Sandy walks keenly to the beach, turns at the gate to wave to me eating breakfast, safely out of reach of the guys selling coral necklaces.
His father was a fisherman pulling crayfish from the sea. He reels in pink fleshed Germans with tattoos on their shoulder instead.


The worst part of scuba diving has to be the dying. It is, after all, easy to forget you are under water and not flying in the tree tops. Though a lung or two of brine is a fishy reminder. I have often wondered what you would last think?
Probably that you’d paid too much for that coral necklace, or not enough depending on who you are, and that here at twenty meters, with the entire reef around your neck, it seems colorless by comparison.

Incommunicado

Just spending some quality time here in Oz with the wife's folks, reading and spinning yarns as they say. Not really out of choice if you have to know the truth. You see until this morning they only had a dial-up connection. (For you kids, imagine a series of squirrels with small packages running from point to point and you're close to the idea. Though, if you don't know what a squirrel is, you may be a little confused).
I have signed them up for ADSL with Telstra, the national carrier and it is a little better, though the promised 1500 kps is patchy and every now and again it won't connect to anything at all, even the Telstra site.
Here in Australia they have download limits. One package (39.99 a month) offers the following treat: up to 256 kbps and a limit of 200MB of download. So that's one way to battle Internet piracy. I suppose it is rewarding for me as a blogger to know that most Australians are willing to pay so much to read these words. Certainly wouldn't cut it in Korea.
Incidentally, Telstra shares are worth about half what they were when last floated a couple years back.

Web Fun

If ever you are bored, type a file name and extension commonly used by digital cameras into the Google Image search engine. eg dscf0001.jpg See if you can find a friend.

Tasmania

At the end, after all.

Rock Me Amadeus

8.20 LAX nachos with beef. A family of five all wearing baseball hats with maple leaves on them leap in unison to exclaim that they are going to Australia. I choke a black bean into my nasal cavity. 'Rock Me Amadeus' makes me think of simpler days. I have tried to get a decent seat on this flight, but it seems everything is booked out. The great unwashed have finally discovered the internet i guess. I have misplaced half a chocolate bar in my 'laptop'bag, I can't see that ending well. As I write this I am also trying to connect to the free wireless here at LAX without any luck. I suck at this computer stuff... ps Everybody Wang Chung tonight.

Leaving Vancouver

5.50 pm Time on road 6 hours. Almost descending into LAX. 2.5 hours of pressing ass with a fat monster truck afficianado who insists on turning to look out the window which presses his mobile phone, still clearly turned on, into my leg. As I write this he is farting on me, in real time. I can feel it through my trousers which I will now have to burn... Just beyond the horizon of his monster truck t-shirt, and just below the peak of his 'Lock and Load' camouflage hat, I can make out bits of the desert. Think of sitting beside Uranus on a plane. He lifts an empty fruit drink bottle to his lips and spits tobacco slop, completely detroying my reverie.

Sunday Afternoon

I am hard pressed to see what bloggers write about every day I gotta tell you... Today I slept late. The dorm dweller I share a bathroom with having decided on a little shower love after closing time. There is nothing like listening to college kids going at it in an enclosed space. Above me they are herding Shetland elephants.
What else? Irish hurling. Munster final was on in the pub where I ate lunch, Waterford coming on strong at the finsih to beat Limerick. You'd know if you got one of those sticks in the mouth I reckon. The helmets they wear are pretty cool; seems to me one of them was wearing the old helmet I used to wear as a kid.
Diastolic pressure remains high but Systolic levels have returned to gravy eating territory.

Wish I was here.

Need I say more?

High Blood Pressure

So I am dying... Yes, Yes, we are all dying grasshopper, but apparently, at any moment my heart is fixing to burst asunder like a beer left too long in the freezer. I know this because of a trip to Shopper's Drugmart. It's the classic story of putting your arm into a hole where it doesn't belong. I'm killing time, waiting for a friend to complete a purchase so I slip my left arm into the old blood pressure reader and there I am looking at 15852 over 964 or something and being encouraged to ask my pharmacist to help me 'through the maze'. A maze. This is what they call estate planning these days. Tomorrow. I'm going back to test the other arm.

London

Was in London last week. First thing you want to do when you get there is get yourself an Oyster Card. Far as I can make out, it's a smart card that you top up from time to time. Best part is that it calculates your journeys, so you never end up paying more than the cheapest fare you were entiteld to if you had bought it at the start of the day. So for example, if you would have been better off buying a day pass. And even better, bus journeys are a pound a piece. Be careful though, it is not for use on some Thameslink services despite what a bearded eejit at King's Cross station might tell you. While I'm on the toursit advisory board here, you can pick up a sim card from Carphone Warehouse for ten pounds, so bring your phone.

Other things to do: get yourself a can of Carlsberg Special Brew (or some less plebian equivalent), head into Regent's Park with a good book (eg Peter Carey's Theft), and prop under a tree for the afternoon.