Better than a funeral

I'm getting to like this idea of moving abroad more and more. It's like having a funeral, only better! So many friends telling me how much they'll miss me. People making an effort to come and visit me, take me out to dinner, ply me with drinks, promising (threatening?) to come and visit once I get to Cork! And, unlike a funeral, I get to be there to enjoy all the eulogies! :-) Seriously though, I guess it takes a big shift like this to make it clear to you how you're appreciated by the people in your life. I should have done this years ago!

Practicing stick shift continues whenever I have the nerve ... actually, at least once a day. I've been doing it by halves. I haven't gotten a chance to practice in my friend's old Beemer again (she assures me it's still running, at least as well as it was before, so I didn't really kill it!), but I realized that my Passat has a Tiptronic transmission which gives me the option of manually shifting the gears when I'm in Drive. I've been practicing on the way home from my practice, and anytime traffic isn't too hectic. It's oddly seductive. Now that the initial terror has faded and I can practice this piece by piece (i.e., no clutch), it's much more interesting than I'd expected. Maybe I'll even come to prefer a manual transmission, who knows?

More good news about the car situation. I found out that I'm not stuck with trying to get someone to take over my lease on the Passat. I can sell it! Volkswagen doesn't care - as long as I get enough to pay them off, they don't give a hoot. Such a relief for me! I'm thinking I might just wait till the last week before I leave and sell it to CarMax. No muss, no fuss. I won't make much (or much of any) profit, but it'll be off my hands. Whew!

So, I've pretty much told everybody about The Big News. The only people still in the dark are my supervisors/administration at my day job and my private practice clients. They won't get the news until all the paperwork is finalized - I'm only waiting on the psychology/government folks in Ireland to approve my training and degrees ("Yes sir, I'm a real psychologist and I might actually know what I'm doing") and then I'll be eligible for my work visa and can start winding things down here.