We’re Moving To New Zealand

Only enjoyable through a window.
Photo courtesy of Ryan Holst on Flickr.

I despise the cold weather. If you follow me on Twitter you probably already know that because of all the complaining I managed to do (I know, me complain? Never!) when the windchill here was -16°F for several days in a row. Luckily, Texas weather changes really quickly and today we broke record highs by making it to 85°F – I’ll take that in February any day. But really, what is there to like about cold weather? You have to wear umpteen shirts, tights under your pants and boots on your feet. Ice causes car accidents, snow keeps you from getting places, and wind makes your nose turn red. No fun. All fun-sucking.


So, the hubs and I are pretty set on, God-willing, never living more North than we currently live (yes, the Panhandle of Texas is North for me. Listen – Minnesota, Vermont, Wisconsin, all those other states located in the Arctic, the do not exist in my world). We hope that I will match to a residency program somewhere in South or Central Texas…heck I guess we’d even take Florida if you twisted our arms, but it’d take a lot of convincing to get us up North anywhere. 

We decided a long time ago we are moving to New Zealand and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Okay, mostly it’s just something we joke about, because New Zealand has some of the best SCUBA diving in the world and it looks like such a beautiful place to live (plus it’s so expensive to get there that we most definitely would not be able to afford to fly ourselves back if we ever visited). 

Last week on one of those hypothermic days I was staring at an online radar map using my mind to will the clouds into dumping snow on us so I wouldn’t have to leave the house for my meeting the next morning and what I can only interpret as a sign from above greeted me on the weather.com radar map page:

“New Zealand never leaves you. Start Planning”
Yep, weather.com, in conjunction with the good Lord in Heaven and the interwebz advertising elves, has informed us that we do in fact need to move to the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

My mom was pretty upset about this until I informed her that this would be our new house:


and this would be the view from the guest quarters: 


Obviously we are not really moving to New Zealand any time soon*, but we are honestly trying to figure out a way that we could afford a visit to the island world. While we’re there we’ll probably just go ahead and buy a house on the coast and move in. You guys will ship our furniture (and dogs) to us, right?

All this imaginary move-planning got me curious about some stuff and I was hoping my infinitely intelligent readers could help me out:

How does it work if someone with a US MD wants to move to another country? If it depends on the country, tell me about the ones you know about. How does it even work if someone with a foreign medical license wants to move to the US? Do they have to take licensing exams again? That would be awful. *nauseous*

Oh, and has anyone ever been to New Zealand? Better yet – please, please tell me one of my readers lives there and can tell me all about it! 🙂

What do you think of cold weather? What about hot weather? 



*Stop hyperventilating mom (and other family members reading this), we are not really moving to New Zealand. We may, however, miss Christmas this year if we can figure out how to save enough money for a vacation over there during the last month of 2011. The weather is best in New Zealand during our winter season. Feel free to start saving and tag along with us! 🙂