July, for me, was a mixed month. I have some exciting news to report, some mundane news, as well as the bad.
I also re-filled my "VISA Fund Account" to $2,000 and smooshed it together with my fully-funded "Pre Trip Cash" fund. I re-named my formerly "VISA Fund" to "DEBIT", as this is the account that my ING Direct Debit card withdraws from.
As well, in other good news, I have booked one of my flights! I have booked a flight with British Airways (via Flight Centre) from Toronto to London on September 23rd, 2008, for the Grand total of just under $650. It's not the best price, but the best I could find with no stopovers and with a carrier I recognized.
I feel very happy indeed that my trip is fully funded, but I still have the same drive to add more to it. I am hoping that in the next 4 weeks I can add another $2,000 to my Savings fund.
I am also really proud of the fact that while I saved money for both my VISA, plane ticket and pre-trip spending, I have yet to drain any of those accounts. I will probably put the $4,000 into my savings account if I don't use them by the time I leave.
In more mundane news, I am feeling a stange mix of panic and exhileration regarding the trip. Packing is moving along slowly, at about the rate of 1 or 2 boxes a day. I have come to the realization that I own a large amount of fragile items. All of the bubble-wraping, newspaper-stuffing and itemizing is very exhausting.
I am rather proud of all of the work that I am doing regarding the packing. For each box, I am photographing and listing all of the items inside. I am keeping these in a file on my external hard-drive, as well as on a sheet of paper both inside and taped to the outside of the box. Each box is labelled with its name and a number, such as "KITCHEN BOX 1" or "PICTURE FRAMES 3" so that I can clearly know what is inside.
I wouldn't have bothered to do all this if I was just moving from one place directly to another. But given that these boxes may stay sealed for 2 years, I want to know what is inside. That way, if I decide that I need/want something, I'll be able to ask someone back home to get XX item from XX box.
Either way, the packing is plugging along, and I'm looking forward to having next week off and finishing the packing.
I also have still yet to book my flight from Calgary to Toronto, but I'm not as concerned about this one. There are many carriers that fly this route multiple times a day and within the same price range. This will probably be booked within the week.
And.... for the bad news. My attempts at riding my computer of Vista has failed. My Dad and I managed to take Vista off and put Windows XP on, but once we loaded XP on, we found out that none of the drivers for my laptop were capable of functioning with XP. Which basically means, that while I could put XP on the computer, my speakers, video, webcam and INTERNET did not work. So... alas, I had to put Vista back on. This time, though, I've done (so many...) backups over the past 2 days. Hopefully this time it won't freak out on me.
However, I'm now in the process of loading all my CD's and other stored music back onto Itunes... It's a very long process and I'm only about 3/4 of the way through it.
So that's the news from this front. I'll still be here, packing and loading, until the first week of September.