I would say that things did not go as planned at the meet-up yesterday, but that would require things to have been planned. Perhaps it is better to say that they did not go as I expected. Indeed, very little was as I expected. London was both bigger and more full of people than I remember, with things to do spread further and thinner than I had could have feared. All of which is a fancy of way of passing the blame for spending far too much time on foot and in the tube network firmly onto circumstances beyond my control.

Only one person was even vaguely like I expected them to be, and that was Isis. Isis is very much the same person three feet in front of you as she is on a computer screen in another county, a dubious honour I would appear to share with her. The others were all far more reserved and quiet than I had imagined (which almost doesn’t include Bantam, until you remember that he used to be known as NooDle). I think the thing I got most wrong in my mind’s eye though, was the hair. Minase has truly biblical hair, the likes of which I could never have foreseen, I may shave him one day and create a marvellous scarf. Shish’s is all over the place where I somehow got it into my head he would be closely cropped. Bantam I suspected of sporting an outlandish bouffant, but was greeted with what may well be a short back and sides, but I’m no barber. Keg hid his hair the whole damn time under a silly hat, so I had to steal it in the end: he had hat-hair though, so I’m not sure if I got a representative view.

Things I have learned:
- The PSP is a beautiful, sexy, wondrous machine whose buttons are all in the wrong place.
- Shish doesn’t say much in person either.
- Bantam actually makes money off banime.com! Maybe I should get some ads on here….
- The London Eye is still a rather popular attraction, book ahead.
- Cornish trains suck.
- The British Transport Police drop giant security cameras on people from helicopters.
- There are not two Forbidden Planets in London.

If I could do it all again? I’d plan the fucker a little bit, maybe find a day’s worth of shit to do all contained within one square mile. Planning might even extend to familiarising myself with where all this shit is in relation to each other. I probably wouldn’t call Bantam “Peter Kay” so much either, he probably gets it enough normally . I’d stay longer too, so we could get good and drunk into the small hours. Nothing cuts through awkward silences like neat gin!

I actually think it would have worked better in a smaller city. In selecting somewhere with loads of stuff to do we forgot that the point of the day was to meet each other and hang out… in the strange company of people you’ve only previously known as text on a screen. If we do it again in the summer I would recommend Oxford. It has a great sushi restaurant, is still fairly central, and is not lacking in large areas of greenery on which to lie in the sun. Like the rasta at King’s Cross to whom I gave a banana said, “take it easy man, it’s the weekend”.

Special mention must go to Isis’ brother, Paul. Despite being clearly bored out of his skull he stuck with us all day, anxious for his sister’s safety at the hands of internet-stalkers. I wonder if we’ll ever find out what he’s done with Keg….

Google tells me this is marmalade.
The hell?

I never used to like marmalade, but now I loathe it.

You see, some fucker had been rooting through the bins in the car park behind where I work, so when I drove into the place today at about, ooh, two o’clock, I drove straight through a load of rubbish. Including a full jar or marmalade. The jar passed under the rear-driver’s side tire and fucked it up good.

I’m no stranger to flats; I have a spare and a jack in the car and I know how to use them! At least I thought I had a jack…. I’d never actually had to change a tire in this car since we got it, so imagine my surprise when I open up the plastic sleeve-thingy that traditionally contains the components of a jack, only to find two poles. Now, the poles fit together to make a longer pole, so it’s not all bad, but I’ll be buggered if I know how that’s going to raise a Landrover six inches off the ground. I did take some comfort in it being the perfect thing with which to beat whoever left all that fucking rubbish, and waved the pole around menacingly for a bit. Then I called the RAC.

Things went quite well then, the guy arrived quite quickly and I even found the rest of the jack, cunningly hidden under the passenger seat. Then he asked me if I could pass him the key for the locking wheel-nut. The what now? I’ve had two Landrover Defenders before, and neither had been equipped with any such trickery. Serves me right for getting one with alloys this time, I suppose. So we ring the local Landrover garage and ask if they have a spare we could borrow. They don’t, they could order one though, if I’d like. The RAC dude suggests we ring back and he deal with them, turns out they have one after all. He goes to get it.

It all worked out in the end, although the gash in the tire was too big to be plugged, and it looks like a fresh one will cost £~120. I may get a cheapo one and just use it as the spare. Oh, and a fucking locking wheel-nut key (type F, if you ever want to come help yourself to a set of very large alloys). At £8.50 I think it’s worth it for being able to change my own damn wheels. It always feels so very good when you change a wheel all on your own.

So, I found a theme that I liked the look of (MinimaPlus, if you must know), then tweaked it lots (why do these people insist on wasting so much horizontal space?), made a nice banner (the thing with the shark up there?) and bullied Andy into making me a button:

(feel free to use this to link to the site, you know you want to!)

I also did some emoticon editing: Adium style!
:catch: :drom: mg: :raptor: dino comics!