You're smiling? You must be new here.

I had my first day at work today and like all first days, it was quite overwhelming.

K kindly accompanied me through Grand Central Station and up to my office building. I would have found it on my own eventually (you reckon?!), but faffing around with my ridiculous sense of direction was not something I needed to do today.

After a delicious coffee with K, I arrived in my building early and got through the building security process just fine. Safely inside my new office, I was taken through the usual inductions and I met so many people. In typical post-30th birthday fashion, names went into my head and immediately whizzed out again. Hopeless. I was trying to make sense of acronyms galore, who's who in the zoo, and generally where my role fits in the greater scheme of things. Everybody at the office was understandably patient about this of course, as they've all been through it before - but everyone I met today seemed lovely and helpful and I'm looking forward to getting to know them better.

Lunch time was rather administrative, in the sense that I got my US banking business sorted, followed by a ridiculously large shop for all manner of toiletries to furnish the main bathroom in the new apartment. We're moving in tomorrow and I wanted to make sure that the main bathroom (that I will be using) has all the usual stuff in it so I'm not caught short on Wednesday morning when I have to get ready for work. I'm such a nerd, I know. The poor man at the store probably thought I was stocking up for the end of the world or something but there was no point explaining. I bought a red hairdryer. With a retractable cord. Hands down, the best purchase of the day.

My brain is tired now, so fortunately the most strenuous thing I'll have to do tonight is to help K pack the last of our moving boxes. As long as I don't have to think as part of that process, we should be fine.

It's really cool to think that by this time tomorrow, we'll have moved in to our new bachelorette pad. I reckon it will take us some time to shift things around into a layout that we're happy with, but I know it's going to be fun. I've told K that I'm going to have a crack at growing herbs on our kitchen windowsill. She didn't laugh at me, but I don't think she really took me too seriously either. Perhaps she was just flashing back to the last houseplant that we managed to kill with kindness. We named him Dennis and he lived in our bathroom. We figured that if we named him, we'd be more inclined to take better care of him but in the end, we loved the poor thing to death. It's been a couple of years since the demise of Dennis, and I'm totally ready to tackle some kitchen herb cultivation. Wish me luck.

I know this is only the end of Day 1, but I reckon it's going to be a really fun couple of months ahead - at work and at play.