the long goodbye *

Friday night was date night. We crammed in enough London-centric activities to stem the pre-emptive home sickness. Dinner at the Oriental Canteen; beer in a random pub; ice skating at the Natural History Museum; last orders champers at St Pancras whilst ogling the Lego Christmas tree. Then home, where we sank an entire bottle of left over wedding prosecco and a box champagne truffles whilst watching Merlin on iPlayer. I hope we can figure out iPlayer in Philly, otherwise sanity may start to drift.

* This was an experiment in mobile blogging with Dan's iPhone. I'm sat in bed with my laptop. #fail

for our next trick...

When I commented back in February that "January 2011 was epic, but the rest of 2011 isn't likely to be any different", it wasn't an understatement. That seems like much longer than 260 days ago. Since then we've been battling through a year with even more phenomenal sized waves of peaks and troughs than we'd expected. As John Cage once said to Ally McSqueal "If you think back, and replay your year - if it doesn't bring you tears of joy or sadness, consider the year wasted". This was not a year wasted - there have been plenty of tears of both sorts, not least the good kind on our wedding day. In fact so much happened this year (and is still to happen) that if nothing AT ALL happens next year, we'll be very happy indeed. To summarise crassly and in list format, key life events so far:

four weddings (including our own),

three funerals (including our cats - yes, they got funerals too),

mega flat maintenance (plaster off, walls injected, plaster back on, painted),

grant writing and interviews,

financial tightrope walking,

finding tenants and becoming landlords,

sorting out visas and contracts for the big move to Philly,

a (weekend) trip to the US to find somewhere to live

Somehow in all of this we've managed to stay sane. For my part that might be down the crazy amount of knitting I managed to squeeze in for the wedding. Right now though, we're standing on the edge of the next big adventure*:

Last day of current job, 2nd of December

Flight to US, 9th of December

First day of new job, 12th of December

I have a shed load of faffing about at work to do so I'm ready to leave, but it's all too dull. Hence sitting here, writing guff instead. This space needs to come back into action though. To relive the peaks and troughs of this year and to savour the adventure as it unfolds in the next.

* The lists have been all encompassing and very long this year. The habit is potentially now irreversibly ingrained. If it's not on a list it doesn't happen.