Now that I am gainfully employed at the museum, I've had to shuffle through a minor mountain of paperwork.  Really, it was just a mole hill of paper work.  In this process, I needed to get an NIS number, the national insurance number, similar to our social security numbers back home.  Since I had not intended on working here, it's just something I never took care of. In the myriad pages of questions about my parents names and my former addresses, I needed to include a complete list of all my entry dates into and out of England and the reasons for those stays.  If you've been playing along, you will know that it would be a long list of dates.  Four trips back home since last Christmas (December, April, July, then December again), plus the dozen countries we've been to in between .  However, as per the instructions in their convoluted language, the list did not need to include any stays in the UK that were less than 30 days, excluding the current stay.  I pulled out my calender and my passport and started to look at all the dates of entry. It turns out, since we've moved here, we have not spent more than 30 consecutive days in England.  That long list of entry dates and reasons for being here collapsed into a list of two.   I think our current "stay" since our re-entry at the beginning of January is destined to be the longest we've been in this country we call home.