Well, Thursday morning I spent doing the last vestiges of my packing. I ran around town a little with Rach (many thanks again for playing taxi, Rach), dropping various bits and pieces off to various people to whom I may or may not have mentioned I was unloading stuff on. Back at Kath’s, I somehow manage to jam all my bits and pieces back into my luggage and then Dylan helps me take the aforementioned luggage out to Mum’s car. Cheers, Dyl! Mum was kind enough to take me to the airport and check my luggage in with me (making sure I wasn’t over on the weight limits, which I wasn’t… barely). We then sat and had coffee and chatted in the airport for a while. It was good to have a friendly send-off. I know Mum is worried I’m going to fall off the planet and never come back to New Zealand or something, but I’m sure I’ll always be making trips back to see everyone, even if I end up living overseas for a while.

Anyway, the traveling wasn’t so good. I made it to Auckland just fine, until they told me that my carry-on was over their weight limit and I would have to either somehow lighten the load by offloading some of the contents (to whom, I’m not entirely sure… they certainly didn’t seem to care) or check the bag at extra cost. Naturally this infuriates me, since I had already flown up from Christchurch no problems. I would later, when checking my baggage in LA, have the baggage handler look at me like I was an idiot for checking that bag as well and say “Nah, that’s a carry-on, right?”, to which I would reply “Mate, the bastards at the last airport made me pay $300 and check this little thing, so I’ll be damned if I’m carrying it around for the rest of the trip.” Which, of course, is what happened. So much for getting a cheaper flight this time. At each airport I touched down in, I had no time whatsoever. I was literally running from gate to gate, through customs and re-checking things. My running around in LAX was fun, as the baggage kept on falling off of the little trolley I was pushing. For my flights across the US, I had a screaming baby to keep me entertained and to top the whole thing off, my (US) cellphone decided that it wasn’t going to work, even when I was back in the country. This led to some unhappy people in Florida, as I didn’t have time to breathe (and thus get out my laptop as an alternate method of communication) until I got to Charlotte and was thus almost in Florida. So… all in all, not the best of trips back. Eventually I did arrive in one piece however and was picked up by Anastasia in Orlando. A couple of hours drive and we were back in Gainesville, where we brought everything inside the apartment and crashed out.

Next day I spent recovering from the travel, making sure to email out to people saying that I arrived just fine. I spent a couple of days recovering, actually… was really groggy. Anastasia and I got my phone fixed and did some shopping.

On Sunday, something entirely unexpected happened. Having just vacated the bedroom a few minutes prior, Anastasia and I were startled off the couch when a very large crash came from that end of the house. A rather hefty tree-branch had fallen from the tree outside and come through the roof, through the ceiling and smashed straight through Anastasia’s long mirror. In a very Boondocks moment, I pointed and said “I can’t believe that just fuckin’ happened!” We managed to do some clean up, tidying up the glass and some of the plaster. The landlady came over and inspected the damage, said she’d take care of things. We put a few spare shingles up on the roof to cover the hole in order to tide it over until the repairmen came the next day. That evening Anastasia and I went out for dinner with Lea and regaled her with the tale.

After a very weird sleep (2 hours to start, 2 hours to finish and nothing in between…), the repair guys were over in the morning and spent most of the morning here with the landlady patching up the hole. It doesn’t quite look like it fits with things on the inside now, but only if you look I guess and at the very least it doesn’t have a hole there. Anastasia went off to study with Lea for the class that they’re sharing (Dynamics, which sounds fairly horrible), then I joined them for lunch at Firehouse Subs and made sure they knew what was going on with the roof. I worked for the afternoon/early evening and then…

…I got an email from the University of Tokyo, confirming my acceptance with them! So, everything continues to fall nicely into place for getting my scholarship and going to Japan next year.

Anastasia and I had dinner with Lea again (she lives here, really… her other apartment is just an expensive storage unit for her stuff…), this time enchilladas (my fave) while we watched Jet Li’s Fearless on DVD. I’m still surprised that for the DVD release, the subtitles they put on the Japanese speech is different from the subtitles that they had on when I went to see it in theatres. I know enough Japanese to know that the subtitles they put on the DVD release is not what they’re saying.

Today was just more emails and more work while Anastasia and Lea went off to study.