Old Musings - August 2002

Once the plane had landed, and I passed through (yet another) security check, I was feeling a bit peckish. This was a good sign - during the first leg of the flight I was feeling very poorly and had decided not to eat anything on the second leg to give my tummy a chance to recover from all the cheese I gobbled up in the lounge in Sydney. (Trust me, if I say I ate a lot of cheese, you can be sure that I ate a LOT of cheese). So I headed off to the British Airways lounge and demanded that they let me in. There I managed to down some good old cornflakes and marmite on toast. I exercised a lot of self-control and avoided all those yummy chocolate pastries, biscuits and fruit to make sure I didn't upset my poor little tummy again.

Anyway, after stealing plenty of stuff from the British Airways lounge, I jumped on the the plane that would eventually take me to Paris. There was one point in during the flight where you could see Dover and Calais at the same time, which was pretty cool.

Despite queuing on the runway for twenty minutes in London, the plane landed on schedule at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. From there, a (relatively) quick bus ride to Gare Montparnasse in the south of Paris had me standing outside my hotel. Finally.

It is currently twelve minutes to eleven (pm). I am approximately 10,000 feet above mean sea level, travelling some 900-odd kilometres per hour (15 kilometres per minute, 250 metres per second, 10 meters for every click on the keyboard). I'm not sure exactly where I am - all I know is that it isn't Australia, and that it isn't Bangkok. A description of "Somewhere in between" will have to suffice for now.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I am on an aeroplane. Destination Paris via London via Bangkok via Sydney ex Wollongong. This may come as a shock to you as I have not mentioned this in earlier mentionings. This would be due to the fact that I did not know of this until 60 hours ago.  You wouldn't believe how much can happen in a couple of days! 

Since being told Wednesday morning, I have been rushing around like mad, trying to get everything in order. Work wants me to pop over and help out two of our French labs getting some of our gear working. Those in-the-know were unavailable, and I ended up drawing the short straw. But I aint complaining! 

My trip started this morning and will last some 24+ hours. I can't really complain with how it was started, after all what is better than a stretched limp? The limo service, who also operate a shuttle service, sometimes used their limos when they run out of vans. This means that even though you are travelling in style, you are travelling in style with strangers. I had the fortune of sharing the limo with two Asian gentlemen. From their rather broken English, and my self-taught Chinese ("I'll have a 21 and two 53's please"), I figured out that they were two Chinese seamen who were returning home.

Once I arrived at the airport, I picked up my tickets (Like I said, this was done in a rush - the travel agent had to courier the tickets to the airport) and checked-in. Luckily an air traffic controller's strike was ruled illegal, so I didn't have to worry about being stuck at the airport for hours on end. But, if it did come to that, then I am sure that I could have survived a couple of days in Qantas' business class lounge. :) Work is *really* nice when they send you on big trips. Business class all the way, baby!

So, anyway, the rest of the trip over was pretty uneventful. I managed to get 5 hours of sleep between Bangkok and London, so I wasn't feeling as shattered as I thought I was going to be.

We arrived at London ahead of schedule, but unfortunately traffic control made us circle for some 20 minutes before landing. It wasn't too bad - we kept on circling and I ended up spotting the Millennium dome (and that big ferris wheel thing), Buckingham Palace,  Westminster Abbey / Big Ben, Hyde Park and that river in the title sequence from East Enders ;)

Once we were finally granted permission to land, we landed. The cool thing was that as we landed, we went past a British Airways hangar and it just happened to have two Concordes parked outside. Cool.

OK, technically speaking we are now into the next day, so the rest of this story will have to go in another section :)



Btw - fridge delivered a while ago. I thought that I had already updated the web, but it doesn't look like it after all. Oh well, that is just something that you will have to wait for until I get back ;) 

The Iceman chargeth

I forgot to mention - had a repair dude come in to see if the fridge could be re-incarnated but alas, this was not the case. He was here for all of 13 minutes - $45 dollars. Ouch! (Looks like I am in the wrong industry! Maybe a career change is in order?)

Anyway, I went into town and after a lot of struggling finally managed to get a new fridge ordered - kind of. (It's a long story involving duplicate product entries, but hopefully the store will be placing an order for the fridge on Monday when F&P open their sales office)

Pop goes the Soda

This weekend I finally decided to get rid of my antique can collection. I have been collecting my softdrink (a.k.a. Pop, Soda, Carbonated Beverage) cans for a year now, and they were taking up a bit too much space. But before throwing them away (read - recycling) I thought that it was important to record the event for future generations.

See here for all the scary details.

The Iceman cometh

And so it came unto pass that on this day of our Lord, a flat member beloved by many, passed over into the here-after. No longer will our drinks seem quite as cold, or our fruit quit so crisp. We shall forever mourn the loss of Mr. Fisher and Paykel,  holder of drinks to some, cooler of ice-cream to others, but most important of all - freezer of meats for us all.

Farewell, F&P. We shall miss you dearly.

The weather
It rained on the 24th of July. 

To the untrained eye, this may appear to be a statement of little importance, but it actually marked the end of a 34 day dry spell. I believe that this was the second longest dry spell recorded since records began in 1870.

Hey - the Ozzies made a big deal out of it.

Whale of a time

I've been working long hours recently, so I decided to take some time off in lieu and have a long weekend. To make things extra special, I even went out and hired a car. There were a number of things I wanted to do down in Shellharbour (like shopping - I now have 5 bean bags!) which is just too far to bike - especially considering that my bike is still in the shop being fixed - and this seemed like the perfect time.

Well, blow me down! I heard on the radio that a couple of whales were sighted off the coast of Kiama, so I rushed down and took a gander. When I got there, I was treated to two the sight of two Southern Right whales doing...  doing... well, I'm not sure what they were doing. I think that they must have been play fighting.

A couple of days later, three whales were spotted in Sydney harbour - a very rare occurrence indeed. The TV news reported that two of them were doing 'what comes naturally' apparently. It is my guess that these two were the ones that I saw down in Kiama.  

Make you think doesn't it? Hmmm... oh...  Eeuuw!

Looks like I picked the 'Right' weekend to hire a car! (Ah, I kill myself sometimes!)

Rebel without a clue

I have come to the conclusion that either Australians have problems with English or that they have some very silly laws.

Some of their signs are rather.. er.. interesting.

Birthday Celebrations

Every now and then, I step outside of my domicile and actually participate in some social interaction with the locals. It would appear that the humanoid lifeforms around here place some significance on the number of times they have revolved around a ball of glowing gas, which they have nicknamed the 'Sun'.

If I understand their traditions correctly, then they honour their deity, the big glowing ball of gas, by creating primitive miniatures of the 'Sun' and go on to sacrifice these models by extinguishing them.

What an odd species. 

Random Stuff

Oh, yeah - I took some photos of like, stuff. 

Web Update
Photos - more Dumb Ozzies!
Photos - Lin Yin's birthday party
Photos - Thar be whales!
Photos - etc, etc, etc.. (See if you can find all the new photos!)

Old ramblings archived away