Starting a blog post is pretty difficult, isn't it? The diary equivalent is "Dear diary", so does this start with "Dear Blog"? I've been similarly uncreative with the title unfortunately.

Anyway, here goes.

It's now just over 3 weeks until I go to Boston and I'm pretty raring to go. My chums have asked me if I'm nervous, so I rattled off a little story that I heard in first year chemistry - Walking on hot coals. Apparently, the African tradition of walking across hot coals is possible to complete without burning your feet. How? If your feet are wet, the coals cause the water to flash boil and the steam, being a rubbish conductor of heat, cushions your feet from the intensity of the heat. The problem: you're not allowed to manually wet your feet before you go across. So the only way to have wet feet is to sweat. What makes you sweat? Nerves. The moment you become so confident that you don't sweat, you burn your feet. So yes, a little nervous, but if I was totally dispassionate then there'd be something wrong, right?

I'm confident in my ability to make an impact, but I just hope I can adjust to working in lbs/feet/psi instead of our wonderful SI units! I suppose it wouldn't be fun if it was easy, right?

My 22nd birthday happens while I'm over there: the 21st of July. So my sister gave me an early present- an envelope with $51 in it. Holding the cash in my hand has made this whole thing real and I'm getting pretty excited! Now I just have to focus on the logistics: getting my kilt AND a suit on the plane without overdoing the luggage, getting my 8inch laptop over there, and working out every facet of online banking so I don't have to make international calls to juggle cash..!

I'll leave it here for now.