okay – a brief recap of past few days:

thursday 0500h heathrow, fly edinburgh, meetings with crazy norwegians, dutch, and assorted other europeans, talk security. nice hotel linlithgow. posh dinner with rest of team, dinner pictures at:

[www.crypticide.org]

discover that norwegians especially are total party monsters, including crowberry liqueur and akvavit starters. very generous folk, very likable.

up 0715h friday. more meetings. hack around with computers. flight due 1500h, delay 2hrs, land heathrow. drop into work, upload pictures, home, collapse.

saturday up 0700h, train, borough market, meeting karin & roland 1030h at market, they get delayed 2hrs but i show theem around the market for a bit, and catch the train home 1300h. arrive home 1500h, discover washing machine has walked off its foundations in the manner of a walking harddisk. fix washing machine. catnap, 90m shower, shave, dress, drive 1h20m welwyn for party. market and party pictures at:

[www.crypticide.org]

leave party 0200h. drive home. motorway sliproad roadworks prevents re-entry to M3. 20 mile loop to U-turn into kingston, think “what the hell” and decide to see how fast car can go. prove theory that skoda has linear acceleration up to 115mph, demonstrates value of turbodiesel. decelerate/bottle out before determining top speed. return to same junction from (total: 20 mile diversion to move 50 yards) other carriageway, take reverse sliproad, get home, dump digicamera content onto imac, bed 0400h.

awake 0815h. prep suzuki 0845h, test ride, find still having problems, suspect timing. prep honda 0930h, meet with advanced motorcycle-training instructor 1000h and go for 3hr ride and debrief. utterly scarey – i have to unlearn tons, before learning new stuff. deeply confusing, but beneficial.

home, tea, visit graham and rachel, steve and tom. chat, tea, home, e-mail, do 3 loads laundry, house is a tip, wet laundry everywhere, have a colleague crashing over tomorrow and diffie is around too, so no doubt it’ll all hit me at once.

oh yeah, and christmas is next week and i haven’t done any cards yet, nor bought any presents, since that’d require me to have time to go shopping. hopefully 24hr shops will come to the rescue.

sort out website, mail you, bed. i lost a stone to influenza so am looking somewhat slimmer at the moment, am still single and bored, and suzi has taken to sitting in the litter tray, widdling inside and pooping over the wall to the outside, necessitating building a wall around the litter tray. lovely.