He passed !!!! :-)

YAY !! Our big boy passed the exam from last weekend and has secured himself a place at the Junior Kindergarten @ the Mulberry School.

Now all we have to do is find a place for Olly to go to and we are onto a winner.

Celebratory meal at the Outback last night then 🙂

We have been out shopping at the Stanford Shopping Mall in Palo Alto today – Simon checked out the Parrot AR Drone Quadricopter in Brookstone.  This is a remote controlled 4 rotor helicopter that is controlled by the iPhone or iPad:-) To top it all, we were in the park with the kids later and Simon managed to break his new RC Helicopter (provided by a work colleague Mike Mills last weekend) on its first outdoor trip.

Simon has ordered his Apple iPad 2 and the delivery date is set as April 6th 2011 – we leave for the UK on the 7th – hmmm – what’s the betting it is going to sit on the doorstep for two weeks then ?

We are in the midst of trying to figure out if we should buy a couple of rental properties in the UK OR if we should buy a house out here in Silicon Valley – the house in SV will cost us circa $1.3m and the houses in the UK 160k UKP each.  The challenge is that to transfer our funds to the UK will end up in our losing a little cash :-(.  Amy out here suggested that as and when we decide to return to the UK we could always rent out the SV house – a smart point that we had not actually considered before – on $1.3m we will be able to relatively easily score $4,000 per calendar month so it would be a pretty good earner.  Clearly we would need a *significant* mortgage for the US option.

Simon is heading out to New York tomorrow night for 4 days and Vicky’s diamonds will be ready for collection at some point during the week.  The question is will she be able to wait until Simon is back before running to get them………

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