Fruit flies like a banana

We seem to have finally "found the floor" as Lisa put it, having tired of the endless piles of stuff and heaved it all into seamail boxes. Our last effort was a 20kg reminder of why cars are awesome, which the post office fortunately agreed to pick up for us. There are probably two more boxes to send and a bit of slash and burn to be done to the wardrobe, then I can almost imagine getting the remainder into a suitcase. This is a Very Good Thing, because it's just over a month until check-in and that Mario "running out of time" sound is on the edge of my hearing.

The conference starts on Wednesday and although I can't wait for the bloody thing to get out of the way, I think it's been a blessing to some extent. Normally at this time of year I'm counting down the hours and days until closing time on a Friday, but the workload has kept me so busy that last week almost left me behind. All the fine tuning is just about done now so all that's left is the main event. It'll then spit me out the other end, at which point I'll only have a month to stew about getting everything organised. Lisa's been keeping herself busy in the meantime with day trips out to Kyoto and Mount Koya for geisha and mountain temples respectively; I think having a break from thinking about packing tape has done us both a power of good.

We had a bit of an excursion out to Nara on Saturday in the form of a "sleepover" with Abel and Sinead. Barely disguising our jealousy at their huge, floorboarded apartment, we cracked open a nice Chianti (fafafafa) and cooked up a pot of sukiyaki at the table. The board games came out along with a big porcelain jug of German beer and we spent the better part of the night playing blind Pictionary and such. Abel seems to have every outrageously American product in the world, from butter in a can to caramel spread for crackers but it was the "scratch pancakes" we had our eye on for breakfast. We had a stack each, swimming in the world's thickest maple syrup and I've only needed half rations since.

Once we were organised we headed into Osaka for a bit of shopping and a very brief flirt with the idea of Burger King's all-you-can-eat Whopper campaign, which we wisely shunned in favour of a spot of sushi. We bid farewell to our gracious hosts, pencilling in one final catchup for December, then headed for home. Even though the place is habitable again it's hard not to feel that everything's in a state of upheaval; we've written out our instructions for the next person, organised the last of our apartment fees and cancelled our grocery deliveries for the year. I have a feeling we won't miss them too much - we've got so many farewell parties, final gatherings and random meals out from now on that I'm wondering how much use the stove is going to get. Between that and boxing all our little comforts up for home, it looks like these creatures of habit are going  cold turkey very soon.