Tonight was the second round interview, with the US via Skype. I passed and am on to the third with the local team. I am pretty excited. I wasn’t nervous today, probably due to the lavender oil under my nose, and also because I decided to treat this as just a conversation. It worked, it went really well.

Of course, yesterday I outed myself at work that I had a second round interview and if anyone had suggestions from their network as to potential replacements, please let me and my manager know… that created a few awkward moments in the meetings. It needs to be done though. It didn’t feel 100% great. However, part of being open to something new means that you need to make sure everything is taken care of that you can. I remember when I first started thinking of moving here, I started asking people six months in advance if they would be interested in my job. I wanted to be sure that my customers were taken care of.

I don’t think it will be a six month window this time. And neither does big C, my manager. First thing this morning, she sent me the job description that will post for my review and input. That felt kind of awkward. 😉

GG and I went to see Anneke van Giersbergen again last night. She had gotten me the tickets for my birthday. It was awesome. While we were at dinner and talking about all the career opportunities, I said to her “I just want to be cool”. It sounds funny, doesn’t it? Coming from a 43 year old woman… I don’t mean hip, I mean I just want to be myself in all 1000 variations and be able to do my best work. To me, that’s cool. I want to love what I do and who I do it with. And I want to be learning. So when the interview question came up tonight about my familiarity with the Linux command line, I answered – I would need to learn it and would look forward to doing so!

In the meantime, I have been researching all the potential visa questions, since I am here on a 5 year visa. One big difference between the Dutch and the US visa system is that with the type of visa I have, my partner would have automatically had work clearance as well. I think this is a significant difference because I am pretty sure that in the US, it doesn’t work that way. And if it did before, that will probably change under the new administration! Interesting really, how systems differ between social values.

I have two years left on mine and then I will need an extension, which is not automatic, especially not if I change employment. I’m willing to take the risk though.