Friday, November 13, 2009

Where were Madhu and Sandra? Dec-08 to Apr-09

Alright folks ! I know it has been EONS since anybody received any updates from us - you must probably be wondering if we had dropped off the planet, and decided to settle in Klingon. If you are not, please do not read further - you probably do not care about us :D.

So let's see, where to being ? I think our marriage date might be a good starting point - I went off work after 2 days of getting married. It was a blessing in disguise, since I had 3 months severance, lots of time, and a new missus at home :). So between the middle of December to mid-April, my life was pretty much a "wake-up, eat, TV, sleep again" routine - surprisingly, I did manage to spend time looking for jobs, and with my wife :). And oh yeah ! we did take a few trips to local places:



I had a couple of interviews in January, so pretty much the next month was waiting to hear back and follow-up stuff from January. First week of February - I defended my PhD Dissertation (yay!). By March-09, we kinda knew that we would be leaving the country soon - I was in the process of accepting a job offer from KAUST, for a Visualization and Computer Graphics Researcher position at the university. So we took a trip down to good'ol Austin, Texas to visit my sister, Anitha, and her hubby Deepak. You can see our pictures here:

And at the beginning of April, the job at KAUST was official - we had to move to San Diego for a few months, before permanently relocating to Saudi Arabia. So it was basically a lot of packing, cardboard boxes, UHaul, LongHauls, and settling in La Jolla, San Diego. That is it for now - rest to be continued in my next blog entry :).

What was my most memorable memory during this time ? Being married to my wife and best friend :) - she was truly my strength. She handled the moves, packing, unpacking, loading, unloading with a gallon of patience, and a pinch of smile on her face.