Goodbye Australia, hello America

Well that’s it. I’ve got no time left for anything. I awoke at 4am - not from excitement, but from sheer panic I still had so much to do. I had half a room left to clean, the house to clean, ship my puppet order and pick up some last minute items, and I still have emails to reply to and admin stuff for the site to fix up. After working til 9am on cleaning my room (yeah, who would have thought I’d have that much crap in there… although it’s kind of fun to clean that late at night, almost cathartic), I’m rather a stressed out person. Which is a pity, because I had really hoped to spend today relaxing.

New readers are probably not aware: but I don’t travel well. I get panic attacks whilst away, but made good progress last year attending the UNIMA 2008 festival. So it’s especially not good to be stressed out before I leave.

The good news is that predominantly the stuff that I’m panicking about can be left for when I get back, or don’t really have to do but would like to (ie. I had to make a mermaid shadow puppet for the exhibition at the National Puppetry Festival, but haven’t added my special attachment so I can add rods to it. Seeing as how it probably won’t require rods to be placed on display, I’d still like to do it as it’s not the ‘finished’ puppet otherwise)… but many things, such as my emails, I’ve been putting off for days and even weeks in some cases. I really wish I had an automatic AI machine to reply to emails for me.

At any rate, this is the last you’ll hear from me for about 2 days. I leave tomorrow, and will arrive on the 11th July (US time, seeing as how I manage to leave and arrive on the same day and the flights are about 24 hours in total). Please be aware that once I arrive, I will be blogging every day - so for two weeks you’ll get lots of updates.

Don’t forget, you can keep up to date with my itinerary here, and find out what shows I’ll be seeing and workshops I’ll be doing. If you’re not sure whether you’d like to follow along, feel free to check out my liveblog of UNIMA 2008, starting with the wrap up here, and a list of festival reviews and ratings here. (Please note: URLs on some posts may be out of date. However, if you return to either one of the above links and click from there, you’ll be fine) This is a good time to read, or re-read, the fun of the last puppet festival I went to - two weeks of puppetry goodness!

Want more? Help build a puppet!