Yearly Archives: 2010

Filling in the gaps: How do you say “I blew a fuse” in British?

Posted on by

This post was actually written on June 5, but when they pertain to a specific date, I’m backdataing them. Also, in the tradition of protecting my family’s privacy, as usual, Internet aliases are used instead of names.

Just as I gave up on staying awake on the plane, they started raising the lights. We were less than 2 hours out of London and it was time to feed us breakfast. I don’t remember what breakfast was, just that I was thoroughly disinterested in it and wanted to be off the plane.

We landed in Heathrow without incident and walked through what I still swear were the employee entrances (lots of long skinny corridors of plan wallboard) until we were finally herded into passport control.

Passport control was a loooong line that terminated in someone asking us why we were here and when we were leaving. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I’d somehow worked myself up to it being, and by then I’m not sure if anything could have terrified me anyway. I was too tired. We collected our luggage and met up with Viv, who handed us a bag of soda and water and weird British candy and led us to the car.

Yorkie
An example of weird British candy

Because we couldn’t check into the hotel until 2, goatfiend took us back to the flat, where we enjoyed unlimited Internet, soda and snacks, a delicious breakfast bread, and wonderful wonderful naps. We were out so cold that Viv went out for a bit, returned, and had to get the neighbor with the spare key to let us in because despite the fact that the flat is 800 square feet and I was less than 5 feet from the door, neither of us heard her knocking to be let back in.

When plantnerd returned home we feasted on huge huge salads, chatted and caught up and drank tea, and then finally checked in at the hotel.

The room was nice, if small. Two beds, a bathroom larger than plantnerd’s kitchen, and a window that actually opened. We promptly went about the usual tasks of choosing beds, setting up (and paying for) internet access, and trying to figure out how to charge 2 laptops, an iPad, and 2 phones on one UK power converter.

Here’s the wrong answer: power bar. I’d packed an old 6-plug power bar from the house, figuring that we could plug that into the wall and then plug all our stuff into it. When you plug the converter-laden-powerbar into the wall, hear “FFFT!” and smell something almost exactly like gunpowder, you rethink your ingenious plan.

The right answer turned out to be twofold: borrow a second converter from the cousin, and change hotel rooms. That’s right, I said change hotel rooms. You see, everything in the UK is triple checked to make sure that it’s electronically OK to plug in, so they almost never blow a fuse or circuit breaker. When they do (as we did – none of the plugs on the desk now worked, including the TV), the hotel staff don’t know how to fix it. There’s no breaker box in the hotel room. There’s nobody on staff certified to go find the problem on a Saturday morning. The only solution was to switch us to the next hotel room down the hall… which is exactly what we did the next morning.

Above the ocean

Posted on by

10:24 pm (ET) – 3:24 am London time. Some notes:

First, How to Train Your Dragon is awesome.

Second, when you’re tired and hungry enough, even cold corn and cheese salad in some kind of Italian dressing stuff tastes good. Odd, I know.

Third, if you order a rum and coke with dinner, they give you the world’s smallest glass of coke, and a bottle of rum that is better sized for two glasses of coke. So I’m still waiting to get more soda before I finish that puppy off. It mitt just be enough to get me to sleep, though I’m thinking the way I feel right now that if I’m not sleeping yet it’s not going to come.

I have a smoldering headache that feels like dehydration, which is an odd idea for me because I’ve had more water in the last 24 hours than I’ve had for months and still it’s not enough. Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering I’m currently canned… Meaning the plane…. Dehydration would be the next step in ensuring my preservation I guess.

According to the map built into my seat screen, we’re finally out over the open ocean. Still many hours to go, which feels amazing because I think I’ve been in this seat for a week already.

The seat thing also shows us further south than the original trajectory it drew back in Toronto. We’re about the same latitude as Halifax, or maybe just south, and just north of Boston.

My companion is fast asleep with her sweatshirt hood over her head and her mouth wide open. If I think I’m dehydrated, I’ve got nothing on what she’s going to be by whatever passes for morning around here.

It’s been just long enough since dinner that those who are still awake are starting to have significant interest in the bathrooms. Couple that with a slight shake to the plane and I’m wishing I’d gone right after dinner. 35,000 feet in the air is no place to try to hold it until you get home.

Right now I’m trying to decide whether to switch over to watching another movie (this time on my iPad) or whether to work on the novel.

12:48am ET, 5:48am London time.

OK, I am officially sick of being awake in a chair.

I already watched two movies (the aforementioned awesome How to Train Your Dragon, and the animated Last Unicorn that came out in 1982 thanks to my iPad) and I highly doubt I have the patience for a third. My body’s sending me every single sign it has that it wants me to lie down and take a nap: legs are cramping up, nose is running, head aches, butt aches, and I can’t type to save myself.

I am a grouch.

Canada: a review

Posted on by

My sister and I are in Toronto right now, on a layover during a trip that will take us from Philly to London. I’m pretty surer we’re just in one of the two terminals, but it’s so small it feels like I’m in the world’s tiniest airport. I think we’ve walked this terminal twice.

Things I didn’t expect about Canada:

1. It’s hot here. Like, probably 85 degrees and muggy. I’m not sure that Canada was prepared for this, because it seems like they’re barely running the air conditioning. I’m used to places running the AC as if they’re refrigerating a building. If I had known that it was going to be sticky hot even in the airports I would have worn shorts.

As it is, it’s only supposed to be in the 60s in the London area, so I don’t necessarily want to change into shorts here, especially since I’m pretty sure the airplane has a better chance of being cold than hot.

2. My brain keeps desperately attempting to resurrect the French lessons I took in high school, so every time I listen to an announcement in English and French I forget half the English announcement as soon as the French one comes on because my brain gets distracted easily on four hours’ sleep.

3. Customs was really easy. Mostly because my sister and I were the only ones trying to get through at the time.

More later, as our vacation develops!

Lava oil maybe?

Posted on by

If I tried to write down everything that was in the nightmares I just woke from we would be here all week. But here’s a quick summary.

A friend from work had a new car (SUV actually) that had voice activated controls. She told me I could try them by telling the car to become a camper, and she handed me a fancy phone/microphone/doohicky. When I told the car to become a camper it became a playground instead – the swingset I’d had as a kid, to be exact, but with one lone tire swing and a largish (30×30) square of AstroTurf that the swingset sat upon.

That drew a crowd, and suddenly I wasn’t going out to lunch with a friend, the car was part of a number of booths at a home show / car show / convention type thing. We did have a camper then, but it was a separate vehicle, which I had to chase a different co-worker through to get the car remote back from. He was planning something nefarious, or maybe he just wanted to run off with the senator (who looked like a different woman I know from work) because they were a couple.

Anyway, I went back outside and asked the car to transform into a camper so we could leave and the car agreed so long as I made sure the senator (the car recognised her) got off the swingset first and wasn’t in danger. Once I did that the car transformed into an armored vehicle, and the senator and I drove away.

Now the dream was no longer first person adults. (Although I have to admit in most of my dreams, including this one, by “adult” I mean I’m about 22 years old.) Instead, the camera is on some toys on a bedroom floor that are being controlled by a child (9 or 10 years old) who is never quite on-camera. Bare arms capped with the dark green sleeves of a teeshirt, brown courderoy pants covering knees, and the occasional white sneaker were glimpsed, but the camera was at head height of our protagonist (and yet it wasn’t the child’s view of the toys) so that’s all we saw.

The child was narrating a converation between some terrorists in their fort (a closet door) who had taken the child’s mother (a Barbie doll in her underwear) hostage, and given the child specific instructions on what he could do to get Mom back, which strangely included trying to blow up the terrorist fort so the terrorists would know he arrived. (Blind & deaf terrorists perhaps?)

Instead, the child used a battering ram (soda straw) that he kept cutting shorter and shorter, to slowly bang the closet door open so that, while he was still negotiating with the terrorists, mom could run out and jump into the armored jeep and then they drove away.

The rest of the dream was a long and complex chase scene, back to normal first person, sometimes taking place in a Hummer, sometimes in my Saturn, sometimes in our Camry, sometimes in my brother’s new Subaru, and sometimes in my parents’ Oldsmobile. I was the driver most of the time, and I was back to being me. Mom was safe at work. I don’t know where my sister was but she was safe as well. Nighthawk, as far as the dream was concerned, didn’t exist.

My father was being hunted by the aforementioned terrorist gang, but since they were a secret society we couldn’t tell who they really were. Everywhere we went at least six cars were following us. We tried lots of ways to shake them, most of which were temporarily successful, but none of which were foolproof – after the next turn or the next car switch they’d be back on our tail in different cars.

Eventually we figured out how to ditch them all and we went home (my parents’ house). Dad and my brother worked on making a giant inflatable toboggan/slide out of a twin air mattress that was at least 30 feet long, and I was in the house thinking about dinner. Dad came in and said that he wanted to go out for a drink and I agreed. I said I’d drive because he was in no shape for it.

We stepped out the front door discussing where to go, and just as we yelled our choice out to my brother, we realized there were at least 10 cars in the yard & on the street, filled with “friends” we recognized, who said they’d all meet us there. They all left.

Mom arrived home from work to find us discussing whether the air mattress would work yet (no) and suggested we go somewhere else for drinks. I got Chance and Kaylee into the house and we all got into my car, but then I got nervous that someone would attack the house while we were gone. I went back to the house with Dad to collect the dogs and that’s when we realized the house two doors up was on fire – at least, the yard was. By the time we saw it, the yard next door was glowing too, and it was starting to seep into our yard.

I thought it was lava, so I ran inside and got the dogs. My brother, and I debated who was going to call 9-1-1, while Dad whipped out this big phone and called. He apparently recognized the man on the other side of the line and explained that it looked like “the rig was leaking again”. When I looked down I realized it looked like a mixture of vegetable and motor oil was running through the yard.

Then a second person cut Dad off on the phone and demanded that if he was going to call 9-1-1 he needed to join the calling club to get the best discounts. We could all hear the argument over the phone between the legitimate dispatchers and this loud screaming man, who was trying to get Dad to admit that his last name was Hochstetter (it’s not) and then hung up yelling he’d be right there.

I suddenly realized that Dad wasn’t on his own cell phone. He was using some other phone he’d picked up somewhere. It was the same phone controller thing from the transforming SUV, which we didn’t even have anymore, and the whole chase was because the terrorists were after the fancy car.

That must have been too logical for my right brain to handle. I woke up.