Tales of a Trainee American

It's suddenly dawning on me, this moving to America thing. The timetable is a little on the tight side - but should just about be manageable.

The absolute hard date to be gone in 14 September. This is when the lease runs out on our flat, and it isn't being renewed. I'm not convinced I could negotiate an extra month - the agents don't seem to be those sort of people.

Anyway, my interview at the US Embassy is on 1 August, at 8am. It may be early, but it's better than a late time - I won't be held up, I should go through quite quickly. As far as I'm aware, they say there and then if you've been successful or not. So I can start planning the move from then on. 6 weeks... not much, but movers are used to shorter lead-times and we've not got much we're moving (our bed being the only really big thing to be going).

One other thing that I will be leaving behind is my current email address. It's tied to my broadband service, and it'll go away when I cancel. So I have to change my email address in a few places. (Actually most places I couldn't care less - minimises spam - but important places like eBay, PayPal, LJ, and regularly-used forums need to get updated.)

I guess the point of the above is to nofity people of my new email address: nrtreeby AT <email service provided by a well-known search engine whose name begins with "g">

So Tuesday, we drove into town to take Aliza to the US Embassy for her registration there. This entailed a trip into Mayor Ken's Dreaded Congestion Charge Zone. I paid up the night before, and requested my receipt be sent by email. I expected (as these things often do) my email to arrive pretty much instantaneously, but it didn't - or so I thought.

A couple of days later, I poked my nose into my Junk Mail folder. Very little gets by the BT Internet spam filters, so I get maybe 1 or 2 junk emails per day - and most of it is genuine junk. Except that, nestled in there, was the receipt I'd requested for my Congestion Charge payment. How appropriate.