Moving around

 Eventually I may get around to posting some properly chronological entries, starting from my earliest memories and going forward.  But I had a request from my kids to write about how we came to make various international moves.  I’ll start way before kids though, from the first time I moved anywhere on my own.

 It is hard to fathom why someone who doesn’t particularly like travelling and doesn’t enjoy the stresses associated with moving house (even within the same city) has moved internationally four times.  Someone must be a glutton for punishment.

 Most of this story is about being lucky – being in the right place at the right time and, importantly, having the right qualifications to be able to accept the opportunities that came my way.  My life has been more about doors that have opened for me rather than me going out and looking for doors to knock on or kick down.

Off to university

Several of my high school friends had a clear vision of what they wanted to do in life.  At least three wanted to be doctors and one a lawyer, and those four all made it into their intended professions.  I, on the other hand, had no idea what I wanted to do or become.  My father was a doctor but I had no interest in following in his footsteps.  I was reasonably good, but certainly not exceptional, at math and liked science.  I didn’t see myself as a math teacher and didn’t know what else one could do with math.  We didn’t have guidance counsellors at my high school back in those days and though my parents were both college graduates they didn’t know anything about mathematically-related fields.

 My parents had both attended the University of Cape Town (UCT) and that is the only college I applied to.  We lived in Port Elizabeth and there is a university there, then called the University of Port Elizabeth (now Nelson Mandela University).  But my parents had a low opinion of it and it was a dual-language university with some fields taught in English and others in Afrikaans.  Mathematics was one of the latter.  My Afrikaans was very poor at that stage and I didn’t want to have to struggle with that language any more than I had already done in high school.  (We had to take both the official languages at the time through high school.)  Fortunately I was accepted into UCT.

 So early in 1973 my parents took me to the railway station in Port Elizabeth and put me on the train to Cape Town.  From there I was on my own.  The train journey used to take well over 24 hours, partly because it wasn’t very direct.  Port Elizabeth and Cape Town are at about the same latitude and the direct route by road is about 500 miles, but the railway line first goes many miles in a northerly direction before turning south-west.  There were several other students on the same train heading off to UCT.  I became friendly with a bunch of Chinese guys, a couple of whom were going to be in the same residence hall as me.  (I took the train on at least one other occasion, which I remember because of a girl I met and later dated briefly.  The briefly is partly because I wasn’t a serious runner yet and didn’t understand the stresses a competitive sportsperson feels the evening before a major game.)  I didn’t have a car at that time and, besides, first-year students weren’t allowed to have cars on campus.  One who did manage to have a car – a brand-new Alfa Romeo Alfetta – was a classmate, Norm Adami.  He went on to have an illustrious career in the beer industry, including being President and CEO of Miller Brewing Company and later of SABMiller Americas.

 Why I mentioned that the fellow-students were Chinese is for a digression on one of the vagaries of Apartheid.  At the time South Africa had a small Chinese community, who had been in the country for a few generations.  (South Africa now has re-established close ties with China, after having had essentially no contact during the Apartheid years.)  In terms of the Group Areas Act, most of the Chinese had to live in their own special areas, but they were allowed to attend “white” universities and were the only race other than whites who were allowed to stay in “white” residence halls at these universities.  What was particularly bizarre was that on the long-distance trains they were allowed to travel in “white” sleeper cars, BUT they were not allowed to eat in the “white” dining saloon – they had to get a steward to bring them meals in their sleeper compartment.

 Most of these students were first-years, like me.  One, Patrick Wong Fung, was in his third or fourth year and so knew his way around.  I don’t recall how we got from the Cape Town station to our residence hall, but presume Patrick helped organize that.  A year or so later Patrick turned 21 and I was part of the group that helped him celebrate.  As part of the “celebration” later that evening we took him a few miles from the residence call, stripped him down to his underwear and left him to make his way back in that state of undress.  “Streaking” was in the news quite often at the time,  As Patrick was making his way along Main Road, Rondebosch, he thought to himself that he should do a proper streak and so took off his underwear.  Unfortunately, just then a police vehicle happened by and he was hauled off to the local police station.  They let him go eventually but I don’t recall whether he was fined or had to go to court.

 Patrick is at least partly responsible for me becoming a statistician.  He majored in mathematical statistics and a couple of years after we met he suggested I take a class in math stat.  The rest, as they say, is history.  In the mid- to late-70s his family moved to Canada, after which I lost contact with him.  I’ve tried searching for him on the Internet but so far without any success.

 As I mentioned at the start of this section, I didn’t know what I wanted to study.  I changed direction a few times and so spent 5 years at UCT.  Then I had to do compulsory military service.  If I had had more get-up-and-go or been more mature, perhaps I would have considered leaving South Africa at that point, to study further in the US or Britain.  But that thought never crossed my mind.

UCT, with Devil’s Peak and the eastern side of Table Mountain, as seen from the residence hall where I lived for 5 years

Off to “war”

Most of my high school classmates had done their initial service directly after high school.  A few of us, including the three who wanted to be doctors, were granted deferment to go to college first.  That had advantages and disadvantage.  The major downside was that if we had gone in 1973 like the rest, our initial service would have been just 9-11 months, but in the interim that had been increased to 2 years.  On the other hand, most of those who went in 1973 were in the army and many saw active combat.  Those of us who had graduated from college with degrees that were at least semi-useful were put into positions that made some use of our education.

 One or two of the people who came to the seminars in the Department of Mathematical Statistics at UCT were statisticians who worked at the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT), the naval branch of Armscor (the government’s military research organization).  I think they knew I was about to graduate and managed to pull strings to get me into the Navy and from there seconded to IMT.  (I hadn’t asked them to do that and don’t recall whether they had even told me they were trying to arrange that.  This is one of the examples of being in the right place at the right time with the right qualifications.)  So, my call-up for service was to the Navy.

 In early January of 1978 my parents again dropped me off at the Port Elizabeth railway station, this time for the journey on a troop train to the Naval training base at Saldanha Bay.  When we got there, those of us who had been to college were separated from the rest of the conscripts while the brass worked out what to do with us.  (The commanding officer heard that I had studied operations research and so got me working on optimizing schedules for guard duty.  When not doing that I was allowed to run as much as I wanted.) 

 After a few days they drove us to the Naval training base at Simon’s Town, on the south-western outskirts of greater Cape Town.  There we were put on a three-month Officers’ Orientation Course (OOC).  For more on that, see the entry from December 30, 2017 titled “SFAD; self harm; or Daddy, what did you do in the war?”  As noted in that entry, for those three months I was not allowed to run, other than in squad formation.  At the end of the OOC we were assigned to various places, with several of us going to IMT (which is also in Simon’s Town).  Full-time employees at IMT are civilians and so don’t wear uniform.  Those of us doing national service had to wear Navy uniforms and also periodically had Navy duties, such as being the Officer of the Day overnight or on weekends (that is, we were in charge of the naval base and responsible for giving permission for ships to enter or leave the harbor, directing firefighters if there was a bushfire on the mountain behind the town, and generally responding to any crisis that might occur, such as an enemy invasion.  There was a pistol in a safe for us to use if we needed it to repel the enemy).  That previous blog post doesn’t mention what I did at IMT, so I should probably add a separate entry on that, explaining what a digital blimp filter is and why I wasn’t supposed to read the reports I wrote (because they were secret and a conscript wasn’t allowed to have a security rating of Secret).

 As my two year stint in the Navy was drawing to a close it was time to think of looking for a job!

Simon’s Town

Gainfully employed!

 Along with some of the other statisticians at IMT, I had been attending statistics seminars at UCT.  I was reasonably confident of being able to get an appointment as a lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Statistics.  In fact, I was so sure that I would be there that several months before the end of my Navy service my brother Mick and I leased an apartment together in Rondebosch, near UCT, and I commuted to IMT from there.  But I had also applied for a position in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, partly because my parents had just moved to that city. 

 UCT did indeed offer me a position and so did UNISA.  The offer from UNISA was substantially higher.  UNISA is a distance-learning institution, using just ordinary mail back in those pre-Internet days.  So I wouldn’t have to stand in front of a class.  On the other hand, it provided materials in both English and Afrikaans and I would need to become much more proficient in the latter language.  At the time UNISA had several outstanding professors in the statistics side of the department.  They would have fitted in well at a top university anywhere in the world.  A couple of them did later move to the US and Europe and some others spent sabbaticals in highly-ranked departments internationally.

 After much vacillation, I accepted the offer from UNISA.  I can claim to have been way ahead of my time, doing something that now seems quite commonplace – I moved back in with my parents.

UNISA offer letter

UNISA offer conditions

Back to Cape Town

 As part of the national service obligation of white males, after the initial two-year period we were eligible to be called up for “camps” of 1-3 months duration every two years for the next 12 years.  We were also supposed to attend regular meetings or parades (which I somehow managed to avoid).

 Pretoria was okay, but it is very conservative and a long way from the coast.  In February/March 1981 I was called up for a one-month “camp” which I spent back at IMT.  While there I started negotiating for a permanent (civilian) position at IMT.  Part of that was so as to get back to Cape Town.  Another, more compelling, reason was to try to get in on the property market.  Back then (and presumably still now) in South Africa part of the benefits package when employed by large organizations, including the government, was a housing subsidy – subsidized mortgage payments.  However, for government positions, including at universities, the housing subsidy was restricted to married men (presumably at that time specifically white married men).  Armscor (and hence IMT) was one of the few exceptions that provided a housing subsidy for single men too, which was a major draw for me at the time.  (As it happened, between beginning to try to get a job at IMT and starting to work there, I met and married Riëtta, so the “single men” part was no longer relevant.)  Long story short, we bought a house (actually a townhouse/duplex) in Tokai, greater Cape Town.  I moved down there first and then Riëtta followed after she had finished teaching at the end of the semester.

IMT offer letter page 1

IMT offer letter page 2

IMT offer letter page 3

Tokai.
  Top: a view of the trails in the forest behind our house
Middle: the Tokai Manor House
Bottom: our house

I worked at IMT for about a year.  I wasn’t particularly happy there that time around.  That was probably mostly because of my supervisor, with whom I had to work closely.  He seemed to be out of it much of the time.  It wasn’t until later that I heard he was quite ill and that it was either the illness or the medication for it that made him drowsy.  The work was interesting – helping to devise tactics for avoiding anti-ship missiles.  I had started at IMT just as the Royal Navy was discovering in the Falklands War how vulnerable surface ships are to anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, a former colleague at UNISA, Peter Salemink, had been teaching Applied Business Statistics in the Department of Business Science at UCT.  He wanted to move back to Pretoria and was looking for someone to take over his position.  Here was an opportunity to leave IMT and to work at UNT.  Once again I was in the right place at the right time, with appropriate qualifications.  I applied and was offered the position.  That didn’t require a move, not even to a new house as our house in Tokai was about halfway between UCT and IMT.

UCT Business Science offer

And back to Pretoria

 Being in Cape Town was generally good, but it was a long way away from our families and the position at UCT didn’t have much in the way of long-term prospects (unless I found a way to move to what became the Department of Statistical Sciences).  So when an opportunity arose to move back to Pretoria I grabbed it.  We sold our house, bought one in Pretoria and moved at the end of 1985.  My old department had split, with the Operations Research component renamed and moving out.  So I joined what had become the Department of Statistics.

UNISA 1985 offer

In the middle of 1986 my mother was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer.  So it was good that we had moved back to Pretoria because it meant we got to see her quite often in what turned out to be the last year of her life.  One aspect of the timing of her death that was particularly unfortunate was that she just missed seeing her first grandchild – Steven was born 19 days after she passed away. 

 

To Seattle

 When my mother knew she probably didn’t have much longer to live, she wrote letters to me, each of my brothers, and my father, to be found and opened after her death.  In my letter she urged me to try to study overseas.  (My brother Mick was already preparing to move to the US, initially to do an MS at the University of Michigan, while finishing his PhD thesis at a South African university.  If our mother had lived few more months he would have left and probably not have come back for her funeral.)

Unlike Mick, who was still single, I had a family to support, so the financial implications of becoming a full-time student again were more substantial.  But I had been at UNISA long enough to have earned paid sabbatical leave and my mother had left me (and my two brothers) a small amount of money.  So I started looking for places to do a PhD in the US, with a view to starting in 1990.

It is hard to imagine it now, but back in those days the web didn’t exist yet.  It wasn’t possible to look up information about universities and courses online, because there wasn’t such a thing as online.  Even email was still a novelty and I wasn’t yet aware of its existence.  Somehow I obtained a copy of a booklet that had information about all the US universities offering PhD programs in statistics or biostatics.  Using that, I took a systematic approach to deciding where to apply.  As Riëtta and I were keen runners, I crossed off all universities in places where it seemed to be too hot in summer or too cold in winter for running to be pleasant.  That left me with a list containing … nothing!  So I had to revise my opinion of what was too hot or too cold.  I ended up applying to three programs, in biostatistics at the University of Washington (UW) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).  The last of those was because a colleague at UNISA had spent a sabbatical there and spoke highly of the program.

In order to apply to those graduate programs I first had to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) and the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).  I thought the latter requirement was a bit of a cheek considering that (a) English is my mother tongue and (b) the language used in the US should be called American because it is not standard English.  I don’t recall where I took those exams, though it must have been somewhere in either Pretoria or Johannesburg.  I must have done well enough to persuade at least one university that I wasn’t a total idiot.

The UW had had a small entering class in their graduate programs in the 1989/1990 academic year.  Because I already had a master’s degree in statistics they offered me a place in their program starting in the middle of the academic year.  The offer including “full support”, that is, reasonable financial assistance.  So we moved to Seattle in March of 1990.  At that stage UNC was still trying to determine whether my math background was adequate for entry into their program.  I don’t recall whether I ever heard back from UTEP.

University of Washington admission letter

We found an apartment within the first few days and settled in.  That December we saw snow falling for the first time.  I was 36 years old and had never seen snow falling or even touched fresh snow (we’d seen some old snow when we’d gone on a hike back in April or May).  For the first few hours it was very exciting, but by the next day when the whole city had shut down and we were trapped inside it was no longer so wonderful.  I had gone downtown to do Christmas shopping and returned just as the snow began.  The timing and the amount of snow caught the city by surprise.  By the evening commute the snow was already quite deep.  Many people were trapped in their cars and took hours to get home, some not making it until the next day.  Buses were sliding down the steep Seattle hills.  It was a mess.  YouTube has several videos of cars and buses sliding in the snow on other occasions, such as this one (with a bus sliding at about 3:30 in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhZCyQ3emQg

Google Street View of the apartment where we lived in Seattle.  Ours was the one of the ground floor to the right of the entrance.

Seeing snow fall for the first time was exciting

A few hours later it was still falling and soon becoming much less fun

The bus system in Seattle is excellent (except when the buses are sliding around in the snow).  We didn’t buy a car when we lived there.  We rented one on a few occasions to go on vacation and to be mobile for the period in 1992 when my father visited us and Lisa was about to be born.  My father and his new wife came to see us (and my brother Mick) in the US on their honeymoon.  Shortly after returning to South Africa my father had his first stroke.  (He had a few more before passing away almost 5 years later.)

The “full support” would have been adequate to live on if I had been single.  One of the conditions of my student visa was that Riëtta was not allowed to work.  With our savings and the money my mother had left me running out, plus a now-expanded family, we couldn’t afford to stay in Seattle.  Having received sabbatical support from UNISA, I was contractually obliged to return there for at least 6 months.  So in June 1993 we reluctantly headed back to Pretoria.  The reluctance was mostly because we had grown very fond of Seattle.

Some students in the UW Department of Biostatistics who had moved away from Seattle took a long time to finish their PhDs, with some bumping up against the university’s 10-year limit.  So I was sent an official letter outlining the department’s concerns about me leaving the area.

University of Washington warning letter

In Pretoria once again

Back in Pretoria we rented a house a few blocks from my father.  As we didn’t expect to stay there very long, we didn’t buy a car but borrowed one from my father.  (He had recovered reasonably well, though not completely, from his first stroke and managed to return to work for a while.)

Steven had completed his first year of school in Seattle.  It was the middle of the South African school year when we moved back.  Initially when we tried to get him into a nearby public school they wanted him to wait until the next school year because he wasn’t quite 6 yet.  But we persuaded them that as he had already had a full year of schooling that didn’t make sense and they relented and allowed him in.

 

On to Hobart

At some point towards the end of our time in Seattle a notice had appeared on our department’s noticeboard saying that Terry Dwyer, the Director of the Menzies Center for Population Health Research (as it was then called, now the Menzies Institute for Medical Research), an epidemiology research center at the University of Tasmania, would be visiting the UW and any biostatistics student who was interested in a job in Australia could meet him for lunch.  I was the only one who turned up.  Terry was also a runner and we ended up talking more about running than work.  He was a shorter distance runner and 10K was about the upper limit of his racing, whereas it was towards the lower end of mine.  Our best times for 10K (or 10,000m on the track) were almost identical.  Apart from being a medical doctor and professor of Epidemiology, Terry was also involved in athletic administration.  In our time in Hobart he served as President of Athletics Tasmania, the governing body for track and field in the state, and later was President of Athletics Australia, the corresponding body for the whole country.

Terry asked me to apply for a position at the Menzies Center, with our lunch together serving as my interview.  Again, I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right qualifications (right 10K time?).  A few months later I was offered the position.  So we then made plans to pack up again for the move to Australia.  We first had to get temporary residence permits approved.  The paperwork came through eventually and we left South Africa in February 1994.

University of Tasmania offer 

We quickly found a house to rent in Hobart and bought a car.  (We became friendly with Geoff and Helen, the couple from whom we rented the house.  Geoff was also a runner and he and Riëtta often dueled in races.)  We got Steven enrolled in a nearby school.  That meant that in less than 12 months he had been in schools in three countries.  Fortunately he adapted well.

I was still working on my dissertation, corresponding with my advisor, Margaret Pepe, by email.  Margaret had also gone to the US as a graduate student, from Ireland.  She is at least 5 years younger than me!  She was a great advisor and very patient.  In November 1994, a couple of months after I had turned 40, I flew back to Seattle for my final (oral) exam and to turn in my dissertation.  Fortunately I passed the exam and, more importantly, didn’t have to make any last-minute changes to the dissertation.  (Passing the final exam for a PhD is usually a formality.  Although it may be nerve-wracking, an advisor shouldn’t let a student take the exam unless the student is ready.  So about the only time a student may fail is if he/she insists on taking the exam before the advisor thinks he/she is ready.)

The Menzies Centre was doing important work.  Their research contributed substantially to the SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) death rate declining to about one third of what it had been just a few years earlier.  (The size and scope of the organization has increased substantially in the years since I left.)  I learned a lot in my time there, particularly about epidemiology and about the vagaries of data collection.  I have never regretted dragging the family off to the far end of the earth.

While at the Menzies Centre I came to realize how important it is for a statistician to have a good understanding of how the data in a study are actually collected – not just how they are supposed to be collected.  That helps provide insight into the sources of variability in the data and what kinds of errors can occur.  You would probably be surprised by how easily things can be screwed up, even for something as supposedly elementary as measuring height.  One of our studies was of exercise induced asthma in young children.  We measured their lung function before and after having them run for a few minutes.  Lung function is dependent on body size, so we needed to measure their heights.  We had a stadiometer that we were planning to use for the height measurements.  Our stadiometer had a fixed scale for very short heights, and a sliding part to use beyond that.  The kids were of an age at which some of them were measurable with the fixed part of the stadiometer while for others we needed to use the sliding part.  Whoever had assembled the stadiometer had messed something up, so that the sliding part gave incorrect readings.  The instructions had been lost and I couldn’t fix the instrument to work correctly.  So I said we should stick a tape measure against a wall and use that.  Once the pilot study was over and the real study began, some bright spark decided that as we had a stadiometer, it should be used rather than the tape measure.  Whoever made that decision didn’t tell me.  When it came time to analyze the results the heights were a mess.  Many of the kids had become shorter than when they had been measured a couple of years earlier!  That obviously shouldn’t happen with kids in the age range 6-9 years.  So the data were essentially unusable.

A stadiometer – not the same as the one we used

Tasmania is very scenic and is a great place to visit.  Living there year-round is less pleasant.  It is rather isolated and the weather is often poor as it is situated slap-bang in the middle of the Roaring Forties.  I was the only PhD-level biostatistician in the state and being a newly-minted PhD I didn’t have anyone who could mentor me professionally.  So I started to look for other positions, either elsewhere in Australia or in the US.  Another factor was that we had done some house-hunting in Hobart but couldn’t find anything affordable that was reasonably well built.  If we’d managed to buy a house we might still have been there now.  Further, public schools in Tasmania are not very good, particularly in the higher grades, and we couldn’t afford to send our kids to private schools.  The running scene was also rather primitive, reminiscent of that in South Africa 15+ years earlier.

I applied unsuccessfully for at least one position elsewhere in Australia, I think it was in Newcastle.  I probably have a rejection letter packed away somewhere, or maybe the advertisement for the job.  I also applied and was flown over to the US for an interview at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  A year or so later I was invited for another interview at the University of Arizona.  This time I took the family along too for a vacation.  Apart from going to Tucson, we went to Disney World (and Gatorland) and to Seattle.  Shortly before leaving for the US I applied for a position in the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  They interviewed me by telephone and when they heard I was going to be in the US, invited me for an in-person interview.  (They wouldn’t have paid for me to fly all the way from Tasmania, though were willing to pay for a flight from Seattle.  So, again, I was going to be in more-or-less the right place at the right time with the right qualifications.)  We hastily changed our plans, with the rest of the family flying home from Seattle and me first going on to Chapel Hill.  My interview was on a Friday and Monday, straddling the weekend in which UNC was playing in the 1998 NCAA Final Four (basketball, for those who don’t know – which I certainly didn’t).  I was told that if UNC won there would be big parties in downtown Chapel Hill and I would hear plenty of noise.  UNC lost in the semi-final, so I didn’t get to hear/see what the celebrations are like.

I ended up being offered positions by both the University of Arizona and UNC.  I think UNC offered somewhat more money.  A bigger factor was that Arizona didn’t have a school of public health yet and I would have been in a very small biostatistics group, whereas UNC had a highly ranked school of public health and a large and well-regarded Department of Biostatistics.  So I accepted the UNC offer.

UNC offer

Moving to Chapel Hill

 We left Hobart in the depths of winter.  The rest of the family first went to Pretoria for a week while I tidied up various loose ends in Australia.  I then joined them in Pretoria and we flew out the same day.  We arrived in Chapel Hill in early August.  Moving from winter to the heat and humidity of summer in North Carolina was quite a shock.  For the first few days I was desperately unhappy, not just because of the weather but also other factors such as how run-down the building that housed the CSCC was.  Many of the (sealed) windows leaked when it rained and I was issued with plastic sheeting to put over my office computer when it rained.  The office furniture should have been surplussed decades earlier.  We didn’t have proper computer desks, just very old desks with computers plonked on top.  I wanted to head straight back to Hobart.  Fortunately the rest of the family vetoed that idea.

 We found a place to rent, bought a car, and got the kids enrolled in schools, ready for the new academic year.  Steven was ready to go into middle school.  Lisa had started school earlier that year in Hobart.  Near the end of the first school year the Chapel Hill/Carrboro school district released plans for redistricting for the next school year.  (One is assigned to schools based on where one lives, but the catchment areas are updated periodically as new schools are opened because of demographic changes.)  Lisa was going to have to move to a school much further away.  We hadn’t been thinking of buying a house, but this prompted us to start house-hunting.  We managed to find one that we could afford and, a big plus, that was zoned for the schools that Steven and Lisa were attending.  An added plus was that the house was within walking distance of the two schools.  A move that didn’t involve going to another country or even another city?  That was a first for us.  We moved into our house in June 1999 and have been here ever since.  Chapel Hill turned out to be a great place for the kids to grow up, with one of the best public school systems in the US.  They also both went on to do their undergraduate degrees at UNC before moving to more exciting cities.

Our house in Chapel Hill

In the first few years here I was sometimes very frustrated by the CSCC leadership and UNC more generally.  For instance, they made minimal effort to help us obtain permanent residence status, even though it was in their interests if they wanted to keep me.  At one point I applied for a position at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.  They flew the whole family out for an interview and eventually offered me a position.  But they didn’t yet have a school of public health or a biostatistics department and it wasn’t clear that I would be any better off.  So we stayed put.

I’ve had a couple ore interviews since then, both after I had been contacted by a recruiter rather than me looking for a new position.  One of them was with a private company in this area.  They made me a quite substantial offer.  We had had a change of leadership in our center and department.  Our department chair immediately made me a counter-offer.  It wasn’t as much as I was being offered, but that they bothered to counter so quickly showed that they cared and that was part of the reason I turned down the position.  Another interview was in the Washington, DC, area.  I was reluctant even to go for the interview, but they were quite persistent.  However, just after that there was a leadership change in their organization and maybe because of that, plus my expressed reluctance, they didn’t make me an offer.  I wasn’t disappointed.  Now I expect to stay where I am until I retire (or am fired).

Although I don’t expect to move to another job, at some point we may move house, perhaps to a nearby retirement community, before I go to my final resting place.  For the latter I presume I will once again be in the right place, with the right qualifications and hope it will be right time – neither too early nor too late.