how you rock | birthday | why dosk rocks | four way junctions
It's my birthday.
(Okay, I've said it, now put the Gollum-Sme-whatsit voice away. He's the reason why I only read one and a half books of the Lord of the Rings)
What I want to say is that you people can bend reality with your own will via the mechanism of livejournal. The proof is very simple; everyone who answered Monday's post hoped for a better Tuesday on the brane-front. What I got was a day that barely rated a 1 (out of 10) headache-wise and was pretty nifty. I went to "work", did stuff, had career and interview advice from my boss (he has got a request for a reference and I interview on Thursday, panel-style but you can't have everything) and then went swimming for the first time in recent memory. Okay, my leg went twang, but that was me being out of shape.
Secondly, the_dosk rocks more than any other brother in the universe.
I picked up the phone and got happy birthday sung at me even though he had had one of the worse days I could imagine. Resits at doskland university prevent him being home until tomorrow. Doskland U has the most... inept*... exam organisation body in the history of ineptitude. Exam one in room with large mowing machines outside. Exam two in a room where the office next door was full of workmen hitting the radiator with hammers. Exam three, they did not have the wit to reschedule a couple of hours after circumstances left dosk in pretty bad condition with alleviated two and half hours into the exam, which was two and a half hours. Can we get some focused hate on these guys? Fill their cars with weasels?
Bah.
Also, reading a book review for a detailed examination of how people drive, it turns out that America has still not cottoned on to the roundabout. Number of places you can have an accident on a busy London roundabout: 16. Number of potential accidents at a four-way stop in New Jersey: 56.
Back in the midst of time, well, sixth form, I had a much beloved copy of Travel Without a Tardis (basically a location tour guide for Who fans written in the eighties by two rather dedicated American fans). This is - as I remember - what it had to say about roundabouts: "Driving along (on the left) you will eventually encounter a road sign that looks like an octopus with some of the legs removed. Do not worry; this is a fantastic British invention called the traffic roundabout and is very simple to understand..."
Seriously, I am not making it sound like h2g2, it genuinely sounded like that. It was a target book (help for people who have not been obsessed with Who pre-new-series; target books are novelizations each less than a centimetre thick and almost all written by Terrence Dicks, they were published by WHAdams and its paperback branch Target - unsurprising, huh - and I probably have about two feet of them. They have a fan-following On Target. Okay, this is a digression on a digression, I think.) So, a) Americans are scary, hell, Five Ways in Dover is scary, I don't want to know what it is like without one-way streets and b) too much information does not exist in the world of tourist guides. They also explain bed-and-breakfast and 80s coinage (back when 5p pieces were a decent size). Clearly this missed some visitors to this sceptred isle as mummyfrog once ended up with some tourists and a big bag of pre-decimal currency some time c2000.
I know there is something else I need to say. I got a birthday phone call from EQ, which was pretty nice, and makes her the second person to sing happy birthday down the phone, although she was more in tune. Not that it would surprise anybody who has met my harpsichord-playing buddy.
Feeling less fantastic today, but for some strange reason I decided that my birthday was an excellent time to deep-clean the kitchen counter. Also, I am sore post-swimming, you can't win everything.
*in spite of my computers for the inept work, I do not use that word at all lightly
(Okay, I've said it, now put the Gollum-Sme-whatsit voice away. He's the reason why I only read one and a half books of the Lord of the Rings)
What I want to say is that you people can bend reality with your own will via the mechanism of livejournal. The proof is very simple; everyone who answered Monday's post hoped for a better Tuesday on the brane-front. What I got was a day that barely rated a 1 (out of 10) headache-wise and was pretty nifty. I went to "work", did stuff, had career and interview advice from my boss (he has got a request for a reference and I interview on Thursday, panel-style but you can't have everything) and then went swimming for the first time in recent memory. Okay, my leg went twang, but that was me being out of shape.
Secondly, the_dosk rocks more than any other brother in the universe.
I picked up the phone and got happy birthday sung at me even though he had had one of the worse days I could imagine. Resits at doskland university prevent him being home until tomorrow. Doskland U has the most... inept*... exam organisation body in the history of ineptitude. Exam one in room with large mowing machines outside. Exam two in a room where the office next door was full of workmen hitting the radiator with hammers. Exam three, they did not have the wit to reschedule a couple of hours after circumstances left dosk in pretty bad condition with alleviated two and half hours into the exam, which was two and a half hours. Can we get some focused hate on these guys? Fill their cars with weasels?
Bah.
Also, reading a book review for a detailed examination of how people drive, it turns out that America has still not cottoned on to the roundabout. Number of places you can have an accident on a busy London roundabout: 16. Number of potential accidents at a four-way stop in New Jersey: 56.
Back in the midst of time, well, sixth form, I had a much beloved copy of Travel Without a Tardis (basically a location tour guide for Who fans written in the eighties by two rather dedicated American fans). This is - as I remember - what it had to say about roundabouts: "Driving along (on the left) you will eventually encounter a road sign that looks like an octopus with some of the legs removed. Do not worry; this is a fantastic British invention called the traffic roundabout and is very simple to understand..."
Seriously, I am not making it sound like h2g2, it genuinely sounded like that. It was a target book (help for people who have not been obsessed with Who pre-new-series; target books are novelizations each less than a centimetre thick and almost all written by Terrence Dicks, they were published by WHAdams and its paperback branch Target - unsurprising, huh - and I probably have about two feet of them. They have a fan-following On Target. Okay, this is a digression on a digression, I think.) So, a) Americans are scary, hell, Five Ways in Dover is scary, I don't want to know what it is like without one-way streets and b) too much information does not exist in the world of tourist guides. They also explain bed-and-breakfast and 80s coinage (back when 5p pieces were a decent size). Clearly this missed some visitors to this sceptred isle as mummyfrog once ended up with some tourists and a big bag of pre-decimal currency some time c2000.
I know there is something else I need to say. I got a birthday phone call from EQ, which was pretty nice, and makes her the second person to sing happy birthday down the phone, although she was more in tune. Not that it would surprise anybody who has met my harpsichord-playing buddy.
Feeling less fantastic today, but for some strange reason I decided that my birthday was an excellent time to deep-clean the kitchen counter. Also, I am sore post-swimming, you can't win everything.
*in spite of my computers for the inept work, I do not use that word at all lightly