Brief Catch Up...

Jesus. It's March.

Since I last put fingers to keyboard to finely craft a post here, I have bought Christmas presents, got on a plane back to the UK, made it as far as Gatwick before transferring to a British Airways Fog Busting Bus to Manchester, seen the family for Christmas, even seen the Germans (Shout out to top cousins Ashley and Lewis!), before travelling back to London, spending a week there for work, travelling back to Houston, settling back into the routine for a brief 2 weeks before starting a new job, doing a little local flying before travelling to Geneva and onwards to Morzine for a Ski Holiday with the parents and Tom 'n Megan. Back to Houston a week later, and the following on board another plane to Santiago, Chile for a quick work gig, back to Houston for 2 and a half weeks to pick up the new job for a bit before back to Santiago again.

I have been back in Houston for nearly a week now, and have just about unpacked and got my apartment back to looking reasonably presentable again, although the odd sock still loiters under cushions awaiting a trip to the washing machine.

So, yes, it's been busy, and I've had little time to get bored, although have just recently been thinking about spending vast amounts of money that I don't have on some property. We have an ancronym at work - OPM. It stands for "Other People's Money" and I think it sounds a great idea. I should head down to have a word with the nice folks at Wells Fargo Bank about getting myself a mortgage. I just think that I should get some tangible assets behind me.

With this new-found ambition, I headed out on Friday (day off) to have a little look at some of the new apartments that are being built near work. There's one that I really liked, but looks like I slightly misjudged the market - it's $720,000, which needless to say is just a little more than I can afford right now! Ah well... Back to the drawing board... There are lots of lower priced properties around here too, a little further out of town, but Houston is a bit weird for holding real estate value over time - as there are no planning restrictions or zoning laws, new developments appear all the time, so areas can drop in value quite substantially after as little as 5 years. Not what I want in an investment.

So maybe I should just keep renting - it's a great for no hassle...

Anyway - back to the opening paragraph...

Skiing this year was in Morzine, not far from Cluses and Geneva. We had a great self-catering Chalet on the slopes on the edge of Morzine Village and right next to the lifts. As the snow in the Alps was pretty bad this year, we were lucky to be able to ski from the door, but we could and did all week. We had a huge dump of snow one night which made for one of the best powder days I've ever had the following morning. The holiday was marred somewhat by Mum managing to wreck her cruciate ligaments whilst getting off a chairlift on the first day. A really annoying injury, and potentially quite serious, necessitating an emergency evacuation from the slopes and an ambulance to a clinic where X-Rays were duly taken, and hundreds of Euros extracted for crutches, a leg brace and various drugs. Recovery is proceeding well, but these things are slow.

The Alps really are amazing, and it's great that we've got the opportunity to go most years.

Once back in Houston, I only had 3 days back at work before heading off to Santiago for another session speaking about Petroleum to the Graduate Programme. Again, it went down really well, and I had a great time, this time spending a lot of time pounding the streets of Santiago. The city is really busy, bustling, with plentiful parks and fountains, but at night the parties start late and go on until daylight. I went to see the statue of the Virgen (yes, that's how they spell it!) Mary standing atop San Cristóbal hill. She looks out over the city of Santiago which sprawls along the foothills of the Andes. The statue is partly the work of French sculptor Bartholdi, of the US Statue of Liberty fame.

I repeated the trip just last week, this time spending Saturday there as well, which was yet another opportunity to see more of the place that I had before.

Labels: Apartment, Chile, France, Houston, Travel, Work

posted by Sam @ 12:07 AM 2 comments