So, uh, I’m moving to South Africa in four days.

I know.

And I’m completely unprepared.

Guys, I know.

The (abridged) backstory: my husband (Al) works for a great company that has a Global Rotation Program that allows employees to work in two of the company’s many offices for six to nine months each.  Al applied last year and was accepted (hooray!) and we decided to do nine months in Joburg and nine months in London. I’ve written about the decision process and my feelings on it here.  Suffice it to say it was sort of a fraught decision but I’m feeling good about the move and even better about my decision to quit my terrible, toxic law firm job and become a professional writer.

Anyway.  It’s really happening now.  Stuff is getting real.  But as I sit here, four days out from boarding a flight to Johannesburg, I feel woefully unprepared for this move.  I haven’t packed half of our appliances, I have a load of laundry that needs doing, I don’t have enough boxes for the rest of our stuff (and why do we have so many novelty hats?), and I ran out of bubble-wrap before I could wrap up all of our wine glasses and ceramic mugs.  Oy.

I couldn’t really pack before this because I was busy suffering through a comically terrible last two weeks of work and I had little time for anything other than crying in my office.  See, Al left for Joburg two weeks ago but I had decided to stay on a couple extra weeks at work because of a big filing deadline for one of my cases.  So there I was, in DC, working bonkers hours to try to get this brief filed, when I started feeling sick.  Really sick.  I had a terrible headache, body aches, joint pain, chills, fever, and sharp abdominal pains, and I completely lost my appetite. I went to the doctor and — long story short! — I had typhoid fever.

Yup.

I’ll spare you the gory details but my last week of work was truly hellish, and not just because I was dealing with a disease that you contract from eating or drinking something contaminated with human feces.  Oh, wait, I guess I didn’t spare you the gory details at all. Well… real talk. Deal with it.

The point is, I don’t recommend working at a law firm. It’s TERRIBLE. Worse than typhoid! And I should know!  Actually, typhoid fever is a pretty useful metric for deciding on the horribleness of any given thing. For example: Drinking a frosty eggnog with rum > watching a baseball game with beer > getting a stubbed toe > watching a baseball game with no beer > having typhoid fever > working at a law firm.

Anyway, I’m better now (thank you, Cipro) and I really do need to pack.