Tried to eat less than too much tonight by only having a starter, but they made me have a dessert and so once again i am overfull. At least it’s not actually painful this time.
I came in to see whether I could put a comments feature into my blog, but have found it’s 36 mins till the california pizza kitchen closes. I’m unable to decide whether I’m hungry, but reason that a fried shrimp and 2 bbq ribs is too little fuel for the day’s wine-tasting I’ve just put myself through, so no blog entry for you just yet.
I’m dining American this morning. just ordered pig in a blanket and root-beer float. I think I’m going to get something like toad-in-the-hole and dandelion-and-burdock with ice-cream in it…
Well a pig in a blanket is more like a skinny sausage wrapped in a scotch pancake… root beer float was great… had two leave 1/3 of the food to avoid pain. Good thing i walked in to town today…
This actually happened on Monday, though its full impact wasn’t appreciated until today. Monday was one of those days where everything you touch breaks. We were having trouble with our target board (=the piece of computer hardware we’re working on) so we borrowed the other one in the company (the only other one in existence, in fact) to see whether the trouble was common to both or specific to ours. And fried it. By the time it made it across the office and was plugged in to my computer, part of the CPU had become a fairly high-resistance piece of wire rather than a highly sophisticated semiconductor device. This means I can’t have the board I was going to take to the UK, as it is the only one in existence. This means if I was to come home now, I’d sit twiddling my thumbs for a few weeks, then have to come back to the US to continue. This is BAD. As a consequence, and once again at only a few days’ notice, I’m staying in the states for another couple of weeks. I’m going to have some serious grovelling to do when I get back to the patient souls who have been watering my plants, looking after my cars, and waiting patiently for a tango lesson.
Went downtown last night, it being the last Tuesday I would be in town. Some of the local salsa scene go out on a Tuesday but not Thur, so I thought I’d get a last dance and say goodbye. I even took my camera.
They were SO shy, they closed Ruby’s and were nowhere to be seen!
I want curry.
Proper curry.
Like you get in England.
That is all.
The Grand Canyon trip didn’t work out at all as planned. But after the plans had changed twice I’d already let go of the idea of the trip I’d had in mind. In the end it was a flight to vegas, 6 hours’ messing around there, then a helicopter ride “be one of the privileged few to have ventured below the rim of the canyon” and an evening in a genu-wine western ranch.
The helicopter ride was great, you got to wear mickey-mouse headphones with a cool boom mic. Our combination pilot/tourguide/comedian explained a few of the bits and bobs around the landscape and we buzzed the Hoover Dam and on the the Grand Canyon. It was pretty impressive. We were shown the point where some cowards got out of Powell’s boat (here, click “August 28″) clambered up the side of the canyon and got murdered, only a couple of days before they rest of the party came to the end of their three-month ordeal shooting the rapids.
At this point, they mentioned they weren’t allowed to go into the canyon proper, so we turned south to the West Ranch “a real working ranch” for some cowboy hospitality. A pleasant evening was spent in the company of a whole bunch of brits, a couple of Danes, an Indian (from india) and some merkins. A bit of horseriding, a hearty meal a lot like you might get in yorkshire, and a campfire singsong, then down the 7-mile rough track to the main road, and the 2 hour trek home.
So technically, I’ve been to the Grand Canyon At Sunset but it doesn’t really count as the canyon’s 10 miles wide and the part I saw was only 2, and sunset happened while I was in a ranch on the south rim … but miles from the actual rim.
Shucks, looks like I’ll have to come out again!
P.S. Vishwanadh figured out that my friend from Sunday morning was probably a Lady Of The Night. I had detected a sense of general defeat and bitterness from her, but I just figured that was what living in vegas did for you. It’s probably an indictment of Essex that I was quite used to getting that kind of vibe from girls there…
I’m writing this sitting outside the Tropicana hotel waiting for the airport bus. I got up at 5 to allow a margin for slacking but there was none so i have time to watch the adverts for the Eagles gig and Phil Collins’ farewell tour on the side of the MGM building… A pair of red boot-cut hipsters just strode over on 3 inch heels and parked next to me. The girl in them announced from behind mascara curtains that she’d just blown $400 in 10 minutes waiting for her friends to pick her up. I said something sympathetic.
“you’re from England right?”
“right! Can you tell?”
“where’s London?”
“?”
“where’s London? is that in england?”
i can’t complain really. If someone told me they were from Bucharest i would have to guess where they were from. But you like to think that England has a more significant place in the mind of the American than somewhere like finland (ba-dum).
I gave her a hot tip not to call a scotchman* English, and the conversation stumbled on a while, fell over, twitched a little and finally lay still.
* i KNOW
My grand canyon trip has not so far turned out to be quite the spiritual voyage i had hoped for… rather than a 500 mile drive through the desert we flew to vegas, where i kicked myself for not knowing what type and quantity of casino chips i should pick up for the ppl back home. Not having intended to come to vegas i was ill prepared for gambling, not having a clue how to play any card game… so we wandered around our hotel/casino and the three adjoining it. Tropicana, MGM, New York New York, and Excalibur in case you’re interested.
We wandered into the kiddies’ arcade and hit the JACKPOT on the Big Dozer game (or something) a game where you had to time the rolling of your coin … rhythm and timing are particular fortés of mine (ladies…) … 250 prize tickets emerged from the machine and for 15 seconds i was the big hero of every 8-year old in the place, plus one Dad who figured if this pansy Limey could do it, why shouldn’t he…?
Faced with the choice of 6 shoddily-constructed plush mascots, or one sizeable but sub-standard rubber ball, I gave the tickets to a little girl whose big sister had a whole
bucketful and we made out way upstairs to where the big people played.
My webmail service broke the other week. I’d sign in then get a few menu options and an error message instead of an inbox. I’d heard that they were upgrading a whole bunch of stuff so I thought I’d give it a week for the problems to work themselves through. I found I could read my messages but not send via Outlook, and that I could send - though not read - through web mail. Less than ideal, but good enough for a temporary fix.
After a couple of weeks the problem was still there so I emailed the helpdesk and asked if it was something they knew about or something I had done… I got a polite message within a day or so saying that the problem was due to rules I had got set up. They weren’t 100% compatible from the old version to the new version. All I had to do was delete my existing rules and I’d be fine.
Unfortunately I had 526 rules and the web interface only allows you to delete one at a time. 3 Hours later (I was doing other stuff at the same time, don’t worry) I had no rules and an inbox again!
I considered getting upset about this. But then I realised, I pay £12 a year for web hosting, email, all configurable by me, and a prompt courteous person on the end of an email who is always helpful or at least patient. By contrast, my current project at work has spend many tens of thousands of dollars on an “embedded linux” product and we have yet to get civility let alone utility out of them.