Well, my crash visit to the US is almost over. Been a well packed and fun couple of days here in California. Thanks to Simon‘s expert tour guiding I’ve had a very good introduction to San Francisco and a cruisey Sunday in the Santa Cruz area. The area really doesn’t look like what I expected, it’s so much more green and rugged. All in all I quite like the place, especially the area around Santa Cruz… the view from the UCSC gym is really quite something else.

Rather out of it at the moment, averaged 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night since getting here and Friday was effectively a 36 hour day. I’m hoping I get some sleep on the flight to Sydney, but that may be too optimistic.

We’ll, as the Governator says… I’ll be back.

Well, I’d say that that moving to the UK has become a certainty. As originally planned I’m still heading to the US in April – but that visit is now shortened to a week. Then back to Sydney for a couple of weeks – dead busy organising our “moving out” of the country. A week visiting family in WA then bounce back through Sydney to the UK.

So much to organise! We’ve been looking at areas to live in in the UK and I must say that my favourite is Oxford – it’s an attractive place with plenty going on in the evenings. It is well placed for my own movements and the rent there isn’t too unreasonable. However I fear that it isn’t the wisest practical choice for Kat, since the IT job market in Oxford isn’t exactly huge and it is an hour long train ride just to get from Oxford to Marylebone station – ruling out commuting to London.

My practical nature will probably win, and at the moment a more sensible place to live looks like Rickmansworth. It is only a 30 min train ride to London, rent there is good and it is convenient for my own movements (I spend most of my time at a location outside of London).

Fun fun!

The other day when I logged into the system at the gym I found an unusual message waiting for me from “Mark” – I have never met this Mark. It read, in summary:

Congratulations, you have lifted 250,000kgs – that’s the equivalent of 70 elephants!

Very strange… so I spent the rest of the day thinking about 70 elephants chopped up into various pieces ranging from 40 to 110kg in size. These pieces being tied to the lifting cables of the gym equipment or being spiked onto either end of an iron bar.

The great thing about benchpressing elephant chunks is that once done you could have a tasty spit-roast – mmm, protein.