zerosleeps

Okay, things aren’t as bad as I though they were. My nomination for sponsorship has been lodged, and I completed the first bit of my application tonight. It was all online, and was relatively painless. There were no questions that knocked me for six: just stuff like passport numbers and history of citizenship.

Think I’ve cracked health insurance as well: I need private health insurance until I enrol with Medicare, and I can only enrol with Medicare when I’m in Australia. And I’ve also discovered that if I stick with Medicare, I pay an extra 1% in tax at my level of earning. That’s to encourage me to get my own private insurance.

Next up: sending supporting documentation, which is again all done online. I believe anything I send has to be certified though, and I’ve got no idea how that works. Do I copy said documents, get someone to sign them, then scan the signed copy? Upload a scan of a scan? What’s the point, and how does it prove that the second scan hasn’t been forged?

Watch this space I guess.

I’ve just found out that the immigration and relocation team at the University of Sydney haven’t received the form I sent them with my personal details. This is what stress feels like. I’m told it takes several weeks for everything to be processed, and I was hoping on flying in about 3 weeks.

And then there’s the time difference thing: by the time I wake up, read, and respond to an email from Sydney, and then they wake up and read my response, 24 hours have passed. Aargh!

I told Dad on the phone earlier that I wasn’t really fussed about getting rid of my car today. That’s not strictly true. It was a good car: we went a lot of places together. Hope the next owner looks after it.

A few wee things have happened today which given this whole move a sense of uncontrollable momentum. First, I found out that I won’t have a car in a couple of days. I’ll miss it, but since I walk to work, it rarely actually moves. Pretty expensive luxury really. I also started cancelling some services today: mobile phone, electricity etc.

But then I came home and played with Skype. Made my first Skype-to-landline call. I’m still impressed!

My current office is in one of those building that tries to be smart. Environment zones, clever air circulation, automatic blinds etc. One of the things it does is turn the lights off in each room when nobody’s there. Now the rooms also have light switches, so you can turn the lights on or off by yourself if you need to or want to.

Except my room. The lights are controlled by a PIR sensor in the ceiling, and that’s it. The lights come on when someone is in the room, whether you like it or not. And there are 8 light fittings, each with 4 bulbs in the room: 32 light bulbs + gallons of sunlight for one person seems rather excessive to me.

The solution: an empty tissue box and four sticky dots.