This week was, as expected, rather absurdly busy. The week started off a bit oddly – Monday was a mixed bag. I got to see Rach (chit-chat), Ian (fish and chips with Pretender) and Dace (help with CV) for varying amounts of time and generally enjoyed their company, but at the end of the day I just felt really lonely and low… didn’t manage to get to sleep until around 4am, either. This made for a fun next day, when I was up before 9am in order to head in to the Japanese Consulate with my brand-spanking-new passport for them to approve of.

I got to play a bunch of games with Dace this week, which was a lot of fun. I actually managed to spend a bunch of time with Dace this week, which was cool. He came over and watched movies a couple of times (with pizza, of course), we went out with Laura and Chris to see 3:10 to Yuma together (which I thoroughly enjoyed… am continually impressed with Christian Bale), then yesterday he came over and we finished sorting out computer stuff so that now he has the old family PC set up (on my old desk) at his flat. I’m pretty sure that’ll be a boon for him both for work and for fun.

I also saw a fair bit of Ian this week as well, which was good. It’s really a pity I didn’t run into Ian earlier on in life, I think we’d have had a lot more fun times. Still, when we’re in the same country it looks like we’re trying to make up for lost time on that front! I don’t know how well (if at all) our little pet game idea is going to survive my going to Japan, but hopefully things will stabilise out for the both of us and we’ll be able to continue to make something together. I’d like that.

This week I also re-set up Mum’s new computer that I got her… sheesh computers can be such troublesome things. Parts not working, software not working, things to be installed, configured… actually my new laptop threw a blue screen on my for a device driver conflict this week as well. At the very least I can see the benefits as well, which is a good thing. Otherwise I would have thrown a whole lot of computers into walls by now. ^^;

Speaking of computer issues, apparently my old laptop will be ready to pick up on Monday. The day before I leave the country. No doubt they will only have fixed some of the problems as well. Figures.

Wednesday’s golf and coffee with Grandma and Grandad also had Great Uncle Bill along as well. It was good to see him again, although since he hasn’t exactly been a regular family fixture for me, I wasn’t quite sure what to talk about sometimes. In another surprising people-I-haven’t-talked-to-in-ages moment, one of Dad’s former engineers, Anoop, rang up at Dad’s place from Canada to have a chat for a while. I was sorry that Dad or any of the other Solution Architects crew weren’t there to talk to him as well, actually.

Other things that happened this week… I did a bunch of cleaning around the house, did various small pieces of work, went into Cathedral Square for a concert of Hera’s (including grabbing some lunch from Ginza, a great little Japanese place in town), getting a bunch of money changed into yen for my trip, closed my completely unused BNZ account and sorted out what the heck I need to do for the IRD for this trip (no small task, sadly). Hm, what else… I put in an appearance at a party around at Ruby’s place, had my final Polytech Japanese class, saw Jem for a little while (right before she was due to go out for her hens’ night, actually), dropped in on Andrea and David to wish David a Happy Birthday… oh, I finally got around to uploading the new LeithCorp site onto my US server, wohoo! Still needs a lot of work I think (particularly updating my portfolio and the general body copy), but it’s better than what it looked like before, so I’m happy with it for now. Mostly that site is just a playground for me to test things out anyway, I don’t really think anyone actually bothers to look at it… certainly I don’t get any business out of it! Anyway, in addition to all the busy-ness, there were also a bunch of times where my brain “just said no” and I was a zombie for a while. Mandatory shut-down periods, seemed like.

Anyway, it was a monster of a week, felt like I was running the whole time. A lot of late nights with my sleep a little more broken than usual. I get closer and closer to leaving for Japan and I’m still part extremely excited and part terrified of how it’s all going to play out. At least when I moved to America I could speak the language (well, more or less…. American English is its own thing, after all). It’s going to be very, very different.