Well it's been a busy couple of weeks I can tell you. I've been putting together the final draft of the paper for the AAAI-CAAW workshop I've been invited to. That required lots of work starting us off in the direction we were hoping to take the blog study in. Since the paper is so short, it's a really brief skim through just some aspects of the thesis, but it will be interesting to turn it into a talk. I've also been trying to sort out funding for flights to Stanford (a few days in San Fran sounds like a nice trip sweetener). Do we want the hassle of changing planes? Or do we want a long haul direct flight leaving at 6am?

Most importantly, I've been putting together my research proposal for a postdoctoral fellowship in Australia. There's quite a lot to it with all the form filling, so I'm very busy at the moment. After that it does take some (many) months to hear back and it wouldn't even start until 2007. So I'm still looking to get me some work in Australia in the meantime because we are getting keener and keener to go by the days. We've been looking at property, watching shows about relocating to Australia, it is definitely for us. The sooner the better as far as we're concerned.

So I never got around to posting all about my upcoming plans, though I shall try to do that this week. Needless to say, a number of those plans concern Australia and our desire to move there. Wherever we go, we were always planning on leaving. So having just gotten back from a month in the States, there have been an increasing number of signs that we should definitely leave as soon as possible.

Firstly, after a very long day of travelling...heavy planes, bad weather, diversions, delays, missed flights...we got home to find that we had been black balled by the only takeout that we wanted. Pizza hut had decided, just three days earlier, that they were no longer going to deliver to our area, which I would like to point out is in the middle of the city. To cap off several days of further frustrating disappointments (people/services being withdrawn, stores no longer stocking anything), I foolishly joked that our grocery stores would be shut when we went shopping yesterday.

Stupid, stupid boy.

The main store we go to, thought being roughly only a year old, was indeed closed for refurbishments, with no date for re-opening. If you believe in these things, then there are few clearer ways for the city of my birth to tell me I'm no longer wanted.