Not to sound overdramatic or anything, but it's the end of an era for me. The last few boxes are being taken down to the bins or cars now, and after I leave at 5:30 for dinner with the in-laws, I'll never be commuting to this office again. This is undeniably a good thing because it means I won't have to pay for a monthly subway pass or spend one and a half to two hours a day on the train depending on the MBTA's incompetence, and I will never have to risk my life on the Harvard Vanguard building lifts again, but it's strange to think that work as I know it is going to change so much.

I'm going to have to change the way I have lunch as well - I've just been to the sushi place across the road for the last time and handed them $10 for lunch (they'll be losing about $100 a month from our absence), promising to come back occasionally when we're around. It was all a bit tragic. Now I'll either have lunch between home and the new office building where we're going to hold occasional meetings, or just buy up some extra lunch resources from the supermarket.

One of the biggest attractions of moving away is never being bothered by the clipboard attackers again. I performed one of my most uninspired escapes from them ever at the start of the week, where I couldn't think of any way to avoid the girl grinning welcomingly at me and had to resort to literally using the "Look over there!" and running away trick. But yesterday, with one of them armed with a table blocking the entire pavement, I decided to brave pretending to talk in ludicrously exaggerated Doric. It's something that I'm quite shaky on, never having spoken it before I realized it could be used for people's fascination and amusement here, but seeing as nobody understands it anyway I knew I could be safe making words up if the situation demanded it. And though I felt I stumbled a bit, I've never seen anyone so pleased to be turned away before - she was grinning in fascination at talking to a 'genuine' Scot, and I managed to refuse and continue while still making her feel good about it. The disadvantage being that I've just confirmed her natural belief that everyone in Scotland talks like the Immortal Highlander.

Whitney's parents stayed with us last night - I had gone to bed early because of the unusual physical exertion throughout the week, and surprisingly slept right through their entire arrival in the middle of the night. I then woke up at 6am while everyone else in the flat was still fast asleep from the journey over or illness, so this morning I had to creep like a ghost around three inert snoozebags. And I'll have to get up as early tomorrow as well, because Whitney's university had the bright idea of holding the formal graduation at quarter to nine in the morning, possibly as some sort of last test to make up for having no exams.

I'd be working from home from now on, but this weekend I plan on dying from exhaustion.

The biggest moving-out effort for us so far happened yesterday. At the moment we're all even more annoyed with the people who own the building than usual, because after years of having the lifts in a near-fatal state, they finally decided to shut one of them down and repair it after one of the building managers happened to experience it for herself last week. That meant that one of the two already slow lifts has been out of service all week, and we've had to wait until everyone else has gone home before we have a hope of moving everything down with any reasonable speed. At the moment, the working lift has had all its wall and ceiling panelling removed and has dreary grey blankets draped around it, making it look like something out of a morgue. But I have to survive just two more trips on it before I no longer have to deal with it daily.

I started off yesterday crawling under the desks cutting ethernet cable ties apart with a small pair of pink paper scissors, and things just got more physically stressful from there. After organizing the man who turned up to take our old textbooks, we sorted miscellany into boxes, and at 6pm started taking them down from the office to a couple of jeeps that friends happened to own. Along with items that would have been easy enough to move if there hadn't been so many of them, we had to take a treadmill and a gigantically heavy medical table that's served as the boss's desk down to the car park. And while two of us were away at people's houses unloading things, the other two stayed behind to cart more things that nobody wanted down to the compactor enclosure. I had thought it was frightening enough during the day, but as I unlocked it last night I realized just how much it looks like Jacob's Ladder - the vague giant machine takes up most of the chain-linked and barbed-wired area, and around it are the remains of crutches and obviously possessed wheelchairs.

After being driven back home that evening with most of the contents of my desk (thankfully, my possessions in the office just amounted to one boxful and an extra monitor), I've been working on just a laptop today - I kept on looking up to my right and wondering why I could see the conference room instead of Eclipse. We also realized that we had to get rid of the giant plant standing in the corner - my own suggested plan was to just go out into the park outside, dig it a small hole and leave it there, and in the end, we went with a very similar plan. While most of the fourth floor was at lunch, the lobby gained a new plant that suspiciously doesn't quite match the others around it. I hope that nobody notices before we leave tomorrow - after all, how are you meant to camouflage a tree?