I’m back from Florida and it feels like we are really beginning to accelerate towards our departure date.  I basically have two weeks left at work, time in which my major responsibilities include training the coworkers I’m leaving behind and packing up my personal belongings.  Oksana will be working through the month of June, training her own replacement, and I’ll spend our last month in Juneau making sure all our possessions are safely packed away.

We also have a thousand-and-one other things to do.  Arrange for medical/travel insurance, complete our vaccinations, set up new bank accounts, cancel most of our utilities and make arrangements on the others to pay up a year in advance, buy ferry tickets, pack, fix the website, and somehow keep posting content (even if it’s Spartan, like this.)

On the plus side, my new Sony Vaio laptop arrived yesterday (after much struggle with FedEx Ground!)  Somewhere around here is my Adobe Master Collection serial number and as soon as I find it, I’ll finally get to try editing actual AVCHD files.  My previous Dell didn’t have the horsepower; let’s see what these i7 chips can do.

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When your family is from the East Coast and you’ve decided to make a life for yourself in Alaska, most of your traveling ends up taking more than twelve hours. It’s hard to get excited about a 3000 mile journey while it requires you to get up at 4:30am just so you can make it to the airport in time for the humiliating dissection of your luggage. Then, if you’re really lucky, you’ll have middle seats between two strangers for the next half-day, not to mention long layovers in airports with chairs intentionally designed to be uncomfortable.

I love flying, but somewhere along the way, I lost the excitement for it.

It’s precisely because most of my travel is extremely tedious that I wasn’t looking forward to flying to Fairbanks last Sunday. I suppose it didn’t help matters much that my trip was work related – three days of training on a new web portal isn’t exactly my idea of fun. The only good thing about traveling for business is that the University foots the bill, so there’s that. But hey, I wouldn’t want to get dooced, so enough about work.

I woke up Sunday morning with a lot to do before my plane was scheduled to leave at 1pm. I don’t know what it is about me, but despite my best intentions, I never seem to pack before the last minute. After going to bed rather late the night before (Curse you, World of Warcraft!), I awoke at 8:30am with my mind already creating a to-do list.

Before tackling the list, though, I started the day like most every other day that I manage to get up before Oksana. I stretched my arm into the partially closed refrigerator and cracked open a Diet Coke as quietly as I could. While ingesting my much-needed caffeine, I sat down at my desk and read some of my daily web sites. When my eyes could stay open without conscious effort, I started in on the first task on my list – backing up and transferring the files I’ll need on my laptop.

The rest of the morning was filled with all the things I should have done the day before: Laundry, shaving, packing, finding contact info for the hotel and printing out Internet maps of Fairbanks and the UAF campus. Somewhere during all that, Oksana came out of the bedroom and went back to sleep on the couch. Envy.
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