Time to farewell my home of the past 10 years...it was a fantastic weekend to say goodbye to friends however. Work lunch on Friday lasted 12 hours - potentially a record even by third party mortgages standards and certainly impressive to my father, who warned me that perhaps Americans aren't quite so used to all day affairs like the Aussies. Something more to get used to, I suppose.

The rest of the weekend? Fringe shows, Womad, farewell drinks and last minute moving chaos. After a big farewell afternoon on Monday I couldn't sleep - I ended up waking at 2:30 am Tuesday morning and spending 4 hours on the computer tidying things up before the removalists arrived that morning. And by 1pm...my house was empty. Deliriously tired, I headed to Megan & Viron's to spend a final night with the kitties (who were still a touch unsettled with their change of circumstances and not afraid to express their displeasure by sleeping on my head). In celebration of my pending trip we had Uyghur food, which is evidently that of a central Asian people somewhere near Kazakhstan and western China - not bad and bloody cheap.

Wednesday, my last day in Adelaide, was a peaceful one. Last minute errands in the morning followed by what I've been waiting 3 months for...the last thing crossed off my list. One final beer at the Austral with a surprise contingent of workmates (all of us happy that Saturday 1am wasn't the last memory we had of each other, I think) and I was off to the airport. I felt right about my decision to leave and strangely at peace with the process - I had expected a welling of emotion, that 'this is it' sense where it all hits and becomes real but...no, it felt right.

Having said that I had had about 5 hours of sleep in the previous 72 hours so that may account for some sort of delirium!