by Hello and welcome to my new blog! My name is Steve, I’m a software engineer and I live in Wellington, New Zealand with my wife Lisa, a nurse, and our three wonderful children. Sophie, our eldest, is six and a half and she’s loving school! She just had her first tooth out and was so stoked to get $10 from the tooth fairy! I think I only got 50 cents. I’ll be taking Sophie to her dancing class soon – she’s extremely talented and will make the RNZB at this rate! Tom turns five next Friday and he’s really excited to be starting “big school”! He’s obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine – he seems to think it was named after him! – and Lisa will be making a Thomas birthday cake for him. Tom will have all his preschool friends over and it’ll be total chaos here! Finally (at least I hope so!) there’s George, the “accident” as we call him. He’ll be one on Boxing Day – I don’t know how any of us survived last Christmas! – and now he’s crawling and bumping into things. He’s so cute. Sophie and Tom think he’s adorable! Our house is getting a bit small for the five of us so we’re looking at upsizing. I recently got promoted to a more senior role so we should manage the bigger mortgage – just about! Our weekends will be spent going from open home to open home! It’s so exciting though to be stepping on the next rung of the property ladder.
I’d love to put up some family photos, but, um, none of the people in the preceding paragraph actually exist. It’s just me. It’s always been just me. My real name isn’t Steve. I’m not a software engineer. It’s many years since I had any sort of promotion. I do live in Wellington. I do own a property and it’s been an unmitigated disaster from the moment I moved in. I’m not the kind of guy who puts exclamation marks at the end of (or in the middle of!) almost every sentence! (Do blokes even do that?! At work it’s always women who do this in their emails!! And it drives me nuts!!!)
I recently went to America for a month (more about that in my next post). It was a life-changing experience for me. For the first time in over a decade I was happy. Properly happy. Being happy is still possible for me – wow! I’m now trying to figure out what works for me and what makes me happy. I know now that everything in that first paragraph (even though the kids sound lovely and Thomas the Tank Engine is great) won’t be it.
Wellington, in case you didn’t know, lies right on a fault line, and my apartment has been earmarked as an earthquake risk. Last week I found out that the strengthening work – which will come at great expense to me – is likely to involve the loss of a window in one of my bedrooms! What use is a bedroom without a window?! Unlike the first paragraph, you could hardly make this up.
I acquired plutoman.com several years ago for some business idea I had that never got beyond the idea stage, and because I thought it was cool. I’m finally using it, so that’s nice.
