Ed Kilpatrick’s – The Lodger

Setting the scene: My name is David Jones and I'm from Glasgow in west central Sctoland. I turned 40 this year and while still single after a nasty divorce a few years ago, I've enjoyed the last year of freedom as my career has taken off in the right direction. I'm an IT consultant and while that will sound boring to so many people, it is still a relatively well paid job and has allowed me to travel. For the last year, I've spent quite a lot of time travelling between my employer's European offices but with my recent promotion to VP, head of product release, I was asked last month if I would take a temporary assignment to our corporate HQ just north of Chicago in a place called, Evanston on the shores of Lake Michigan. While I'd made many trips to our corporate HQ, I had never spent longer than a few weeks in the US and therefore a year was going to be a whole new ball game! I accepted the assignment in late October 2009 and made arrangements to have my house to be looked after by a family member for the period I was away. I didn't like the idea of renting out my house, even though the money would have been a welcome bonus. Instead I opted to take a fully expensed package, where I was still paid in the UK but would spend the next twelve months in Illinois. My employer managed to obtain the visa needed so in early November, I left the early days of winter in the UK for a much colder winter in the mid west (USA). I spent the first two weeks living out of a suitcase in one of [...]