Sent most of my belongings off with a removal company yesterday. Am still very nervous about the whole thing (particularly don't like the take-all-my-wordly-possessions-and-here's-a-big-cheque-too aspect of it!) but people ship stuff all over the world everyday and I'm hoping it'll all turn up in Düsseldorf and not too much will be broken. I caved at the last minute and kept my files with documentation relating to work, pension, health insurance and the Revenue. I've bought my brother a flight to come and visit me the week after I arrive over there and will leave a suitcase of stuff with him to bring with him as well. How ridiculous is it that it was cheaper to buy another flight where he can check in one bag of up to 20kg than it would be to pay the excess baggage on that 20kg if I were to bring it myself (at €9/kilo excess baggage is not cheap!)?!?
I have a mountain of stuff to do in work and will be doing some serious overtime in the next few days to get through it. This situation hasn't been helped by my boss being actually in the office over the last week rather than out at meetings and the fact that he's been doing more client work than admin as well which in turn generates more work for me. And he's sort of trying to make sure everything is covered before I leave so keeps calling me into his office to show him how to do this or that and confirm points he wouldn't normally bother his head with because I'd take care of it. My replacement won't start for another month so for the time he's away on holidays he'll have little or no support in the office keeping an eye on things although admittedly in the last year or so he has gotten much better about actually taking a proper holiday and not being in constant contact with the office. I'm working on a handover document for my replacement setting out everything that needs to be done on a daily basis to keep everything running smoothly and am even amazing myself at the myriad of very small tasks I do that don't seem to be 'real' tasks and yet are the kind of things that make up a good part of my day - I seem to do a lot of things that take only a minute or so but it all adds up.
It rained again today. I know it's raining a lot more in Germany than usual but I still can't wait to get away from it and at least have a bit of sunshine inbetween.
2 comments:
I remember when you wrote about thinking of moving to Germany - and now you are! I keep telling the Mister that we should move to Scotland (he says Ireland) and I wonder if it will ever happen for us.
It's too bad we couldn't meet up in Dublin when we were there.
Funny enough, Canada would be fairly high up on my list of places I'd like to go to. I even remember going into Canada House during my last weeks of college to find out if it was possible to go there to work for a year. I think I must have asked the wrong question because I came away with a whole load of documents outlining the very stringent requirements to get a Canadian visa (I just wanted to go over travelling but knew I would have had to work while there to support myself, couldn't have afforded more than a week's holiday without working). It really put me off because it seemed so difficult and also because I seemed to meet very few of the requirements :-)
I think 2008 is a big year, lots of people are doing big things and I'm really happy I'm finally doing something I want to instead of just waiting for it to happen.
We might meet somewhere yet, who knows what the next ten years will bring!
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