Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza

It's been quite an emotional couple of days for me and Tim. Over the weekend we had our going-away party, said goodbye to many friends and family, and started making peace with the fact that we're about to leave the city where we met, fell in love, and called home for nearly five years.

And then we found out our visas are delayed. So far it sounds like just a week, but it's hard to know for sure.

Major bummer, as we'd been hoping to arrive in Sydney in time for Australia Day, and we'd joined a Sydney Vegetarian group on Meetup.com who are having a party a few days later that we'll now have to miss. Not to mention, it would have been nice to have an extra week with Tony Danza.

Early this morning, through torrential downpours, we drove our little guy down to Pet Express, the company that has been helping us through our pet immigration process. I can't recommend their services more highly. Throughout, they were responsive, on top of the myriad of paperwork and vet appointments required of us, friendly, and reassuring.

We bid Tony a tearful goodbye and earlier this evening, his plane shipped off to Australia. He'll arrive tomorrow at his quarantine facility, where he'll spend the next ten or so weeks. It was so hard not being able to tell him that we'd be coming back for him. We're allowed to visit when we get there, though the facility is a bit far outside the city and not public transit accessible so it will be tough.

We were able to take our minds off of him today though, as it was quite the busy day of shipping off all our worldly possessions to Sydney, and handing off the rest to Goodwill, SCRAP, and various friends. The upside of our delay in travel is that I can take a bit of a breather tomorrow before repainting and cleaning the apartment. Whew!

And bonus: we'll have a chance to check out this weekend's emergency vegan bake sale to benefit Haiti. Bonus link for you: Food for Life, a great organization that is bringing vegan meals to Haiti. I highly recommend donating to them. I suppose in that context, saying goodbye to your cat and being delayed a week to Australia is not the biggest tragedy in the world.