On the Open ROAAAAAAAD

I see that I've neglected to post for nearly two weeks! I shall rectify this at once.

My last post was the Sunday night immediately after my last return to Spore; the Saturday before that I had attended a farewell hike for one of the House of Bread people, and that Sunday itself was all farewells and goodbye speeches. As it turned out, though, my packing went a little slower than expected (mostly due to the time it took to scrounge for boxes and finish off administrative things like closing down accounts and informing the house-owner of my impending departure) and arranging for transport, in between meeting up with friends for farewells: I expect the house-owner was happier with me (as a tenant) in that week than ever before, since I was often out of the house for upwards of five hours a day every day to meet people for lunch or tea or dinner, and all that human contact tired me out (enjoyable though it was) and so I always fell asleep relatively early.

(Though I should mention that on at least one occasion I woke up to find the door open and the house-owner's head stuck into the room to see if anything had been left turned on, and the head withdrew before I kicked the door shut on it.)

At any rate I went a-walking a lot in those days, and on at least one occasion I was accosted by people doing roadside surveys who thought I was a high-school student, which set me off on worrying whether I'm too young-looking for this job and whether it'll cause me heaps of trouble trying to be taken seriously. Then again, maybe it'll help in that the mistakes I make will be put down to boyish bobance and bounce, and I'll be let off relatively easily.

So the slew of farewells went on until Friday night, and on Saturday at around 3pm I (and all my possessions that I could remember) left Spore and arrived at So Hour around 7pm or so, to a mixed reaction. The people seemed quite happy that I was around, but definitely were shocked that I had brought quite so much stuff with me--in fact if it weren't for me having lost a substantial amount of weight over the past few months (nearly 5kg, according to the scale in the store) I shouldn't have been able to fit into the car with all my stuff. As it was, though, I fit in, albeit barely; and it was a distinctly uncomfortable ride.

The next day I and my eldest cousin fetched the family car down from my Fifth Aunt's house, and since then (that would be, I think, Sunday) I've been learning to drive. It's a distinctly less frightening experience than before, which I attribute to puberty already being conclusively over and my having been to very fast rides at theme parks (which make moving at around 20kph much less fearsome). As it turns out I'm still not terribly coordinated and I do still have issues with telling my right hand from my left--an hereditary trait, since a number of cousins have such issues too--but so far nothing terrible has happened, apart from nearly running over the foot of somebody standing by the roadside (I was concentrating on avoiding the hedges and the motorbike on the other side) and meeting three lorries in a row on one of the one-lane stone paths.

In between all that I've been emailing and Skypeing and making phone calls, and the upshot is that I've got a rather nice place to stay, about ten minutes' drive from the factory and with a very agreeable landlord who also happens to be the son of the ex-Headmaster of the local primary school, who taught my eldest cousin; it's a rather nice room, too, and I'm quite pleased with it. At any rate I'm only going to need the room for about six months, which should give me plenty of time to familiarise myself with driving; and in about four weeks I'll have to be good enough to drive down to Spore for the wedding. (And I'm getting a GPS today to help with that pesky lack of sense of direction--RM400, which is a bit pricey, but it'll be worth it with all the driving I expect to end up doing!)

And so? Things seem to be falling into place, apart from my irritating bank account still not being activated despite me following the bankers' advice and manually depositing money into the account; the website says I should have been withdrawing instead, but they don't open on weekends and their weekday office hours are very short, which will make things very tricky. It's quite irritating. But otherwise things seem to be going smoothly, which I thank God for; it's true of course that He's seldom early but never late. It's just one of His more annoying traits--one I call His sense of dramatic suspense. But at any rate it looks like I'm going to end my period of unemployment on a happy note.