The Clan of the Cave Bague

A 4am start isn’t a natural thing. But we’re up, and the taxi to the airport is due in 45 minutes. I don’t feel like I’ve had any sleep at all. Gaaaaah!

Nelefa.org will drop off the net for a while on Monday evening – both the website and email will be unavailable. Poor old jem, the box we host on, is undergoing some disk surgery by the highly trained secret ninja administrators of the Yoyo collective consciousness.

But it’ll all be fine by tomorrow. Which is fine, because we’ll be sitting on an aeroplane by then and unlikely to be anywhere near a net connection until we reach Hong Kong at the very least. Given that we’re only going to be in Hong Kong for an hour, though, we’re more likely to be sprinting to the departure terminal than mucking about with the interweb.

Anyhoo – this basically means that this’ll be the last post for an undefined period of time. We’re all very excited and raring to go – last day in the UK at the moment and we’ll be leaving very early tomorrow.

Nelefa.org just dropped off the net for an hour or two! I think there were strange technical wierdnesses at Yoyo Towers. I’m sure all will be revealed in time.

Theres no time for tears – they ll come later when we look at pictures of our friends and family once the journey is over – we have had to be strong for the sake of the kids cos kids are very perceptive!.

Theres been quite a few moments when Ive had them but Ive had to push them down b/c I know that when they come they ll come in floods and I need to be strong at the moment.

We are almost at the end of the packing and we plan to spend all the day out on Monday having lunch and meeting up with old friends, coming home early evening and perhaps spending a couple of hours with one of my friends having a chat before retiring to bed – setting the alarm clock for the morning.

Honestly, this is a bumpy ride but we ll get there.

Still smiling.

Debbie

Oh God, make it end soon.

We’ve been packing for what seems like days. We have a baggage allowance of 20Kg each. There are five of us. That’s a tenth of a metric ton of luggage. No problem, right? Wrong – we seem to have twice that amount of rubbish kicking around. We’re filling case after case and the piles aren’t diminishing.

One big case holds 20kg. That’s fine. One small case can also hold 20kg of denser things – books, CDs, that kind of thing. The problem comes when you have a combination of case sizes – as I understand it, they don’t measure the whole lot and say “95 Kg, that’s fine”. If there’s five cases, one of them is 15Kg and the other is 35, you’ll be charged for the 15kg overlimit in the second case.

ARGH!

I’m posting this entry using Deepest Sender, an add-on for firefox which gives a nice little mini-blog-posting thingy. It’s really very nice. The only thing I’ve found that it doesn’t allow me to do via the gui is to change a link property to open in a new window, but I can do that via the source tab anyway.

Anyway, we’re in the middle of packing still. There seems to be an awful lot of rubbish kicking around so we’re being quite mercenary with the black bin liners. Only got six days to go now, so we’re getting very excited.

I hate packing. This is a well documented fact. It’s also why I’m sitting here writing about packing instead of actually doing it. So far, my morning has been spent dismantling Bionicle models after being nagged into photographing them from every conceivable angle to aid in their reconstitution. As if they’re going to have time to do it when they arrive!

We’re nervously weighing things. We have a reasonable baggage allowance of 20 x 5 kilograms, which should be plenty, but then we’re carrying more than the average tourist. Ten million bags of Bionicle for example.

Still – we have some nice giant suitcases. Luridly coloured, but hey – you can’t have everything.

Well, it’s been done. The flights are booked for the 31st of October, so we’re off to Oz. We’re spending the coming week doing all our pre-departure visiting, as well as fun things like setting up bank accounts and packing.

It’s all going to be a bit of an adventure really!

What an Ace little cartridge! It has card games, board games, bowling, darts – it’s just ace! I forgot how much I like Rummy It’s also multiplayer with a single cart and even has 7-player online multiplayer. Not only that, but it’s only twenty quid. That’s forty-odd P a game – not to be sniffed at!

I have too many characters. It’s official. I’ve been having a blast with ol’ Pooky recently. I got him over the horrible hump of the early twenties. It seems to be a bit of a rough spot with mages – not enough damage to attack anything higher than green and groups are hard to come by because everyone else can solo yellows without too much of a problem. Or maybe I’m just rubbish.

I think it’s probably the latter.