In Which Jaime Settles in and Learns to Drive Again

The past few days have been reasonably uneventful, I think. When did I last update this? Monday?

This week I've started actually working for my keep. Which has been good for me, I think. I nearly almost sort of missed getting up early and doing things by 7am or so. Nearly almost sort of, mind. I still keep staying up far too late talking to people I shouldn't be talking with and getting generally distracted from the whole sleeping thing. I think this is generally unhelped by the whole timezone issue, meaning that my night time is late afternoon the next day back in New Zealand, and a perfect time for everyone I want to be catching up with to be online. Clearly I need to work harder on getting everyone on Skype, so that we can cover more interesting things faster.

I do get a fair amount of time off in the middle of the day, though (like now), which has been used for napping, and catching up on aforementioned sleep. It is time that will hopefully be filled with a few college courses sometime soon, which I expect will be far, far more productive than sitting around home doing very little (It's probably also bad for the homesickness that is likely to kick in at some point). I'm still not sure what sort of papers I want to take, but currently my thinkings are somewhere along the lines of American History (apparently this often involves a bit of travel, too), or the computer programming kind of thing. I think it largely depends on what still has spaces at the right times and things. Sadly they have to be "accredited" courses, meaning that I'm not allowed to take the dance, music, or photography classes I've found. Or knitting. That looked like fun.

I guess the major thing of the week is that I've now started driving, which is certainly an adjustment. My initial thoughts about driving were that being on the wrong side of the road would be incredibly unsettling, but as I've told several people, what I've actually found far, far stranger is being on the wrong side of the car. I need to re-train my instincts to deal with all the extra car I have sticking out of one side, and all the extra space I have on the other.

I seem to be picking it up fairly quickly, for the most part. At least they aren't silly enough to swap the accelerator and the brake around, that would cause far more problems. The handbrakes here are weird, however, as they are not, in fact, handbrakes, but footbrakes, that I seem to mostly call the park brake, and reminisce about how lovely planes are.

I have not killed any small animals (or larger ones), or hit anything thus far, so have deemed this whole driving on the wrong side thing a relative success. At least for now.