Try This at Home.

Leaving your home for an extended period is an experience that produces many demands; the amount of paperwork required to obtain permission to live and work outside your country is often dauntingly large, I burnt out 2 pens filling out forms in triplicate for AEON and working my way through the visa application process. Packing is another mini-nightmare as you try to condense your life to fit airline baggage-limits, 27kg seems a little restrictive considering the amount of 'mandatory' gear (like suits) that's dictated by the company. Thank god I live in an age when so much can be condensed into digital files, not that an mp3 library can really compare with a CD collection, and reading text off a screen doesn't have the visceral charms of holding a book, but at least I'm not flying into a complete void.

One of the not so harsh parts of leaving is the opportunity/obligation of seeing everyone to say goodbye, preferably with as much 'party' attached to the experience as possible. The last few days of my life have been devoted to getting as much 'party' time in as possible. The stories are many, a select sampling:

- Meeting Kombei, one of the supervising teachers for the class of Japanese exchange students who are currently visiting my old high-school. We traded many notes on beer and he taught me a lot about Japanese drinking culture and etiquette. He also said that teaching English is 'really easy', which makes the terror subside ever so slightly.

- Pete using his and Matt's awesome home theatre setup to play ancient games using a NES emulator on his computer. '1943' and 'Guerilla Warfare' are only improved by making their giant pixellated visages many meters across. Truely the ultimate fusion of state of the art and retro.

- Jamie managing to obtain for me a genuine shopping trolley, something I have coveted for a significant period of time. I only regret that I won't have time to use it as a chariot with which to commute to pubs. Still, I'm sure that Pete and Matt will give it a good home, and now they have somewhere to store their ridiculously enormous cache of empty glassware. Many thanks again!

- Walking into unibar to be confronted with a sea of engineers all dressed in green with headbands as part of their 'Binja Turtles' pubcrawl; another one of those things that's a little tough to visulize; so here's a photo:



Aren't they precious?

- Dancing with Kristy to New York, New York (if you can call our vague twirling and swaying 'dancing') it's amazing what you can do after 15 jugs or so of the foamy stuff!

- Hanging out with the workcover crew and having all my questions about GST, birthday cakes and fiscal management answered. They make a great pizza too! Watching Pete throw up out of the taxi door wasn't so fantastic (although we had a great taxi driver, he just pulled over and said 'it's ok'. I even got to meet Leo (Pete's turtle) the next morning; he's major cute!

I pretty much have everything I need all ready, now it's just a matter of packing it all; I had a lot of fun trawling through those 'Australiania' shops looking for gifts to take over, check out my fantastic future office-mascot:


He/She doesn't have a name yet... suggestions gratefully received!

I went to my doctor for a checkup before I left, I got proded, listened and peered into and was pronounced fit to travel. Then I got a very serious lecture about the dangers of binge-drinking and using alcohol as a 'way to fit into a new environment'. Heh, at least I can be confident that my university did it's best to prepare me for that hazard. I promised to only buy vending-machine beer for the novelty value and not to actually drink any.

Tonight I'm off to see my old high school's production of Beauty and the Beast then I'm heartily looking forward to a complete 8 hours (minimum) sleep in my own bed, preferably without any alcohol to 'help' with the process.

Party on world. Just make sure to switch to coffee every once in a while.

Novocaine, Bowling and Changing Clocks.

Happy end of daylight saving everyone! (or at least those of you who are S.A. residents) I'm not sure that an 'extra' hour in bed really makes up for the hassle of changing all the clocks and smoke alarm batteries in the house, but hey; at least it gives us a chance to reset all our timepieces to the correct time and make sure that our smoke alarms are actually working right? After all, we all know that the rules of irony dictate that a house with a working smoke alarm will likely never catch fire.

Speaking of preparedness, my trip to the dentist was routinely scary; everything was fine until there was a spontaneous decision to update my x-rays (just in case my skeletonised jawbone washes up on a shoreline and needs to be identified presumably), at which point it was declared that I needed a filling replaced. Cue injectons, scraping, drilling and a whole bunch of strange Geiger-esque equipment jammed in my mouth; an experience much like this.

Afterwards I went into town to see Emma (who has her own far more substantive blog here, check it out!), drink coffee and get more travel stuff planned; that all went well despite my Novocaine-induced Bells-palsy look (actually it was a help with the coffee, having a numb tongue means you can drink scalding hot water without the pain). While it turns out that exchanging paper money isn't half the hassle I'd be led to believe, unfortunately QANTAS only lets you haul 20kg of luggage when you fly to Japan, so I've got some serious boxing and shipping to organise, unless of course I wear 8 layers of clothes on the flight itself (which might make me immune to snake-bite at least).

Yesterday my jaw still hurt somewhat so I made the decision to have a 'quiet' day, I finished unpacking some shirts, fiddled around with the laptop a bit and finished watching Texhnolyze (frankly, I still don't get it, but it was fun to watch and very 'relaxing'). In the evening I went out bowling down at Ingle Farm; I found out that years of non-practice hasn't improved my bowling technique, but there was much fun anyway, even if Rebecca did blow us all out of the water (the girl has bowling in the genes obviously). Peter managed to get the jukebox to play every Mandy Moore song it had in sequence, then followed it up later with Vanilla Ice which was pretty sodding hilarious. Great night!

Today I'm resolving to tidy up somewhat around here, 'cause I'm getting just slightly sick of living amongst giant, constantly tottering piles of paper, (I had this seriously weird dream last night about pushing a filing cabinet through one of those aquariums that have the giant glass tunnels so you can see all the sharks up close and personal; I think it's a sign). That and I'll get back to learning some Japanese because my progress has lagged just a little lately; more hours in my day might help, but hey, I'd probably end up sleeping them away too. *sigh*