My feet are very tired. I’ve been walking around Cambridge all day organising paperwork so that I can matriculate, getting a student card, finding out about bank accounts and mobile phone services, meeting my official ‘buddy’ and so on.

While I was doing all this, two people said ‘happy birthday’ to me. They asked for my birthdate in order to fill in some forms.

Luckily, there were many birthday wishes in my email inbox to stave off the gloom of being away from family and friends on my birthday.

I’m in Cambridge now and have a room to live in. I even have people I call ‘friends’. I’ve been at a camp for a few days, feeling homesick but eventually recovering to enjoy caving, hiking and games.

When I get a computer next week, this blog will return to normal programming.

I am (again) at Singapore Airport, on my way to Dubai, then London. Damjan is here too.

It’s been uneventful. I have the biggest, purplest suitcase on the block. Packing sure is stressful. They let Damjan and I have an extra couple of kilograms.

I hope you are all well. I got to see many, many friends before I had to go. Thank you for the niceness.

I don’t think this post is very good. It’s very early in the morning and I haven’t slept much.

Bye bye.

This is a vineyard near Red Hill, a town on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Through the generosity of my friend Kieren, I got to stay in a beautiful newly constructed architect-designed homestead on Saturday night.

When the vines are full of grapes, Kieren’s family invites their friends over to pick grapes and make wine. To reward us for enduring a day of ‘hard work’ in the glorious sunshine, Kieren’s mum (a most accomplished chef) prepares a feast for us.

I like them ducks.

This pool featured in Poolside Magazine. On Saturday night, we sat in the 37°C water of the spa, drank wine and watched the stars.

This is Jemima. Kieren said, ‘She’s not smart but she’s very photogenic.’ I said something about Jemima being blonde.

I finished up at work last Monday. Since then, I’ve been saying final goodbyes to friends, doing my tax and packing my bags. I got a new suitacase. It’s 108 L and purple. The people at work also gave me a 30 L backpack, which I was really excited about. I had resigned myself to not getting a new backpack. This one has ventilation panels and an instruction manual and everything!

At the moment, I’m copying my CDs onto the computer so that I can take my music on my portable hard drive. I’m copying Thriller by Michael Jackson. It’s really slow.

I’ve chosen to copy the music as WMA. If I had more time, I’d think a bit more about the ethical and optimal audio format to use. My immediate needs, however, was to use a widely accepted format with small file sizes. I also like the way Windows Media Player can find album information. I don’t need to type it all in!

I went to a vineyard at Red Hill on the weekend. I have many photos. I think about two-thirds of them will be deleted. I will post them up once they’ve been processed.

At the start of every week for more than four months, I’ve taken the Hume Highway from Melbourne to Shepparton. Just as I pass Clonbinane (one hour north of Melbourne), a hill looms directly in front of me.

One day, I got a lift with Paul, my boss. When this hill appeared before us, he said, “Ah! There’s the chicken! I always look forward to seeing the chicken.”

I was startled. “I always thought it looked like a chicken too! I never mentioned it.”

“Well, Nat and Katie knew about it,” Paul said, naming the two work colleagues Jamie and I replaced on this Shepparton job. “Katie always said, ‘Have you seen the chicken yet? You know you’re halfway to Shepp when you see the chicken.’ ”

I was quite pleased. So I wasn’t the only one.

The next week, Jamie was driving me up.

“Look,” I pointed. “There’s the chicken.”

“What?!” Jamie said. “Have we talked about this?”

“No, I talked about it with Paul last week. Every week I’ve been seeing this chicken and he says that he, Nat and Katie have noticed it too.”

“Well, so have I,” said Jamie. “I keep forgetting to mention it when we’re driving.”

A month later, Erin joined us on the job and was introduced to the chicken. The chicken photo on this blog entry is thanks to her efforts in the car. It’s a good farewell present.

Paul, our first aid trainer, was teaching us what happens when you call ‘000′ in an emergency.

“The first thing they ask is ‘Police, fire or ambulance?’,” he said. “Today, we’re asking for an ambulance.” He wrote ‘AMBULANCE’ on the board then marked out about six or seven dashes underneath the word.

“What’s the next thing you think they’ll ask?”

“I guess, where you are?” someone suggested.

“Right.” Next to the second dash, Paul wrote ‘PRECISE LOCATION’. “What next?”

And so we went. Very quickly, we had on the board ‘AGE’, ‘CONTACT PHONE NUMBER’, ‘CHIEF COMPLAINT’, ‘CONSCIOUS?’ and ‘BREATHING?’.

There was one more spot left.

“One more to go, guys!” Paul urged. We stared at each other in puzzlement. Silence. I racked my brain. What else do paramedics need to know? Dangers on site? Medical history?

“Come on, one more… It’s a three letter word…” Paul hinted.

The two youngest men in the room said simultaneously, “SEX!”

“Correct!”

There are two weeks to go before I leave for Cambridge. After a few days of moping, at mid-morning on Friday, I decided to be cheerful. Then, at 5 PM, I realised that this was for real — I had to say goodbye to people I care about. It was harder than I expected.

I am about five hours of work away from finishing my dispute resolution essay. It will be a relief when it’s done. I think it will turn out all right too. I expected it to be sub-standard, given my rush, but I think it’ll be fine. I didn’t do any work on it Monday to Friday this week. I needed a break; the topic was saturating me. The break seems to have worked.

I’ve been having dreams that reflect my state of mind so accurately that if I was living a novel or a movie, I’d mock it for being contrived. A week ago, I dreamed that I was on a spaceship to Mars. I was leaving my family and friends behind to join the colony.

On Mars, we landed in a tall dome, the first in a series of them. The roof was blue like the sky, the buildings were rectangular and single blocks of bright colour. There was only one street and it stretched ahead of me. I fought my way through the crowd of colonisers and joined a queue to use one of four internet computer terminals. Come to think of it, it was a lot like the internet terminal at Singapore Airport.

I eventually got my turn at the computer. I had only 15 minutes. I tried to type an email to tell my family and friends that I missed them. For some reason, I had trouble typing — and someone kept moving my mouse. Like in the movies, just as the timer counted down the final seconds, I fought the invisible mouse-pusher to get the cursor onto the ’send’ button.

I don’t know if I got to send the email.

I had another dream a few days later. I dreamed I was sitting at a desk. It looked like a desk in a pod like at work. I was working on something, then before I knew it, some people had come around and taken away my computer. Then I saw pinned to my pod wall my university timetable. I started panicking when I realised that I had already missed two classes today. I had forgotten that I was a student again.

This is one of the most creative music video clips I’ve seen. There are four men doing a choreographed routine on eight treadmills. Go watch it! OK Go – Here It Goes Again.

My friends know of my obsession with Venn diagrams. I have found someone who is like me — see indexed.