Seattle!

</January><February>

Somehow, January is over. I live in another country now! It is still surreal.

This post is all about updates and progress! I am going to try and keep this short and sweet unlike the last post. You get all of the ambition and goal setting with none of the weeping and self-pity.

Okay! Where to begin?

January was a weird, weird time. Did I get anything done? Well, I successfully immigrated to America, so I would call that an accomplishment. I made it through a ton of paperwork and administrative hoop-jumping, which felt like a full-time job in itself.

I was kind of dreading my first day of work because I was so drained and frustrated from the process of transferring down here, but once I started it felt so good to be doing real work again that I actually had more energy to deal with all the relocation shenanigans.

I also found a new apartment with my new roommate. The view from our living room is awesome! I move in next week, and I will be so happy to finally start settling in.

One of my goals for January was to “organize all my junk”, and I definitely did a lot of that when packing up the house in Victoria. I am not going to elaborate on that because this is not a sad post.

My other January goal was to organize and re-write my Mandarin notes. I totally did not plan ahead for this and all my Mandarin books got packed onto a truck that is still on its way here from Canada. But my stuff gets delivered on Tuesday and then no more excuses!

I started working on a map of Seattle, with all the great places that I’ve been to so far. I doubt it will ever be as epic as Michelle’s map of Vancouver, but it’s a start. Andrew came to visit for a few days, so we already found a couple of awesome restaurants. I am definitely planning to eat & drink my way across this city.

So, February: the goal is to write letters & postcards to all of my friends. I am super excited to do this, and want to keep it up for the rest of the year too. I already tried buying Canadian stamps at the post office but they were sold out. How offensive! I will try again soon.

Also, I want to get ramped up on my game engine side project. I wrote a bunch of code in December but haven’t touched it since, so I want to get going on it as soon as I get my computer set up at the new apartment.

And that’s it! I could write three hundred pages about all my weird moving-related feelings but I am going to avoid that and focus on happy goal setting instead.

Happy February!