Pat really needs to reconsider what a “good time” to leave the UK is.

*YAAAWWWN*

See you on t’other side!

Squage

…

I’ve been busy for a lot of today, stopping for some footy watching and a nice couple of goodbye beers with James and Gib this afternoon.

Inbetween these tasks, I’ve been feeling a strange mixture of massive excitement, a bit of sadness and a little fear.

It’s really odd not knowing what’s coming. This is so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done and so it’s really difficult to contemplate. I mean: I’m not coming back to England for A YEAR.

That’s insane.

What’s great though is that I know this is the right thing to do. Where I was in my life wasn’t where I wanted to be and I’ve felt like I’ve been treading water for years now… so this is me doing something about it.

Anyway I’m not gonna waffle on as a) there’s plenty of time to do that on my travels and b) it’s 8:30pm, I’m knackered and need to get up at about 4am.

Do stay in touch – I’ll do my best to reciprocate!

Toodles,

Pat

…and I spent most of today recovering from last night.

Twas a great night (thanks for coming FFE folk, I really appreciated it!!), but unfortunately there were more than a few vodka-cokes, beers and odd shot things (cheers Mr Elliott… I think) to make most of today a touch delicate.

Here’s a photo of the hard core group who managed to make it through the bowling, meal and onto the wonder of Chicagos:

There were plenty of other photos from last night but I think it’d be unfair to post many of them online :-)

Anyway after a whole lot of packing, tidying and drinking water I’ve managed to get to a stage where I could actually go to the airport and get out to New York. Which is nice. Still got lots to do tomorrow in the world of PC cleaning up, car emptying and printing of documents, but I’m pretty chilled regarding everything.

Tonight we had a family meal out (the last one for a year – eek), which was really nice. It was a curry, inevitably, and excitingly (what?) Scuzz and I both sampled the true joy of the Celebratory Dessert Team – Punky and Gavvi:

Live the dream.

2 more wake ups to go…

Pat

…and I’m getting quite excited now. But it’s excitement with a tint of sadness, which was quite apparent at the end of last night.

Lev and I went to Bas Vegas for a nice meal – complete with doodling on the tables:

Following that we went to see a rather high brow piece of cultural “infotainment”: Borat.

Despite the second half feeling like it was just treading over the same ground that the first half did, I still heartily recommend seeing it, if only to sit in horror whilst watching Borat and his rather portly producer running around a hotel stark naked and staring in disbelief at a crazy Christian Gospel ceremony in Texas – where Cohen doesn’t even need to make his character do anything ridiculous to make the audience cringe…

Anyway, after seeing that, Lev and I said goodbye “for a year”… and as I drove off I suddenly realised that, oh my god, I’m not gonna see my friends for an entire year.

It’s really quite scary.

Anyway, another goodbye happened today – this time with Gary Steers (him from SGR Colchester fame) and Sarah Soon-to-be-Steers:

They got me an amazing selection of amusing and useful gifts for the journey… including a pack of cards with a lame – sorry, great – chat up line on each card.

My favourite is the following:

“Hello. I’ve got 3 months to life”.

It’s just so wrong. I’ll let you know if it works… :-)

Right, time to go… got some getting ready to do for my Work Leaving Do this evening!

Til tomorrow (whereupon I might be a touch hungover)…

Pat

…and it’s feeling crowded in the house with all the Squagés hanging around!

Still, Pat seems to be pleased with it so that’s fine. He had another nice lie in today, which was good to work off the beers from last night’s pizza, beer and quality film fest round James’ schweet flat.

Pat spent most of the day putting off going to Lakeside to get some more bits for travelling. Following watching far too much daytime telly, Pat watched series 3 episode 5 of LOST – which was ACE, thanks The Dave :-)

Eventually he wandered over to Lakeside. I stayed at home. I’m glad, as it seems like it wasn’t that great. From the random, confused mumblings I managed to extract the following analogy:

In Constantine, the world of Hell exists in parallel to the world of the living. The image below illustrates how these worlds appear:

Here are those same two parallel worlds at Lakeside Shopping Centre, Thurrock:

Nuff said.

Toodles,

Squage

…and the “not being at work” thing isn’t quite sinking in.

The idea that I might NEVER go back into the office again seems really odd – after all, I went there straight after Uni and it’s been the only thing I’ve known since.

I keep feeling I’ll be going back next week – which, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Very odd… I keep swaying between sadness and a great sense of relief + freedom.

I suspect that’ll get replaced with MASSIVE EXCITEMENT in a couple of days… in the mean time I’ve been filling my time today organising myself and buying stuff:

That’s not including the clothes… I really hope my back pack is big enough :-)

Toodles,

Pat