Busy doing nothing - 8 Days

And now I am getting to that moment where it seems like I have absolutely bloody no time to do anything I need to do. Which in fact is nothing, but I know that there must be stuff for me to do because you don’t just sit around for a week before moving to another country.

I did re-pack at the weekend, and now I have got a potential four suitcases down to two, plus a carry-on. I’ll pack/throw out all but one set of work clothes tomorrow night, along with about half of the remaining clothes.

I’m pulling together some handover stuff for work, where I finish this Wednesday, but I’m only taking a week and a half’s holiday, because I’ll be back doing the same job soon enough, just in my home office. It’s nice that I can say I’ll sort that out when I’m back, but it’s also shit that I can’t say “fuck it” someone else will do it, like a long line of my predecessors have.

I’ve cleared out my desk, and have completed one of the bids I had to do before going, and should send out another tomorrow. Then I have to make sure everything is where it should be and that anything that should be with anyone else finds its way to them. I also have to factor in saying goodbye to everyone, eating cakes, and paying my last four or five visits to our very own Costa Coffee, where either Mary can serve me cappuccino flavoured lava, or Helen can somehow work her magic to make milk colder using steam.

From Wednesday onwards it will be the final run of goodbyes and see you laters, with my farewell to Fir Park, both my Grandad’s, all of my Motherwell family, my best mate, and Onesti’s chip shop to take place on Wednesday/Thursday. Friday has been left open for whatever, then on Saturday it’s the last football game and day/night out with my brother, and on Sunday its dinner with the family. Oh, and the pub quiz where we will exact our revenge on the milk drinking wankers that won last night.

Monday will be relatively quiet with some last minute preparations, including checking in online at 6am, and then it will be the dreaded goodbyes to Mum, Lauren, Stuart and Sheona. Onto Tuesday morning where Dad will drop me off at Edinburgh International Airport, we’ll do our manly goodbyes. Then it’s check-in, bathroom,  two mushroom and swiss cheese muffins, bathroom, security, shoes off, laptop out, shoes on, laptop in, bathroom, bottle of water, bathroom, board one and a bit hour flight to Amsterdam, pretzels, coffee, land, check into, Yotel, nap, security, shoes off, laptop out, bag searched, tetris bag back together, shoes on, laptop in, board nine hour flight to Memphis, no nap, shite food that I secretly like, beat someone at bejewelled, drink some free beer, land, customs-greencard-easy, pick up baggage, security, drop baggage again, smell BBQ, make my way to baggage reclaim, walk past Cassie and Davie, they find me, we all hug, get my bags, get in the car and forget that we even spent the last year mainly apart.

So I haven’t left myself too much time to fit in anything that I’ve missed, including the dentist, buying some gifts for my lovely colleagues, visiting my old neighbour, saying goodbye to my guitar, buying some new British clothes, and stockpiling marmite and chocolate.

Sometimes there isn't much to say - 12 Days

One thing that may hinder my getting on with the Americans is my relative quietness compared to them. OK Americans are stereotypically loud anyway, and us Brits are known for being a wee bit more reserved, but I'm generally on the quiet side even for a Scotsman.  I'm not shy or nervous, and don't have a lack of things to say. I have a shitload of opinions about everything. I'm just really not that fussed about talking a lot of the time. Quiet is nice. I also like thinking a lot, just not clever type thinking, I usually just do that when I get paid for it. 

I really am only writing about this subject because I have fuck all to blog about today. As with this here blog, when I do talk it tends to be bollocks, and a lot of it.  I got my birthday out of the way with no issues, and the day after is nearly done, so that only leaves 12 days of potential screw up. 

A plane nearly crashed in Singapore today, and someone asked me if that worried me, totally distracting me from trying to figure out if I'd seen the girl from Black Sheep somewhere before(the killer sheep movie, not the Spade/Farley one), imdb didn't throw anything up, so I guess she just looks like someone, which means there's no chance of figuring it out since I'm not really good with faces, I worry that I'll walk past people I know in the street because I forgot what they look like. I'd find them if I was looking for them though. 

Sorry Kevin

I'm so much worse with names, I used to speak to a colleague every day about stuff, and the fact he used to play cricket for my team back in the day. It took me about four years to figure out his name. It was kind of embarrassing asking another colleague who he was, when most of the time they saw the guy he was talking to me. I did try going through the cricket club archives to no avail. His name was Kevin, fuck knows what he looks like. That reminds me of someone who constantly called me John, despite being one of few Colin's in the organisation, and definitely the only one in the office. I even had people shout across the office at me when she was there, hoping it would click. The kind of thing Kevin should really have done for me really. Didn't work though.

She reminded me of the dizzy mum in Shaun of the Dead, a great movie, but I wish less people would like it. I was there from Big Train and Spaced and the one where he did a magazine and the guy Serafinowicz was a baddie in it. I figure it may be better to like popular shit after it's popular, and maybe everyone will piss off. 

I have to say, the Bee Gees song that came on was cheese perfection, for whom the bell tolls, if the first guitar refrain doesn't make you smile then you have no soul, not soul as in Aretha Franklin, an actual soul, you are just a shell of a Bee Gee hating nothing. Cheesy music has it's place, and it's mainly on my mp3 player. Many a morning I'd fill my two mile walk to work with 'bat out of hell', 'party hard', 'dead or alive', and 'you win again', sometimes even wondering how I would arrange the track if I was playing it live as a tribute to the artist who died just that day, which is nearly as good as picking out a random suit on the train and imaging them fronting the video for whatever song comes on next. 'Closer' always gets a good reaction. Another good thing is looking out the bus/train/car window, and imagining the next song is the first song in a movie, fading in from the opening credits, then cast everyone you see in the movie,  and then when you stop imagine how shit everything is compared to the movie plot you just dreamt up. I've never gotten round to dancing or singing with my headphones on though, anytime I see someone do that I think they must be really happy, but most probably just mental.

Not having a guitar for a while after I move is going to be a bitch. I'm not even that good at playing it, but if I close my eyes I can imagine that someone else is playing that shit and I don't feel so bad.

It's my last Friday of work tomorrow, and in four days I can say I'm moving next week.

November Pain - See what I did there? 13 days.

It's Drago's Birthday too.

The fact that I turned 31 today and 30 this time last year has pretty much passed me by. I really did catch myself a few times last month totally forgetting my birthday was approaching. I got a note from my mum a few weeks back asking if I was coming to hers for dinner on the third, and my first thought was why? As with most adults, the emphasis on your own birthday tends to fade when you have kids, but the events of the last year have compounded this for me.

I can’t quite remember why we decided that my birthday was the best day for Cassie and Davie to leave last year, I’m sure it was to do with a combination of flight availability and cost, and the ins and outs of shipping the dogs back to the USA. Oh, it was because the house sale was to go though on the 5^th, and we needed to get the house cleared.  There wasn’t really anywhere for three of us and two dogs to stay so it was best they all went ahead of me, with me following once I got my green card. At the time I obviously didn’t expect to be here for a whole year, but even the thought of being apart for the planned three months was a pretty big deal. The green card was a formality though, so we weren’t too worried.

That all changed of course once the house sale fell through. Even though we were given assurances that the buyer already had a mortgage in place prior to us accepting the offer, they didn’t, and couldn’t. My solicitors dragged the process on so long that we had already made all of the moving arrangements before we found out, about two weeks before they were set to fly out.

and Adam Ant's

Despite this we decided to go ahead with everything, partly due to the majority of the costs being non-refundable and the amount of work that had gone into making the arrangements, and also in the hope that there would be the same level of interest in the house as there was prior to accepting the offer.  I also figured that there was no point in all of us facing the uncertainty, when Cassie and Davie could go and get settled ahead of me. I think this was a case of me being far too rational, and not nearly as selfish as I should be sometimes.  

So we forged ahead and kept to our plans and tried not to let the situation get on top of us. It had been a hard few months, but we still had some of the left over optimism from prior to me getting paid off, and it at least felt like the move was finally happening. At the time there was a good chance that this wouldn’t affect our timeline, as I still had some work to do with the visa, but it did have financial implications as I now had a mortgage and bills to pay whilst living on my own, seriously reducing my ability to save for the move, and with my redundancy pay now running out and no house sale proceeds on the horizon there was a lot of uncertainty and worry.

He's cool

On top of all that, the day before Cassie and Davie left could hardly have gone any worse, as at the last minute the costs to transport the dogs almost doubled due to a monumental fuck up by the shipping company. Finding this out ten minutes before they were due to be picked up, and being left with no alternative but to stump up the cash was absolutely sickening and was the shit flavoured icing on the cake of an incredibly shitty three months.

By then it would have easy just to think that everyone was just out to fuck us over. Everything about the move had been pretty well planned, but it seemed that it all just went to shit as soon as we pulled the trigger and decided to go for it. Therefore I think we did pretty well to keep doing what we had to do, making sure that we were at least doing everything in our power to make things work.

and the inventor of these

Now it’s another weird birthday, but for different reasons. I’m two weeks from finally getting the move I’ve both been longing for and dreading, for the same reasons any sane and normal person would. I’ve been two weeks away before though. Recently every phone call, letter, and e-mail has been received with a great deal of dread, as I just can’t accept that this is all going to happen without a problem. Every minute between now and 6pm (CST) on November 16^th will be filled with the same dread.  I am once again in a position where everything is organised and there is nothing else left to do which is under my control. 

I got an e-mail from my estate agent about two hours ago and just seeing the “from” address was sickening, as I was half expecting news of a major issue with the house or the tenant. It was just my rent statement. 

Finally getting this move sorted doesn’t mean our life is going to be plain sailing and worry free, but it will be great to get back to dealing with normal issues, together.

This takes away slightly from what today should be, and that’s my last birthday here with my family. For now at least. It’s not like we’re doing anything big, but we never make a production of birthdays, and a quiet one would be nice. So if anything’s going to go tits up, can it wait until Thursday please?

Everyone should move here instead - 14 days

You're welcome

If it's not immediately apparent to you all why I am going to miss this great country of mine, why the fuck not? (I'm blogging in Scottish today, so you'll just have to put up with the swearing).  So I guess I should just give you a wee reminder of why Scotland is so fucking great.

Not only do we have a country of infinite beauty, with all the hills and lochs you can shake a stick at, we're a clever lot and invented a lot of shit.  Like the television, telephone, penicillin, raincoat, red hair, and a shit load of other things.  We've given the world the multi-million dollar industry that is golf. Scotland got Tiger Woods laid, and one day he will thank us for that.



Scottis

We invented the US Navy, and further Wikipedia research shows that we also invented fucking time. Time! The light bulb means fuck all if there's no time. There wouldn't be much point in having a wheel (which we didn't invent, but we did invent tyres) before time was invented, oh and the standard for all of the best inventions ever invented would be rendered completely useless without good old Scottish time: "would you like some sliced bread with your dinner?", "yes please, when's dinner?", "I don't know, we don't have time yet. Sorry".

So we kind of invented everything. For those who don't believe me, we invented hypnotism.

Some great people like, Adam Smith, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, David Hume, James Watt, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M. Barrie, and Sean Connery, are all Scottish. Jeez, we even gave the USA a president which kind of pisses me off since they changed the rules since then and I cant go for it.

stand still laddie!

Due to our greatness it's rather unsurprising that there are more Scottish-Americans than actual Scottish-Scottish people, although this is mainly down to bullshit claims. Johnny Cash and his wife, Reese Witherspoon, claim to have Scottish heritage, along with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Bill Gates. Oh, and it makes a lot of sense that Jack Daniel, the inventor of the whiskey, is of Scottish descent. But nothing beats this, UNCLE SAM IS FUCKING SCOTTISH!

It may be worth noting that many things which are stereotypically Scottish aren't, such as Haggis (French), Bagpipes (Roman), Kilt (Scandinavian), and Tartan (Chinese).

Then there's music. Not the folk music or the bagpipe music, but frickin great music. We have given the world some pretty decent bands and musicians such as: Simple Minds, Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Belle & Sebastian, The Beta Band, Biffy Clyro, Big Country, Idlewild, Travis, Deacon Blue, The Delgados, Teenage Fanclub, Franz Ferdinand, Glasvegas, Mogwai, Paulo Nutini, The Proclaimers, and AC/DC. Contrary to popular belief, Susan Boyle is not Scottish, she is an impostor. If you want to be educated just click on the links for some of my favourite songs by said artists.

Not Scottish

This is merely a sample of our greatness. So, it kind of gets on my tits when people don't even know where we fucking are! Or what language we speak. Seriously, I've been complimented on my English on more than one occasion, and also asked what my first language was. I've been asked if we had tomatoes or potatoes in Scotland, and also if we had bicycles, which we invented of course.