The Year is Over

It's hard to believe it's over a year already since I started My Year of Agile Living.

This whole time I've been living in Sydney, spending the weekend at Cosy Grove roughly once a fortnight to catch up with the kids. Dave has been living roughly half the time with me in Sydney and half the time with the kids in Canberra.

Me at Sculptures by the Sea

You'd think being separated for half the year would put some strain on our marriage, but it has actually been a renewal. The time we have had together in Sydney has felt like a honeymoon, just the two of us in the apartment, exploring Sydney's attractions and events.

The ThoughtWorks social club has been a terrific way to see Sydney, with outings to Cirque du Soleil and the Sydney Biennale on Cockatoo Island being amongst the most memorable.

I'll admit the year hasn't gone entirely according to plan. I haven't been able to cultivate the zen-like detachment from belongings and living space that I had hoped to. During the year I have accumulated far more than the original single suitcase and backpack worth of stuff in Sydney. But at least it's less than a truck-worth.

And I became so attached to the apartment in Wollstonecraft that I am still there after seven months. But I have tried four other dwellings.

I had to return to Canberra for a month to support my family during some difficult times, but I'm back in Sydney now and I'm loving it. I'd find it hard now to live anywhere else; though that won't stop me from giving it a try if adventure beckons.

Working for ThoughtWorks has been everything I hoped for and more. The people have been wonderful; so supportive and caring, and so very smart it's scary. I have learnt an amazing amount this year in this extraordinary company, put in a great deal of hard work, and had a huge amount of fun. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

So what are my plans for the future? I'll definitely continue working for ThoughtWorks as long as I can. Our son is planning to move out of home next year, and our daughter may too. When that time comes we may have to change what we're doing, but until then we'll carry on as we are now.

If you want to continue the journey with me, visit my new blog, MAC's Musings.

5: Bristol on Sinclair

Arrival

I moved into "Bristol on Sinclair" on April 2, 2012. The building was
built as an extension to the Mater Hospital in
1929 in the art-deco style, and has a heritage listed facade.

View of the staircase from the loft

The apartment is a loft style apartment with a galley kitchen, a laundry-in-a-cupboard, and a small eating/sitting
area. There's a spiral staircase leading up to a loft with a queen bed, built in robes, and an ensuite bathroom.

Cost

$425 per week - a tad more than our budget but worth it!

First Impressions

	It felt wonderful to be moving into a place of our own; a place with a secure parking space for our car and a lift up to our door. And our own laundry facilities, including a dryer. Bliss!
	It being a loft apartment, there's no bedroom door, so light and sound spill over from the lounge room to the bedroom. There's no privacy when visitors are present, and they are forced to walk through the bedroom to get to the bathroom. Also, there's a construction site next door, and the jackhammers start around 7am on weekdays - but the noise is not usually too bad.
	The first night I slept in the apartment was quite hot, and I left the windows open. Unfortunately a mosquito found me, and I was awake half the night boxing my own ears trying to stop the whining.

The Neighbourhood

What I really love about this place is the neighbourhood. It seems like you can walk for a few minutes and get to anything you need. We're five minutes walk from the heart of Crows Nest with hundreds of restaurants, cafes and bars. 15 minutes takes you to North Sydney, where I was working from January until September - lovely to be able to walk to work after the hour journey I had from Allawah!

Wollstonecraft, St Leonard's and North Sydney train stations are all within walking distance, but the easiest way into the city is by bus. The buses run every few minutes straight down the Pacific Highway, with a stop less than a block from our building. They'll get you into town in 10 minutes if the traffic is light.

What will I miss?

This has been a wonderful place to live, and I'd recommend it to anyone. We have a wonderful view of the city
lights, and can just see the Harbour Bridge peeking above the trees. 

The area is fairly quiet, with some lovely walks down to the harbour. I've been pleasantly surprised by how green and leafy North Sydney is; I had always thought Canberra had the monopoly on green space in cities.

Departure

Despite my plans to try as much of Sydney as I could in my first year there, I fell in love with this place and have not been able to bring myself to move... yet...

4: Allawah

Arrival

After six weeks of the luxury of living in the city apartments courtesy of ThoughtWorks, it was time for us to find our own accommodation. Our budget was limited because we had to pay rent in Sydney as well as paying for the mortgage on our house in Canberra and supporting our children. So I looked for some affordable shared accommodation. I advertised on Gumtree and Irene gave me a call. She and Paul are Chinese students sharing a three bedroom flat on Lancelot St in Allawah, near Hurstville. Irene offered us a bedroom with its own balcony and ensuite bathroom. Dave and I moved out to Allawah on December 10, the day of the ThoughtWorks Christmas party, which was ironically just down the road from our previous apartment on Elizabeth St.

Cost

$250 per week

First Impressions

	Lancelot St is a beautiful tree-lined street running through the heart of Allawah directly from the train station. The brief walk from the station takes you past medium density housing blocks, some with lovely gardens. When it rains, the air is filled with the scent of citronella from the lemon-scented eucalypts lining the street. Irene and Paul were very welcoming, treating us to some lovely home-cooked Chinese food. It felt a bit strange to be sharing accommodation again - as if I had reverted to student-hood myself - but Irene and Paul, though friendly, were very quiet and usually kept to their own rooms. It was almost like having the place to ourselves.
	The bathroom needed a bit of TLC. The toilet leaked and the taps dripped incessantly even if you shut them off hard with both hands, until the plumber came and fixed them - a week before we left. The shower was the old fashioned kind with two taps, a non-water-saving shower head, and a raised lip you had to step over to get in and out. I found I much preferred it to the trendy showers we had in the city apartments, where it was impossible to avoid getting water all over the floor, and adjusting the flick mixer to the right pressure and temperature was a high art.
	The previous tenants of our room had owned the TV and a lot of the furniture and equipment in the place, and had taken it with them when they left. As a result, the place was very sparsely furnished. We ended up buying some bits and pieces of furniture and some bedlinen. Dave bought a small TV set that could double as a computer monitor. The reception was terrible and the only channels we could get were SBS and 9 - and then only if you had the aerial in exactly the right spot for each one. It's a good thing I don't have much time for TV! Then there were the morning wake-up calls. Every morning at around 5:30 two things happened. The guy who parked his truck outside our balcony started warming his engine, and the birds started calling. I love birds, but when you have magpies, currawongs, crows, lorikeets, grey butcherbirds, pigeons and  a baby noisy miner all clamouring to be the centre of attention, even the keenest twitcher would yearn for a scarecrow, if not a shotgun.

The Neighbourhood

Allawah is a small suburb near Hurstville on the Eastern and Illawarra train line, about 25 minutes south of the City. When Europeans arrived in the early 1800s the area was inhabited by Aborigines of the Eora tribe. The first European settlers were of British or Irish ancestry and there are still some houses on the back streets that are reminiscent of late 19th century Britain. During the 1960s there was a wave of immigration from southern Europe, especially Italians and Greeks. Today you can see their influence in the style of the balustrades on the medium density housing blocks that give the area a decidedly Southern European feel.

In the 1990s there was another wave of immigration, this time from China and Hong Kong. Now 42% of the local population is of Chinese ancestry. Hurstville is a Chinatown, the streets lined with great restaurants and fascinating Asian grocery stores, though lacking the traditional Chinese gateway you see in Chinatowns in the centre of cities like Sydney, Melbourne and San Francisco.

Lancelot St comes off Railway Parade, which has a few small shops, some takeaways and a rather nice Italian restaurant. The heart of Allawah would have to be the Allawah Hotel, which comes alive on a Friday and Saturday night, with concommitant rowdy drunks staggering home past our balcony late at night. They do make a pretty good counter meal though (the hotel, not the drunks, I mean!).

Paul, Irene, David and me at our farewell dinner

What Will I Miss?

The hardest thing to leave behind is always the people you've known and come to care for. Irene and Paul were ideal flatmates. They were very busy with their studies and spent most of their time at home studying quietly in their rooms (in distinct contrast to the Australian students I have lived with!) I think we all enjoyed learning about each others' cultures.

During our last week in Allawah David and I took Irene and Paul out for dinner at an Italian restaurant. They are not used to Western style dining, and we spent a very enjoyable evening talking about the differences between Western and Chinese eating.

Departure

In my last blog I expressed the fond wish that I would not have to move our stuff by myself the next time. Well as luck would have it, on moving day David was in Canberra. I had to pick up the keys for the new apartment on April 2nd, which was a Monday. The previous weekend I had spent at a very intense rehearsal retreat (did I mention that I'm a singer?). I returned exhausted, late on Sunday afternoon, and had to pack the car that evening so I could get across town and pick up the keys, park the car at the new place and get into work by a reasonable time in the morning. After rehearsal on the Tuesday night I stayed one last night in Allawah, and completed my packing and cleaned the bathroom and our bedroom before heading off to work on the Wednesday. By the end of the week I was a complete wreck. Luckily it was Easter, and I had a four day weekend to recover. Note to self: next time organise a day off work to move and don't try to do it all out of hours!

You may remember from my first blog that I had hoped to live Agile, with only a suitcase and a backpack to weigh me down. Well, the best laid plans... Thankfully Paul carried two heavy suitcases down the stairs for me. As well as the suitcases, there was a box of office equipment including a printer, the food from the fridge and cupboard, a bag of linen, and some small items of furniture and some household equipment we had bought. Oh, and Dave's TV. All in all, a carload and a half. As far as Agile Living goes I think we can call that an Epic Fail :-P.

At least we didn't need a truck!

3: Regency Hyde Park

Arrival

ThoughtWorks' lease on our apartment at Windsor on Kent expired on November 25. We had located lodgings in Allawah but the new place was not available until December 10. ThoughtWorks kindly offered us a further two weeks in an apartment at Regency Hyde Park.

I had to move out before work. I was expecting to have to call a taxi and lug my suitcase etc down to it by myself, then park the bags in a luggage room until our apartment was ready in the afternoon. I was very pleasantly surprised by the service Corporate Housing (the accommodation managers) provided. They came to Kent St with a car, helped me down with the luggage, drove me over to the Regency, and helped me get settled in. That was very welcome, especially as Dave was in Canberra.

Cost

ThoughtWorks paid the rent (thanks again ThoughtWorks :-)) - we had to pay only for the cleaning.

First Impressions

	The apartment was more stylish than the Kent St one, with modern inclusions and an impressive parquetry floor in the front foyer.
	This is a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment so not as spacious as the two bedroom Kent St place. It was fine for the two of us but Kent St was better for guests. It looks out into a courtyard surrounded by taller buildings so there's not much of a view.
	Evenings were sometimes pretty noisy as there's much more night life this side of the CBD.

Decked out for Christmas

The Neighbourhood

The building is across the road from Hyde Park. I really enjoyed walking through the park and seeing the wildlife including possums and kookaburras), especially after the artificial environment around Kent St. It's right above Museum station and close to Town Hall station. Best of all, its two blocks to our favourite sushi bar, Makato!

What will I miss?

Like Kent St, Regency has a really nice pool and spa. I'm going to miss being able to pop downstairs for a swim any time I like. And the CBD location is very convenient - except when I have to travel out to Caringbah for rehearsals (did I mention that I'm a singer?)

Departure

Dave brought the car up from Canberra as the new place in Allawah has on-street parking. We loaded up the car and headed out to the 'burbs on Saturday December 10. I have to admit I'm not quite as Agile as I'd hoped when I started this blog. Dave brought up my printer and some other office stuff in a packing box, and some linen for our next place where we'll have to provide our own. I decided I couldn't live without some good sharp knives for cooking plus some other kitchen goodies. And we had a suitcase each and a couple of backpacks. So the car has ended up fairly full. Hope I don't have to move all this stuff by myself next time!

Lace Up Yer Boots!

Lace up yer hiking boots and grab yer alpenstock, 'cuz that's a mighty big mountain we be climbin'!

I thought my last role as a consultant for the Rational tool suite had a steep learning curve. I had felt like I was hauling myself up a long and rocky slope with a few trusted companions to keep me company and administer first aid if I fell and scraped my knee.

There were a few nice views that helped make it worthwhile, but on the whole the outlook was barren and the path was beset with robbers lying in wait to ambush me as I passed by.

Working for ThoughtWorks is a completely different proposition. The mountain is higher, longer and steeper. But there are a multitude of different paths to explore, each with its own character and rewards along the way. And there are hundreds of ThoughtWorkers travelling with me, offering me guidance and support, and lending me a helping hand from above.

I've changed languages from Java to Ruby. Instead of test-driven development with JUnit I'm doing behaviour-driven development with Cucumber. I've switched from Spring to Rails, and from predominantly back-end development to predominantly front-end.  I'm learning frameworks with amusing names like Jasmine, Gherkin and Capybara.

Then there's the supporting technologies. I've switched from Windows to Mac (yay!) and from a centralised repository (SVN) to a distributed one (Mercurial). I'm using Mingle instead of Trac for tracking issues and Go instead of Hudson for automated deployments.

All this while trying to remember dozens of new faces and names, living in a  new city, and memorising a repertoire of songs for my new chorus (did I mention I'm a singer?).

XConf and the YOW developer's conference were like chair lifts, giving me a boost up new terrain with relatively little effort. My ThoughtWorks colleagues answer my dumb questions with endless patience and good will. But often it's my own hard legwork that carries me forward.

It's daunting at times, sometimes downright scary, but also terribly exciting!

2: Windsor on Kent

Arrival

We moved in on October 24, my first day at ThoughtWorks. We had arranged for David to meet the manager at 2pm while I was at work. Dave very manfully hauled our luggage the 1.9 km from Central Station by himself, and met me at Wynyard Park after work to show me in.

Cost

ThoughtWorks is assisting my relocation by providing this apartment at no cost to us. Thank you ThoughtWorks!

First Impressions

	It's an East facing apartment and the morning sun streams in; so much easier getting up in the morning! We have city views, and I find it fascinating focusing in on the little details of the buildings. I like having a leisurely breakfast while watching the workaholics in the office across the road already hard at it.
	I expected to be disturbed by the city noises I'm not used to, but I've found the city has a music all its own. A background white-noise hum punctuated by sudden outbursts; a siren; a souped-up engine; late night revellers. At dusk and dawn a solitary bird cries out for her missing mate.
	When we first arrived there was an odour in the laundry as if the previous month's tenant's wet washing still inhabited the washing machine. But that dissipated after airing for a while. Really, it would be churlish to complain about anything - this is a terrific apartment and I'm very grateful to ThoughtWorks for providing it for us.

The Neighbourhood

This location is great; we're five minutes walk from Darling Harbour; 10 minutes from the George St cinemas, Town Hall Station; 15 minutes from the ThoughtWorks office on Pitt St. In my second week I was working at a client site in the very next block - love the 3 minute walk to work!

I've joined Fitness First and there are three gyms within walking distance. I really should get to them more often...

I miss the flora and fauna I'm used to in Canberra. The street has a few trees on it but the nearest grass is at Wynyard. Even pigeons are conspicuous by their absence here.

It is a fantastic location for food. Nando's is across the road. We had a wonderful Japanese dinner at a restaurant around the corner, and some very nice Yum Cha in Chinatown, about 10 minutes walk up the street towards Paddy's Market.

What will I miss?

The building has a lovely pool and spa. It's really nice being able to duck downstairs for a swim whenever I want.

Departure

Tomorrow the lease runs out on this apartment. I have selected our next residence, but it's not available until December 10. ThoughtWorks have come to the rescue and provided us with an additional two weeks in their corporate apartments on Elizabeth St opposite Hyde Park.

I was very impressed by Corporate Housing, the apartment managers. They're sending someone over tomorrow morning to help me with my luggage (Dave's in Canberra) and drive me over to the new place. I expected to have to haul my luggage down to a taxi and manhandle (or personhandle?) it into the new place by myself.

Salmon and Sardines

A Random Walk

My apartment on Kent Street is four blocks west and roughly seven blocks south of the ThoughtWorks office on Pitt Street. My first week in Sydney I'm working in the TW office. Morning and evening I explore Sydney by a series of random walks governed by the state of the traffic lights at each intersection I come to. As I walk to and from work I take the direction with the first green light and thereby explore most of the rectangle defined by work and home. My commute has a casino flavour to it, every corner a two-up game.

The Back Entrance

My second week in Sydney I discover what seems to be a convenient shortcut from my apartment on Kent Street through to the office on Pitt Street. There's a back entrance to Wynyard Station on Kent Street. Traversing a fairly narrow passageway, I come to a pair of escalators one of which takes me down towards the station. Skirting the station and angling left I can wheel my laptop case up the gentle incline of the Met Centre shopping mall through to George Street, avoiding stairs and several sets of traffic lights.

I am a Salmon

I discover the drawbacks of the Wynyard route the first time I attempt it at peak hour. Coming back from George Street I flow with the crowd through the mall as far as the station. As I round the station proper I am suddenly confronted by an onrushing horde of pedestrians. I feel like a salmon battling upstream as I struggle against the oncoming masses. Reaching the escalators, I am dismayed to see they are both running downwards into the station. I am forced to battle both the crowds and the force of gravity as I haul my heavy bag up the long flight of stairs.

Bargers and Saunterers

I worked in the city in Canberra before coming to Sydney. The pedestrian traffic in the centre of Canberra bears little resemblance to the masses of people I'm commuting with in Sydney. I have to develop new techniques to cope with the various classes of people on the streets.

The smokers are easy to deal with. I learn to hold my breath as I see one approaching, and exhale slowly as the plume of carcinogens envelopes me.

Then there are the saunterers. These are the folk without a care in the world, who amble slowly along, building up a backlog of frustrated commuters behind them. There are several classes of saunterers; the chatting saunterer (face to face and mobile) the texting saunterer (usually mobile, but at least one genuine book reader); the window shopping saunter; the gawking tourist saunterer (guilty, yer honour!). After missing several walk signals stuck behind saunterers, I learn to duck behind a barger and follow in their wake as they forge through.

A barger disregards anything in their path. They are determined to get to where they're going without deviation or pause. Bargers also come in several flavours;
the white rabbit barger; the oblivious barger (with their eyes fixed firmly on the ground 1 metre in front of them); the aggressive barger. I learn to spot them coming and shelter behind a light pole or in an alcove till they've passed. If they're going your way though, they do come in handy.

Sardines

I am reminded of fish again in my third week,when I start working at a client site in North Sydney. Now I have to brave the peak hour exodus from Wynyard station to take the train to North Sydney. I have discovered that the York Street entrance, though further from the apartment, is much friendlier to the few travellers swimming upstream. Of the four escalators, one is going the right way for me.

The platform is packed with people, and when the train arrives we all squeeze madly into the carriages, jammed in like so many sardines. I am fearful of being spat out like a watermelon seed when the doors open at Milson's Point.

There's a woman standing near me who complains bitterly about the state of Sydney public transport. She's not used to slumming it with the common folk. But she relieves the tension by making a risque joke when she is thrown against the young man next to her, and we have an amusing conversation for the rest of the trip.