I have a place to live. I have tickets. I have a purpose, starting 28 March. Now I just need to get there.

I always forget how much effort is involved in travelling. I have the rest of the day to pack my things and then I leave the house around 4am tomorrow. I’ll arrive at my temporary accommodation about thirty hours later (assuming no delays).

Packing itself is hard. There is a lot just in deciding what to take (and what to take carry-on). Then we get to the process of fitting it all into a suitcase, or deciding what to exclude when it doesn’t fit.

On the plane I am planning to do some coding (just to get myself in the swing of things). There are a number of bug fixes and enhancements to the TDU website which are good candidates. I’ll take some TV. Maybe a book. Maybe I’ll try to sleep, though I expect the combination of excitement and aircraft will make that difficult.

It really hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m going. I think that emotional journey (gross, I know) will be as tough as anything else. I might have a little cry on the plane, you never know. Maybe when I arrive. Maybe wandering through a park a week from now. It’ll happen though. And in my own true style, I will definitely blog about it.

Now that I’ve figured out everything set-up wise, aside from some clothes shopping (seriously, it turns out I only have like one pair of casual trousers that I like) I don’t know what I’ll do my first week in the big apple NYC the City of Angels that foreign place I’m going to. There’s so much to do, and I need to do some of it. If only because I might not have time later.

There’s a bunch of boring stuff I need to do (banking, establishing residency, registering to vote). There’s got to be some exciting stuff too though. I’m thinking I might start with muesums and art galleries. My boss suggested the opera and a Harlem jazz club. Another suggestion was pancakes in a diner during the wee hours. Why not both, right?

I’m going to try to blog every day from now on (timezones mean I will skip what is the Australian 21 March). Often this will be cool technical stuff (e.g. talking about the cool dark corners of unicode article I saw today). Sometimes it will be personal. I’ll use tags to make it easier for you to stalk me track what you’re interested in.

My posts might not always have an actual conclusion or point.