I'm in LA with sister Teresa, enjoying her friends and coffeehouse connections.
I'm getting ready to leave for my big trip to New Zealand. I’ll be there for somewhere between 7 months and a year, so anticipating departure is an emotional trip.

If you'd like to keep in touch, here is some information:

You can send “real mail” through the BUNAC office in Aukland. Forwarding takes time, so if you have something urgent to tell me e-mail is a better option.

The forwarding address:

Erica K. Ritter
C/O IEP – Work NZ, PO Box 1786
Shortland Street, Aukland, New Zealand.

(they recommend underlining the last name, to reduce confusion when they’re holding or forwarding mail.)

I have phone numbers for the organisations, but I don't think they want to get calls for me except in extreme emergency. But if you want to know how their programs work, they might be useful to you. The BUNAC office in Connecticut is 1-800-462-8622, and their partner in NZ, IEP Aukland is (011 64) 9 366-6255.

The time difference is 16 hrs ahead of the East Coast, 19 hours ahead of the West Coast. Or you can think of it as five hours behind PST. For example, at midnight in Oregon, we’d be settling into our evening in New Zealand around 7 pm. Obviously, calling from your afternoon or evening is a better idea – Sunday noon on on the Pacific Coast is a snappy 7 am of Aukland’s Monday.

Riding the last few weeks into this new adventure, everything feels more intense. Which is overall a good thing, although experiencing things this thoroughly can be exhausting, and diminishes my energy for planning or working on other things. The "normal" things that I'm experiencing intensely include appreciation of the good things, like freinds, family, and American foods, and fear/distress/doubt about the massive uncertainties I'm throwing myself up against.

There was also the very weird sensation of being “intensely” sleepy, foggy, and sated after a good meal – “vaguely blank” is not a state of mind that I would have imagined could be experienced intensely, but there it was.

My sister Teresa has a marvelous technique with my outbursts, which is better experienced than described -- it's basically a combination of generous laughter, and/or taking me seriously and sympathetically for just as long as it takes her to get distracted by something else. Which allows me to vent and then get distracted myself, a perfect combination.