do and she's not really been working on that much as she's been concentrating on the first assignment, but she has got some visits to JetBlue sorted to do some research for her dissertation.

For finishing her assignment, she treated herself with a day off on Sunday to recuperate, but spent an hour at the gym in the morning (well, she has neglected it a bit lately!). Then both of us went out for our first round of golf for the season. We went to a local "executive" course in Portland that we use frequently. We both had pretty good rounds considering that we haven't played for four months, so it was a pleasing result all round.

We were actually surprised that the courses would be open so early. Less than 2 weeks ago we had a foot of snow appear overnight! This was just three days after a big rain storm had actually washed the previously remaining snow so we thought we'd got rid of it all, but then we were all when we woke up to a winter wonderland again. So Annalie made the most of the fresh "dump" by going to the local "mountain" after work for a couple of hours' snowboarding. Let's just say it's not Killington! Annalie had pretty much nailed the hardest slopes in two runs!

Ian has now started his FAA ground school to prepare him for learning to fly later in the year. Once his Firefighter Academy is over he wants to do more limo work so that he can pay for his flying lessons. He went out and bought a specific set of materials - everything he needs to help him qualify for his PPL. The school he's thinking of using is specially accredited with the FAA so he could potentially get qualified faster, especially if he does some more intensive flying. He's not starting from scratch either as he's done some flying in the RAF in the past. He's been getting driving jobs just on Fridays so far so it's not exactly building up the bank balance!

Outside of both our studies we've been trying to have a bit of a social life as well. Last Saturday night Ian ended up having a bit of a gamble without going anywhere near the casinos! One of his fire buddies had a boys' night in where the betting was on the dice. Ian had never played before but made the most of beginners' luck and doubling his money Before the guys had chance to win it back, they got a shout and had to head off down to the fire house.

Annalie went out on the Rolls-Royce girls' night out on Thursday to a local Mexican that wasn't very impressive. But it was nice for her to catch up with the girls anyway. There's been some new arrivals recently but only one of them made it out to the dinner. The rest of the wives do things together during the day but Ian seems to think he's not invited. Annalie was assured during the night out that he's always welcome, even to playgroup!!

Annalie also finally managed to go out with her communications colleagues at Pratt & Whitney, the other major partner at IAE. During the lunch the boss joked that they were going to hire Annalie to keep her here, so she's trying to figure out if they were really joking or not! Well, she's got two years left to figure that out

Speaking of which, we can't believe we've nearly reached our one year anniversary Today, one year ago, Annalie flew out here to do a week's handover before we both moved out for good on the 24th March. Thankfully we've already done a third of our bucket list, and considering we're a third of the way through our assignment, that's not bad!

We've got some other travels already booked for this year though. In addition to New Zealand, we're heading off to Orlando at the start of April to meet up with Annalie's sister, bro-in-law and niece and nephew while they're on holiday over here. Annalie has also tied in one of her trips to JetBlue with this so she's going to get some of her dissertation done before they arrive. And there's an air show in Beijing in September which Ian decided he wanted to tag along for. Because Annalie had done a trip with BA late last year, we had a free companion ticket which meant that Ian could travel with Annalie on any trip she makes on BA this year, and in the same class as well. So Annalie booked her flights to Beijing early to get a good price through BA and it's business class all the way. We just had to pay the taxes, which were a fair bit but a fraction of the price of Annalie's ticket! Just got to sort out the visa nearer the time.

Who knows, some day Ian might be able to take Annalie there himself!