Archive
December 2000| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Current entry Archive December 2000 |
Given the sheer amount of logistical organisation and co-ordination that had to take place to get me here, it's probably not surprising that having successfully arrived here, I've been taking a few days off from dealing with it all. Yes, there is more to be done, which couldn't be taken care of beforehand. Although I'd naturally prefer to keep ignoring it all indefinitely, I declared today Bureaucracy Day and started making some calls.
There are two major areas I have to straighten out, which are somewhat linked together. The first is that since I'm an indefinite resident here, I have to start paying taxes to the UK rather than the US. This would be quite straightforward except that I'm still working for a US company that has no UK presence (hence no UK employer tax ID, hence no way to pay taxes directly on my behalf). Investigations so far indicate that I'll have to pay taxes manually myself, either on a monthly basis or in a lump sum at the end of the tax year (which, by the way, ends in April here). However, by the same mechanism that I pay taxes, I also have to pay National Insurance contributions, which is much like FICA in the US, and in order to do that (or indeed to pay taxes at all), I have to have a National Insurance number (much like a Social Security number), which brings me to the second area I tackled today.
My situation is sufficiently unusual (the complication of working for a US company being the kicker) that nobody quite knows what to do with me, so various departments keep referring me back to each other. The Tax Office sent me to the International/Residency department, which said no, I have to talk to the Collector at the local Tax Office, who tried to refer me back to the International people again, and so on. It was much the same with trying to get the National Insurance number. Normally, citizens of other countries who continue to be employed by their foreign employer have been sent here temporarily by that employer, which means the person involved doesn't really have to interact with the UK tax/insurance system; they continue to be handled by their home country. But because I'm an indefinite resident, I have to pay taxes and National Insurance regardless of who employs me.
I've had some success, though; I have an appointment on Wednesday with DSS (the National Insurance people), at which time I ought to be able to straighten that out. The taxes aren't in quite as good a state yet; the International people say the Collector has to set me up for a Simplified PAYE (Pay As You Earn) Self-Assessment system whereby I make tax payments myself, monthly; but the Collector doesn't see why I should have to do PAYE, and wants to send me a Self-Assessment form in April whereby I pay taxes in a single lump sum at the end of the tax year and not before. Also the collector doesn't know how to set me up to pay National Insurance contributions. The International people did mention that the tax system is in the process of being changed, which makes people less likely to know how to handle an exception.
One very nice thing in all of this: Nobody quite knows where I fit, but they're all terribly apologetic about it and try very hard to be helpful. Not the sort of attitude I would have expected from tax and social services civil servants. None of the many people I've spoken to has seemed indifferent, annoyed or hostile. When they take my number and say they'll call me back, they really do, and within minutes. Also, the whole system seems remarkably laid back; if I do pay taxes by Self Assessment at the end of the year, I don't actually have to file the return until January 2002!
Another bit of progress today: I had the central heating people in again this afternoon. They have now concluded that it's definitely the pump, and probably the valve, and they'd like to replace them both; they will call within a couple of days to let us know how much that will cost and when they can do it.
Meanwhile, on the work front, the things I've done to the lab's login process have gone south in an unexpected way. Turns out that although the lab is on the other side of the WAN from Boston, all the lab's NT logins are being processed by a server in Boston, not by the server sitting two feet away on their local side of the WAN. It's probably been acting this way all along, but there was no reason we'd notice it while NetWare was their primary network OS. Now I just have to figure out why the local server doesn't want to process login requests...
The NetGear router/gateway did, in fact, arrive yesterday. So what if I don't have a cable connection yet; I had to play with it anyway, so I fired it up and was able to see it from this computer, and get into its configuration mode with no problem. It looks like a very nice piece of equipment so far; easy setup, convenient to use, and decent documentation.
So that's what I've been up to for the last couple of days--whenever I'm not staring vacuously into Mike's eyes, of course. Heh heh.
Completed at 22:25
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
Over lunch today at Pizza Hut, we realised that Mike's moral framework is made of Meccano. That pretty much captures the tone of the day, I think. Much silliness.
Today we went shopping for wallpaper, and bought christmas tree decorations, a christmas tree, and no wallpaper. Not our fault really, though; they were out of the design we wanted. Another branch of the store is rumoured to have some; we'll check that out tomorrow.
Today's other major accomplishment was that Mike set me up to use !Diary. This means a lot less manual hacking around of these pages, which is all to the good, but during the course of this project I was forced to see the various cool features of RISC OS to the point where I may simply die of feature envy. But anyway, this is therefore the first diary entry generated by !Diary, not that you can see the difference. Well, you can, if you look at the tag down below that used to say "Completed at"; it now says "Created at". Anyway, this should make writing diary entries a lot more about the content and less about hacking around little bits of syntax (and missing half of them half the time, which I guess comes out to a quarter after you do the maths).
I'm on something of a Pratchett binge at the moment; Mike currently has a later Discworld volume on loan from Cath, presumably to be returned at some point, so I'm racing through the preceding volumes to try to get to read it before it goes home again. If my mind seems to be operating in a slightly more warped fashion than usual, I blame Pratchett.
Created at 23:26
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
A busy day yesterday. An adventure across town yielded sufficient rolls of the wallpaper design we want to use, so we're ready to start! Well, except for preparation, of course. So yesterday evening was spent emptying the contents of the living room into the dining room, while ensuring that we can still use the computers, the TV etc while they are temporarily located there. It's a bit crowded in here at the moment, but still manages to be functional.
Emptying the living room included pulling up all the wiring running under the edges of the carpet, because when we reassemble the living room, we're going to do it in the planned New Configuration, which makes room for my stuff when it arrives. Reconfiguring the living room will mean redoing most of the wiring from scratch, so there was no point in leaving it there. My goodness, there was a lot of cable under there! Not surprising, considering that Mike has everything wired to everything, so you can use just about any equipment as either source or destination for just about any signal.
So, the living room is now basically empty; we need some drop cloths, and a few other bits of equipment we hadn't thought of when we were shopping yesterday, but otherwise we're ready to go. Mike has been taking pictures as we go along; they'll probably appear on his site at some point.
This afternoon I did some laundry, unsupervised. It doesn't seem to have come out as tiny shreds of fluff, so I think that's good.
Meanwhile, we seem to be having a problem with migratory fish...
Much, much later...
We have now begun wallpaper removal activities! It's not as difficult as I thought it would be. We have a system: Whoever is holding the steamer, steams; whoever is holding the knife, scrapes; and we get bits of sticky damp wallpaper all over our trainers. It works well for us.
I expect we'll get a lot more done the next time we work on it, because tonight was a late start and I had to be taught how to do it, and we had to figure out how the steamer worked. Onward...
Created at 16:13
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
BANG!
That's what happens when you feed 240 volts to a power supply that's only expecting 120.
The company very kindly shipped me the old computer I used to have at home, which isn't especially high spec but would do nicely for a server for us. I'd checked beforehand that its tag specifically said it could handle 240 volts. When it arrived on Wednesday, I thought nothing of connecting it up, but when I got to the point of plugging in the power cord, there was an incredibly loud bang and a nasty smell, and a puff of smoke. Ooops!
I'd looked for a voltage switch, but hadn't found one, which is why I thought it was auto-switching. Resorting to reading the manual revealed that it did indeed have one. Unfortunately it's under the plastic shell, but outside the metal of the case itself, so there's no way I could have seen it just by looking. A fair amount of disassembly was required to get to it. (For those of you who don't routinely disassemble computers, this is roughly analogous to installing your doorbell under your siding.)
Fortunately, I didn't start any fires or damage anything else (including the two hard drives that were in the computer); and even more fortunately, the company has dozens of these things lying around so they have already shipped me another one to explode at my leisure.
It's been very busy the last few days, even aside from electrical incidents. On Tuesday I spent some time with Mike's mother--she took me around to meet some of her relatives (yipe). They were all very nice, very extraverted people. It appears that she's quite concerned that after the holidays are over, and January and February set in, that because I'm working at home and not "meeting new people" I will get homesick, bored and depressed. Hmm. This strikes me as exceedingly unlikely. I didn't meet new people in the US; I actively avoided it. That's the point of being an introvert. I like being at home by myself and playing with the computer. Sometimes I get on a roll and have trouble stopping working when Mike gets home in the evenings. This is my idea of fun. So no, I'm not particularly worried about getting homesick, bored, or depressed.
On Wednesday I had my appointment with the DSS people about getting a National Insurance number. This was surprisingly painless; I showed up, and a lady asked me questions and filled out forms for me. This was good, because the form primarily consisted of two blank pages in which the applicant is supposed to describe their situation in freeform text. They have very specific things they're looking for, which she knew what they were but I'd have had no clue.
The office itself was a strange experience. Let's just say that I didn't have very much in common with the other people who were there. At one point a youngish man came out of one of the interview rooms and noticed someone he knew in the waiting area, so they had a chat about how he's just gotten out of rehab on Monday, it was supposed to be a six-month program but the centre has been closed after only three months, they wanted to transfer him to another centre in Kent but then he wouldn't be near his kids...and he thinks he can stay off the drugs this time... It was all quite surreal. Just about everyone else was there because they are living off state funds, and are in truly difficult situations, but they were all quite cheerful and pleasant.
Oh yes, and the Muzak system played nothing but the Beatles. I guess I should have expected that...
Mike has yesterday, today and Monday off from work, which has been fun (although I have to work during most of the day anyway). Late yesterday we went to the Trafford Centre (the enormous mall near Manchester where I went with Pete and Mel back in October). It was, not surprisingly, rather more crowded this time. In between finding things we want, we managed to pick up some things for other people as well, so we've made a start on the christmas shopping, finally. Sadly, we didn't manage to escape without being pulled in by the gravity well at Thornton's. Well, I did have to try their mints so I can decide whether they're something Linda would like or not. It wouldn't do to send her some and have them turn out to be full of nuts or something like that, now would it?
Leaving the Trafford Centre proved slightly more difficult than arriving. We went out to the parking lot and--no car. No car! We were sure we were looking in the right place; we knew we'd turned down the first aisle after entering the lot, and parked nose against a column. Once we'd gotten good and panicked, and were actually headed back into the mall to look for security people, we discovered our mistake. We'd gone too far down the lot. The place where we drove into the lot was not, as we'd thought, at the end of the lot, but rather halfway down. So as we walked back toward the mall, we spotted the entrance we'd really used, realised what had happened, and found the car, right where we'd left it. Whew! That was not a good feeling. I wanted to hug the car when we found it.
Last night we went for a curry with Cath and her partner Steve, whom I hadn't met before. He seems nice; the pun density got pretty high at several points.
On the work front, I've mostly been delving deep into my godawful macros. I cleaned them up and standardized them quite a lot (with an eye toward someone other than me eventually having to take over the code), but also added some nifty new stuff. Along the way I thought of a way to solve a problem that I'd previously thought I couldn't do anything about, which is always nice. Aha, I can fix that after all...
And the house is still in an uproar, mostly because we haven't had a chance to do anything more with the wallpaper since we began it on Monday, what with so much going on. We plan to tackle it again today (Mike will probably start without me, while I get some more work done). With the weekend approaching, and Mike having today and Monday off, we ought to be able to find a few spare minutes to make some progress on it.
One more house-related thing: the ongoing central heating saga. On Friday we had the central heating people in again, as I mentioned. This week we got their quote for replacing the pump and the valve: £400. Ouch! This may or may not be highway robbery for the extent of what needs to be done, but for us it's simply not worth it; the hot water part of the system works fine, and the upstairs radiators work fine, so really we'd be paying that just to get one lonely downstairs radiator working again. So we've decided to forego this extremely expensive band-aid, because the system is aging anyway and eventually we need to extend the central heating system to the rooms that don't yet have it, and possibly replace the boiler. If we're already talking about this level of expense, we might as well go all the way and do the whole job. Maybe.
Oh, and for those of you who insinuated that I'd pick up a British accent quickly, I am pleased to report that instead, I am contaminating Mike's accent with mine. Muhahahaha!
In November I did such a good job of posting regular diary entries. Sadly, I'm not starting December nearly so well. It's not that I don't have anything to say; it's entirely the opposite problem. There's so much going on that by the time we get around to thinking about doing diary entries, we're wiped out and it's really late, so we say forget it. Ah well, things can't be crazy like this forever...can they?
Created at 22:30
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
Yet another gap and long diary entry caused by more insanely busy days...
On Friday, they tried to deliver the new, non-exploded computer, but we apparently missed them, so after I wrote that last entry we had to go to the delivery company's depot and pick it up ourselves. It was either that or wait till Monday, which was clearly out of the question...
We managed to change the voltage and plug it in without frying it, so after a considerable amount of fiddling and twiddling, it was up and running later in the evening. Of course it's not in a final configuration; this was more of a test setup. Still, eventually it'll be a halfway-decent home server.
After that was settled, we stripped off the rest of the old wallpaper, and Mike did a first pass at filling in the holes in the plaster caused by the cavity wall ties (a type of structural support). The weekend consisted mostly of finishing filling the holes, sanding and washing the walls (including scrubbing off the excruciating border paper glue), and--finally--putting up some actual wallpaper.
Sunday's wallpapering was interrupted by having dinner at Mike's mother's, and spending most of the afternoon and evening there, mostly so that I could meet Arnie, whom I've somehow managed to miss so far. He seems like a nice guy, if a bit quiet and overshadowed by Mike's very social mother.
Once we got back here, which was around 10:00, we pressed on with the wallpapering until about 1:30, at which point we were about halfway around the room, past three fairly icky corners, but headed into several more. Then finally last night, in a wild burst of energy (primarily attributable to We Can't Take Much More of This), we made it to the end. Of course then we had to do the border...But that went up very quickly, taking probably an hour altogether. So now it's done, and looks absolutely terrific, in my utterly unbiased opinion. Bye-bye huge pink flowers! Mike took pictures with the digital camera, so you can see Before, During, and After pictures in his diary. Well, not just yet, because his RiscPC is currently taken to bits and the motherboard sent away, as you'll already know if you read his diary. Hopefully it'll be back by Friday, but meanwhile Mike won't be posting any diary entries, and I'm back to creating entries manually instead of using !Diary.
Last night was something of a zoo. We finished around 9:00, and we were both dead tired, but we had to clean up from the wallpapering (trash day today), and get the motherboard out of the RiscPC. We also had to move at least some stuff back into the living room, because today was the cable modem installation and we'd have been tripping all over ourselves if everything was still in the dining room. In the end we were up well past 12:30. I heartily agree with Mike's assessment of his state at the end of the day: "Ug."
So now we move on to today's main event, the cable modem installation. Bear with me; this is going to get technical.
Unfortunately the cable company only supports Windows 95 and 98, so there I was last night at 11:30, starting a Windows 95 install on a spare 6GB HD Mike had lying around. As I half-expected, putting something as old as 95 on a computer as new as this Dell didn't work out very well; the NIC (network interface card) is far too new, and the drivers wouldn't work. It got too late to keep fighting with it, so I figured I'd continue this morning (the scheduled installation time being somewhere between 10:00 and 2:00), or alternatively have a quiet word with the installers and say look, we both know there's no technical reason you can't do this on NT, so how about it? But the installers arrived at 9:50, so I hadn't got any further with the NIC, and they told me that yes, they understand about NT, but they have to do the installation on 95 or 98 or else report a failed installation and come back later when I have it working. Yipe! Now that's an incentive. I had a race against time (while the installers did the physical cable installation) trying to bludgeon the NIC into co-operating. But it soon became clear that I wasn't getting anywhere, and the downloadable help documents at the Dell web site were in a 4MB zip file--kind of the point of having the cable modem, you know? So I thought, hey, I have this other computer from work here, and it's really old; I'll try its NIC. A fine idea, except that the NIC is integrated on the motherboard and can't be removed. So instead I moved the hard drive with 95 on it into the other computer. I then had to go through several reboots while 95 re-detected the different hardware via Plug and Pray, but eventually I got to install the NIC and lo and behold, it worked! (Insert triumphant music here.)
...For a while. (Triumphant music trails off.) They require installation of Internet Explorer 5.0, within which they configure the user's email ID. IE's setup program wouldn't run because the display wasn't set for enough colours. I'd left 95 at the basic default resolution, thinking it wouldn't be important. No problem; I installed the video driver. It installed fine, I rebooted, and...nothing! No change in available resolutions, yet no errors. Fifteen more minutes of furious tinkering around got me nowhere again. This time I suggested that we look at their installation CD and go directly to the setup program, and skip the high-colour ad that doubtless was set to display at the beginning. Amazingly, this actually worked; IE installed fine (well, the second time; the first time it just quit without doing anything despite reporting success). They made the necessary configuration settings and went away.
Now, these particular installation guys handled everything inside the house; they had a separate subcontractor to install the cable line from the street to the outside of the house. This team hadn't showed up by this time, so the inside installers came back about two hours later to finish the job. Would you believe, the 95 computer wouldn't boot? It hung halfway up three times in a row. I had a working cable line, a working cable modem, and all the information I needed to configure it myself and they were still going to have to fail the install, just because they hadn't shown me how to go to their web site yet. Thankfully, they gave me a break, and let me sign off on the installation anyway.
The ironic thing is that all of this effort was necessary solely because the cable company only officially supports 95 and 98. The settings to be made are trivial--they take literally less than 5 seconds to make. The echoes of the door closing behind them hadn't died away before I had the settings made in NT and was setting up the NetGear gateway/router we bought to allow us to share the cable modem among our various computers. Again, its setup was trivial; it took longer to cable it up than it did to configure it and get it working. I already have all the computers that are still here successfully set up to use it.
Whew! So that's taken care of. Now we can relax, right? Well, after we get the living room set up again, and the rest of the house restored to a semblance of order. Of course setting up the living room involves reconfiguring it to the layout we'd planned that will incorporate my stuff. And then there's the unfinished christmas shopping, which is becoming something of a looming deadline of its own, and christmas being held here to prepare for, and oh yes, New Years being held here as well...
Hmm. Maybe we can't relax after all...
(Later)
Late-breaking news: We have just trashed our server. This is not actually a crisis, believe it or not. See, we salvaged the CPU from the computer I fried, because these computers support dual processors. So we added a second CPU, but Windows NT only detects the number of CPUs at installation time; changing it afterwards is a bit fiddly. We attempted it, and now it won't boot. We could perhaps repair it, but it'd actually be easier to reinstall from scratch. This, of course, has the added benefit that the second CPU will be detected automatically during the reinstallation.
Fortunately, we hadn't put anything on the server that can't be replaced (knowing, as we did, that this was really more of a first attempt than anything final). And we can use this opportunity to move one of the IDE drives to the other channel...
These are the kinds of things that go on when two geeks get together with no restraining influences.
Created at 21:14
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
There's good news, and there's bad news.
The good news: Out of the blue, Bishop Removals (the UK end of my international move) called this afternoon. They expect the ship to arrive on December 31! Clearing customs etc will take about a week, so they expect to deliver my stuff around the 8th of January. Good, good, good!
The bad news: They will notify me of their intended delivery date the day before. Bad, bad, bad. This most likely means that Mike won't be able to be here when the stuff shows up; that's just not very much warning to get a day off from work.
All this may be moot anyway; Humboldt (the US end of the move) is probably about to radio the ship and tell them to dump the container overboard. They emailed me yesterday to say that my credit card was denied. Ack!! A call to the bank this morning revealed that I have a $1500 daily limit on the card. Hmm, that would have been nice to know. I've had a couple of close calls I never knew about, with various expensive Ethan Allen furniture deliveries. The bank was quite happy to change the limit, though, so hopefully Humboldt will be able to process the charge now.
Well, anyway. Meanwhile, I have the server restored to something approaching functionality, after reinstalling it quite a few times. This multiprocessor stuff is trickier than you'd think. I also have my tunnel to work re-established via the cable modem. I thought it would be difficult, because the NetGear box comes with instructions for trying to get tunnels to work through it, but I didn't have to change anything after all; it just worked first try. I therefore spent my day catching up on things that would have been difficult to do without the tunnel, and generally making the lives of my co-workers miserable.
Strange weather since last night. It's been raining very hard off and on, and the wind gusts have been quite impressive. Right now it's just started hailing so hard that it's setting off car alarms. Whoops, it's already over. And, from time to time, the sun has peeked out today. It changes so fast it makes your head swim. I think I'd better have some tea.
(Much later, so much later in fact that it's now tomorrow morning)
OK, so I didn't get around to posting this last night. Once Mike got in, we made some progress on putting the living room back together, in what might actually be the final configuration. In the process, we twiddled the new floor plans a bit, mostly having to do with locations of bookcases and stereo, and in the end I think we have a better plan than we started with.
Mike says that he thinks that taking a day off with short notice when my stuff arrives may not be a problem after all, which is definitely good news.
I have cheated slightly: I modified the previous diary entry. I forgot to spell-check it for non-British spellings, so I've gone back and done that, resulting in a few minor changes.
Created at 18:00
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
(To be sung to the tune of "Spam":) Forms, forms, forms, forms...
Another Bureaucracy Day. This time it's tax forms. Today I filled out my W-4 (2000), W-4 (2001), Form 673 (Statement for Claiming Benefits Provided by Section 911 of the Internal Revenue Code, a long-winded way of saying I plan to claim exemption from US taxes on the grounds of being taxed by another country), and most of my UK Form P86 (Notification of Arrival in the United Kingdom) but I will have to send for Booklet IR20 before I can finish it. We also filled out form W-7 (Application for IRS Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) for Mike, because he doesn't have a Social Security Number, which hinders filling out my 1040 come April. That one's kind of scary, because we have to send Mike's passport to the IRS. They promise they'll return it...
Another bit of house-related maintenance going on: We had a blocked drain. There's this grill set into the paving stones in the front yard, and apparently there's piping below it, and that piping has become partially blocked, so in heavy volume conditions, the drain backs up into the yard. This is not especially a good thing. Today some drain people came to look at it; they cleaned it out, then made some dire pronouncements about its future prognosis if some replacement work isn't done. In testing whether they'd cleared the blockage, they had me run the water hard for several minutes. Strangely, no water passed through the front yard drain. "Do you have a gully in your back garden?" they asked. Well, there's another grill-like thing near the corner of the house, which was what they meant. In looking out the back window, it had definitely backed up, and made something of a puddle at the back door. Although I didn't have a key to open the door to the garden, this was not a problem for the enterprising drain specialists; they climbed over the wall from the neighbours, while carrying their drain-cleaning equipment. My goodness.
Happily, Humboldt was able to process the charge to my credit card today, so I may get my stuff after all.
It has crossed my mind that my recent diary entries might be read as complaining about how much we have going on and how busy we are. That's not what I intend at all. I'm having a wonderful time, especially playing with the computer setup.
Right, that's cleared that up. Back to playing with computer bits.
Created at 19:45
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
News flash! Stop the presses! It might drop below freezing here tonight!
The weather here is so confused, the rosebush in the back garden has re-bloomed, and insects are hatching, thinking it's spring. Everything is green and growing. My brain refuses to equate this with December; it looks a lot more like April to me. Meanwhile, yesterday in Boston they had freezing rain and six inches of snow...Ahhh, how I do miss New England weather.
Not!
...Whoops, once again I wrote the above yesterday, and never finished or posted it. Still, I'll just continue from there. Things are too chaotic at the moment for me to have predictable chunks of time in the evenings for doing diary entries, so they'll just have to be written in patches.
The weather has indeed taken a somewhat colder turn last night and today; it probably made it only to about 5°C today, which is about 40°F. I expect the rosebush isn't terribly happy about this development.
I'm pleased to report that things are getting somewhat back under control here. Things are mostly back in their proper rooms, and are even in their expected post-Lisa-stuff-delivery positions. And yet, even with all this progress, we still managed to have time to spend most of today on an expedition to find an unusual christmas present item.
Christmas is looming enormously; it's being held here, which means a vast amount of cooking and general hosting. I have no idea how that will go, because neither of us knows how to cook most of the traditional items. (Which are, of course, not quite the same as the items that are traditional in the US.) I think Mike's mother will probably get heavily involved. I plan to stay out of the way and do a lot of dishes.
This evening I've even managed to find time to fiddle with the site a bit. Christmas shopping, and having to tell other people what we might want, has resulted in me paying a lot more attention than usual to stuff I might like to have. From the lists that have grown from this exercise, I've added a Movies Buying Queue and a Music Buying Queue, and greatly updated the Books Buying Queue.
So I'm playing with the computer, and Mike is sitting behind me rewiring the living room audio arrangements. This counts as a pretty good evening, I'd say.
Created at 22:55
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
'Tis the season...
After posting last night's diary entry, we decided it would be a good time to put up the christmas tree. This meant we didn't get to sleep until sometime after 2:30, but at least the tree is done. As evidence of this, I submit the following pictures.
 |
Tree01 (105 KB). Voila, the tree! If you look closely, you can see several of what look like tiny orange ornaments. These are actually chocolate oranges, designed specifically as christmas tree ornaments, to be consumed on christmas day. Chocolate on the christmas tree is an excellent British custom which I think the US should import immediately, if not sooner. (Also, if you look at the wall you'll notice the new wallpaper and border, shown here in its first public appearance. You can't get an especially good idea of what it looks like, since it wasn't really the subject of this photo, but it's a start.) |
 |
Tree02 (110 KB). Mike took this picture without the room lights on and without the flash, so you can really see the christmas tree lights themselves. |
Christmas traditions, as you might expect by now, differ greatly between here and the US. There are a zillion little differences, in such areas as traditional christmas meal menu items, card-sending protocols, and gift-opening times and procedures. Just to throw out a typical example of a tiny difference: Christmas tree ornaments (baubles) don't have integrated hooks. Whereas in the US the hook is attached to the metal cap at the top of the ornament (and the whole cap can fall off, including the hook), here the cap is part of the bauble, and you buy a box of S-shaped hooks separately (and just the hook falls off). And, of course, intermixed with the British differences are Mike's family's particular traditions.
One British tradition that startled me greatly, and for which I was happy that Mike was here to tell me what I was expected to do, is that small groups of schoolchildren ring the doorbell and sing carols at you until you give them money, whereupon they go away. I let the first group sing a whole song and a half before it sunk into my head that they seemed to be expecting something. So for the last week or so, we've had to be judicious about answering the door. We've only been caught twice so far.
Another difference that's very visible is that people here don't really go overboard decorating the outsides of their houses. In fact, most don't do any outdoor decoration at all. There is no equivalent of Bookie Row, not that I've seen yet anyway.
Today was definitely a preparing-for-christmas kind of day. I spent most of the day wrapping presents. First, though, I had to go to the School of Wrapping Presents Evilly. One of Mike's family's traditions is the wrapping of presents such that there are no exposed paper edges anywhere; all edges are thoroughly sealed with tape. Needless to say, this makes getting into the present somewhat difficult. (It presents a challenge, you might say.)
Meanwhile, my condolences to those of you who flew home from Florida today...You know who you are. Well, at least I see on the weather channel's web site that you came home to a nice balmy day. 55°F! My my!
Created at 22:46
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
Yesterday was a pretty good day, right up until the part where we bumped into another car in the Tesco's car park.
During the afternoon I took the train into Liverpool City Centre to pick up a few last-minute christmas items. It's quite a nice centre; it's pedestrianized, so walking from place to place is easy, and there are quite a few interesting shops. I had a nice leisurely cup of tea at Waterstones before coming home.
We'd planned to go to Tesco's as late as possible; they're open 24 hrs weekdays, so we reasoned that by going late, we'd avoid crowds. In the course of backing up to align properly to turn into an empty spot...bang!
We have, as you might imagine, been over this several times since then, and we're still not entirely sure what really went wrong. It was dark, but we were both looking, and neither of us ever saw another car. Even after we'd hit, I couldn't really believe it was a car because I still couldn't see one--not even headlights. Our left corner hit their right corner, as though they were trying to pull around us on the left; shouldn't their left headlight beam have been clearly visible from the passenger's seat? (Especially because it was raining lightly!) Did they forget to turn their headlights on? Were they moving forward? Why couldn't either of us see them?
This is all most unnerving, as neither of us really knows how the insurance system in this country works. I'm not familiar with it, of course, and Mike has never had to call on it himself. Hopefully it's similar to the system in the US, where the two insurance companies duke it out and we get to stay pretty much out of it.
But all is not doom and gloom; Mike's motherboard finally showed up today, so a pleasant evening has been passed getting the RiscPC put back together, and ambitiously leaping forward straight to trying to network it again, with mixed but mostly positive results. Certainly it's not having the kind of crash-happy behaviour it had with the old motherboard. In support of this effort, I cooked dinner tonight. That's right, I heated up a pizza without burning it or setting the house on fire or exploding the stove or even food-poisoning us. (At least, no symptoms so far.)
Oh, and out of the blue H&A gave me a pay raise after all this year, which I totally didn't expect, and it's not just a token one. Can't complain about that either. Life can't decide whether it wants to thwack me with a rolled-up towel or pat me on the head and feed me bon-bons.
Created at 00:48
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
A very nice day today, full of techie stuff.
Did the usual work things all day, including being utterly mystified at a 250MB file copy across the WAN, internally to H&A, that spectacularly failed to complete overnight. In fact, in about 8 hours it managed less than half of that. I know the WAN line to the lab isn't particularly fast, but I could have done almost as well with a modem. Well, I can't fix that, but it does put a serious damper on plans to do the next file copy, which is about 2GB. Hmm, I should be able to do that over the course of, say, February.
Meanwhile, more perfecting of the home network. We ended up staying up fiddling till about 1:30 last night, trying to fix a really bad speed problem between the RiscPC and the server. Much more progress today, including great improvement on the speed problem (but still not quite what we'd like). This is pretty good; we've gone from no RiscPC just over 24 hours ago to a fairly nicely tweaked network tonight. Tonight's diary entry is still manual, but within the next day or two we'll get me back to using !Diary.
Just for the sheer fun of it, here are some of the features of our new network:
Sigh. Happy little techies.
Created at 00:54
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
Happy Solstice!
Another fine day, still unseasonably warm and seasonably green, with flowers flowering and palm trees palming everywhere. I'm dreaming of a green christmas...
I have today through Tuesday off; Mike, of course, has today through all of next week, grumble grumble. We both took vacation (holiday) for today and tomorrow, but Tuesday is a national holiday here (Boxing Day), and the University gives everyone the whole of next week off without having to use holiday.
We used the opportunity of both being home during business hours to take care of another bit of bureaucracy: my application for a provisional driver's licence1. This requires some explanation for American readers. A provisional licence is pretty much equivalent to a learner's permit, although without restrictions in my case because I already have a foreign licence. Thing is, you know how you go to the registry to apply for a licence? They don't do that here, because there is a grand total of one (1) registry; it's called the DVLA and it's in south Wales. All licence-related transactions are processed through the mail. I filled out the necessary forms and could have mailed them directly to the DVLA, except...The snag is, for a photo ID licence, they require the applicant to supply the photo, and therefore there's some question as to whether the picture you're sending is really of you. If you're British, you send a British passport or your old licence and that's good enough. If you're not British, or you've never had a licence before, then someone who has known you for two years must countersign the photo, confirming that you are you. Obviously, nobody here has known me for two years. In that case, the applicant must go to their local VRO (Vehicle Registration Office, sort of a mini-registry outpost) and the staff there verify that the photo is of you and take the application themselves.
Our local VRO is in Chester, about an hour's drive south. The VRO was open till 4:00, which was fine except that other things took longer than they should have and we ended up setting out at just about 3:00, and we hadn't exactly been to the VRO before, so we were going to have to find it and find parking. In the end we were quite lucky and found it first try, navigating directly from a map, and also found parking very easily; I was in the office at 3:51. Handily, because they verified my identity in person, they let me keep my passport; otherwise I'd have had to mail it with the application, which is a bit scary because losing it would be, shall we say, somewhat inconvenient.
It was especially good that we got this done today because this country effectively shuts down starting tonight. Most businesses and government offices are closed from tomorrow through at least Boxing Day. Shopping hours here are never as expansive as they are in the US (most shops and even malls close at 5:30 or 6:00 and can only be open 6 hours on Sundays), but even for the pre-christmas run-up they haven't expanded hours all that much. You really have to plan in advance, because if you forget the cranberry sauce, there won't be any supermarkets open for you to dash out to. Anyway, the VRO is closed tomorrow and most of next week, so today was the last useful business day we both have off for some time.
After taking care of that errand, we wandered into Chester for a few minutes; we got sucked into the gravity vortex of an old book shop and were forced to buy two books: "Chemistry and Its Mysteries" (1920), and "Cyclopædic Science Simplified" (1877! Chapter 1 is entitled "On Light: And the Ether Supposed to Pervade the Whole Universe"). Then we drifted into the city centre, a wonderful place with bits dating from anywhere from the Romans on up freely intermixed, and had a nice browse through some shops before coming back here.
For dinner Mike made a wonderful chicken satay stir-fry. I am so thoroughly spoiled.
1This is not a misspelling. In the UK, "licence" is a noun, meaning a document granting official permission to do something, while "license" is a verb, meaning "to grant a licence".
Created at 00:52
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
A quiet day, a finishing-things-up day. We wrapped lots of presents, which is strange because before today I'd have said we were nearly done. We cleaned up the house a bit more. Mike did some more tweaking to the wiring and the RiscPC setup--on which topic, it's worth mentioning that he's back to writing Diary entries again.
So there was that, and some actual reading; all in all, a very nice day, but not one that generates a whole lot of comment, so I'll leave it at that, I think.
Created at 23:25
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
So, no sooner do we have Mike's computer back up and running mostly happily, than mine goes a bit south. When I boot it, it halfway logs me in to NT by itself without ever presenting a login dialog, and never gets to a desktop. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del on the resultant blank screen brings up the security dialog, showing that I'm logged in to the domain somehow. Also the Event Viewer shows three bad blocks in the last 24 hours, and an Autochk ran last time I booted. Hmm. This all points to impending ill health. However, I've done backups to the server and also configured a backup program so that I can continue to do backups easily, so I can probably troubleshoot safely.
Meanwhile, the rest of the day has been spent cleaning and doing laundry--not exactly my favorite things to do. Still, it's been a quiet day, which is nice, especially considering that by this time tomorrow, there'll be four more people and two cats in the house, which should provide plenty of chaos. There was also supposed to be (can I say this? Yes, Helen doesn't have access to the web) a hamster; Helen wanted one as a christmas present, so Mike's mother got her one. But the hamster has been hiding in the corner of its cage ever since it was bought, in a little plastic house, so nobody has really seen it. Today Mike's mother cleaned the cage, and lo and behold, there are now seven hamsters. Ooops. Well, that settles the question of the hamster's gender. So in actuality, there will be four people, two cats, and seven hamsters, plus us.
This will probably mean no diary entries till all the guests are gone (Wednesday-ish); things will be far too hectic.
Created at 22:13
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
Happy christmas to me, happy christmas to me...
One full stomach and lots of Good Stuff later, the dust is now settling. It appears to be traditional here to give lots of chocolate, a practice with which I heartily agree. Let's see, I have a Thornton's sampler, an enormous bar of something called Galaxy (which, when I asked what it was, everyone just laughed), some Cadbury's mini-bars (and don't make the mistake of thinking that Cadbury's here bears even the faintest resemblance to the US version), a chocolate orange, and I don't remember what else, probably because I've already eaten it. Oh, did you know that After Eight mints makes a truffle? They do. Oh, do they. In addition, there was some Kendal mint cake (basically compressed sugar with some mint flavour added). Mike also got a variant called, most terrifyingly, "Kendal Mint Bombs" which claim to be "twice as strong". I'm not sure how that can be. What, is it 200% sugar?
There are also lots of miscellaneous soap and bath products, which ought to keep me stocked till about the end of time or thereabouts. There was a calendar, and a duster, and memberships for both of us in the National Trust, and two Britain guidebooks, and I don't think I'll remember what else unless I have it in front of me.
Mike and I, rather than try to get things for each other, decided to get ourselves a present from us, so we're getting a DVD player sometime during the next few weeks. Meanwhile we both got each other DVDs as sort of minor christmas presents; Mike got me a live Metallica (the endearingly named "Cunning Stunts") and I got him G3 (Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, and Steve Vai in concert together). Sort of funny, but appropriate, that our first two DVDs aren't even films.
Linda and Tom got Mike a CD from Gravity Kills, which I had known about but forgotten. We haven't listened to it yet, but it did lead me to get the CD ripper and sound drivers working on my NT installation, so it's just now finishing being ripped. This means we can add it to the behemoth playlist, now topping 4,200 tracks (and that's not including quite a few CDs I've presently elected to leave out of the main playlist). If we threw everything in, we could go nearly 3 weeks without repeating a track.
I called the US last night and talked to everyone just after they finished opening presents, which was nice because I got to hear reactions. Things seem to have gone over well enough. We got Eric a bunch of books via Amazon; he stuck all the tags to himself. Later, he stuck bows all over his chest. I think he has the hang of christmas. Linda also called again tonight.
Oh yes, I should mention menu differences between here (Mike's family anyway) and the US. Turkey and stuffing were pretty much the same; potatoes are roasted. Vegetables included carrots, parsnips, and brussels sprouts (ewwww). After dinner, I got to try the infamous christmas pudding. Pudding, if I haven't mentioned it before, has nothing to do with the smooth creamy substance we call pudding in the US; it seems to refer to any of a wide variety of cake-like desserts. Christmas pudding is something like the filling of a mince pie; it includes raisins, and various other fruits, and is loosely clumped together by something cake-ish. In all, it's a very rich, but not extremely sweet experience. There's also christmas cake yet to be had, which I don't know anything about yet but suspect will be similar to fruitcake. No pies, cookies, or more everyday cakes were in evidence.
Present-opening was quite different as well. Nothing was done on christmas eve; it was all done today. Presents are divided into two categories, something like main and auxiliary presents (I haven't assimilated the distinction yet, although Mike will no doubt try to explain it to me once he reads this entry). Auxiliary presents are put under the tree in advance, but main presents are hidden away and are brought downstairs on christmas morning and opened at that point. The under-the-tree presents were opened after christmas dinner (lunch). Again, all of this may be family traditions.
I was very fortunate that the question of church came up only in a very tangential way. When everyone was leaving this morning they mentioned that they assumed Mike wasn't going, and sort of asked whether I was, so I got to say a simple "no" without any other baggage coming up. I don't mind explaining my views to people, but such conversations rarely remain simple intellectual exchanges of opinions, so I prefer to avoid the topic altogether when possible.
During the afternoon, Mike's mother beat the stuffing out of the rest of us at Trivial Pursuit. Duh, not that I'd have thought of it, but of course they don't play with the same edition here; their question cards are a lot more UK-centric. At one point I got a question something like "What is the only county in the UK whose name begins with A?" However, there was some turn-about; I got to watch them flounder at a question that asked what sport Kareem Abdul-Jabbar plays (even watching them try to pronounce it was fun). So was the very idea of me knowing the answer to a sports question that nobody else knew.
I've also been doing a bit of work over the weekend; I still have those enormous file moves to deal with, as part of migrating the lab to NT. I did find out why the previous copy took so long, but it just created a new mystery. Before I started the copies, I checked the total size to be moved, and found that one drive had 250MB and the other about 2.5GB. It was the 250MB move I was doing, for obvious reasons (it being small enough to be feasible). After it took nearly 72 hours to finish, I re-checked the sizes of both drives, and found that the one I'd copied was actually 880MB and the one remaining was about 750MB. What went wrong when I checked the sizes originally? These figures are nothing like the ones I first got. No idea.
If you notice a certain...frenetic tone to this entry, it may have something to do with the enormous chocolate and sugar overdose I've ingested this evening. (Not to mention tea. Except oops, I just mentioned it.) I'm sure there's a sugar trough (or trench, or maybe even more like canyon) in my immediate future, but I hope to be sound asleep by the time it hits. With any luck I'll just have weird dreams.
Created at 00:02
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
It's snowing!
Well, not really snowing snowing. It's more of a Norman Rockwell kind of snow--picturesque without being especially inconvenient. The flakes are the enormous, gently settling kind you get when it's close to freezing, aside from a few brief, frenzied spates of hail. In keeping with typical English weather patterns, it's not doing the settle-in-and-snow-all-day thing we'd get in New England; instead, it has started and stopped several times, and often seems to be snowing hard out of a perfectly blue sky. And, having now been outside, I can testify that it is perfect snowball snow.
Actually it turns out I lied about the not-being-inconvenient. Having, as we now do, two DVDs but no DVD player, and being, as it now is, the after-christmas sale season, we were filled with the urge to go buy a new toy today. The snow put a damper on this. First we decided we shouldn't go. Then the snow stopped, but by the time we were ready to go it had started again. At this point we were in New Toy Frenzy and went anyway. The snow isn't very deep--just a couple of inches--but of course, they don't exactly maintain a vast fleet of on-call snow-removal equipment here. Our road still hasn't been treated or ploughed; in fact nothing but the main roads have been salted, and I don't think anything has been ploughed. This made the roads quite icy and treacherous in places. Stops and starts were a bit twitchy at times, but the real trouble was with getting out of and back into the parking space. (This is a narrow road, so it's very bad form to park any further into the street than is absolutely necessary--which is defined as anything more than an inch or two from the curb! They take incredibly tight parking tolerances completely for granted here.) We had a lot of wheel-spinning getting out, and getting back in we had to give up when the back end was still a good six inches out; we'll have to move it when the snow clears up. That may take a while, because we're heading into a cold snap (hovering near freezing for the next few days!), so the snow won't have much reason to melt and may even freeze solid as it would do in the US.
But never mind all that; the important thing is that we did, in fact, buy a DVD player! It's a very good thing we're both not at all *J*1, because the first one we liked was out of stock. In fact, so was our second choice. But we were a lot more interested in not waiting than we were in which particular DVD player we ended up with, especially because they all seem to be nearly identical in features, so we just went with our third choice, there having been little to distinguish between them in the first place. Still, I can see that our decisionmaking process would horrify some people: "After much thought and careful comparison, we've settled on this one. Oh, you don't have it? OK, we'll take this one. Not that one either? All right, how about this one? Yes? Great!"
So we have it, and it is now set up, and my new Metallica DVD is playing in the background right now. I can't watch it and write this entry at the same time, but I dip into it from time to time. Like any new DVD owners, we've been amusing ourselves by playing with the extras--changing camera angles, turning on subtitles, and looking at the extra bits of footage included on the disc. Earlier, we watched part of Mike's G3 DVD, which was enjoyable for me to see just what the heck those guys are doing to make those sounds come out of their guitars. (Mike already knows, of course.)
So what else is going on? Helen and Kevin went home on Boxing Day (Tuesday) after lunch; Mike's mother and Arnie stayed through till about noon yesterday. Overall I think things went well, although by the end we were both exhausted just from the unrelenting being social. But we now have the house to ourselves again, and we're celebrating by accomplishing nothing much. We'll have to clean up again before New Year's Eve, since we're having people over again (although the expected bad weather and difficult travel conditions may change that).
Because they weren't right in front of me, I forgot to mention when cataloguing christmas presents that we got a rather tidy sum in Amazon gift certificates from my US relatives. We also have something of a mystery; we got one from my dad and Verna, and then another one from Pete and Mel, and then a third one showed up early christmas morning, with an empty "From" field. We have no idea who it could be from. It's in dollars, which suggests US, and is from amazon.com rather than .co.uk, but I thought I already knew what everyone in the US had given us. So if you sent us an Amazon gift certificate and we haven't said thank-you, this might be why...
Now the only problem is, what on earth will we spend it all on... :-)
Last night we watched a video Mike got me for christmas; it's a show by a British comedian named Eddie Izzard. He's rather...surreal. I couldn't possibly describe it adequately; perhaps it would give you an idea if I mention that within five minutes of the start, he was doing a disagreement between god and Noah (with Sean Connery's voice) about whether a speedboat would be better than an ark, because you could put the animals with long ears toward the outside and their ears would stream back in the wind. No, I think you really have to see the video to get any idea. He's crazed.
Meanwhile, more modifications to the home network. It turned out that there were some problems with the printer setup. We had it connected to the server, with a print queue that we could both connect to and use. This was the most logical setup, of course. However, most annoyingly, NT tinkers with jobs in its queues; it doesn't just treat a queue as a holding area while it spools jobs to the printer. It actually runs them through the print processor a second time, even though the client has presumably already done that. (Yet another side effect of peer-to-peer, where all clients are servers and all servers are clients. NT presumably can't tell the difference between a job spooling locally and a job already spooled from another computer's spooler. Yeccch.) This turned out to be a problem for the RiscPC; large colour jobs were modified on the way through and would print a little bit and then eject and start over. After much fiddling to determine whether we could fix it, we instead reconnected the printer to the RiscPC and Mike figured out how to share it from there.
If you're a techno-toy-freak at all, check out this...We'd been thinking about a car CD changer as our next toy, but now we're reconsidering. They're still obscenely expensive, but considering how many MP3s we already have, this seems tailor-made for us.
Strangely, although we're now a full week past the solstice, sunrise time hasn't changed at all; it's just stopped where it is (8:27). Sunset is creeping forward by a little more than a minute per day. Soon the headlong slide into longer days should start; the day here has to lengthen by more than ten hours before midsummer, so it should go very fast once it gets going. I can't complain about that. I thought midwinter would mean much shorter days here than in Massachusetts, but in the end they were only an hour shorter at their shortest.
1This is a reference to MBTI personality types. See MBTI-related links if you're curious. Aren't footnotes fun?
Created at 22:56
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
A quiet day. For most of the afternoon, H&A wasn't accessible via the Internet, so I had to do purely local tasks. I got pretty heavily into commenting the code for Lisa's Macros. I've been trying to do this for a few days now. The snag always is, I comment a few procedures, but then I notice something that needs fixing, or could be done better, or a feature that could be added...So I don't get very far on the commenting in any single session.
I'm happy that H&A finally did reappear, because I've been planning to move the lab's post office to their NT server over the weekend. If the problem was at the ISP, and nobody at H&A reported it during the day today, chances seemed pretty high that it would remain unresolved until Tuesday, which would have killed my chances of moving the post office. I'm expecting it to take a fairly long time, because I have to do the move across the WAN again. The file copy alone should take well into tomorrow sometime. I can't count on being able to finish in a single overnight operation, hence wanting to do it over the weekend.
I've started the file copy; now I just have to wait till tomorrow for the next steps...assuming I can still connect to H&A tomorrow...
So, that's it for tonight, I think. Fairly focused at the moment. Oh, I did tinker a bit with the Movie lists today, but not much else.
Whoops, wait, one more thing.
 |
Green Ivy and Snow (188 KB). One of the strangest things so far about the weather here has been seeing it snow over green grass, green leaves, green bushes...It's like seeing a snowfall in May. Sadly, we didn't think to take pictures while the grass was still peeking through, but you can get the idea from this. |
Also a correction to yesterday's entry: Mike says a minor side street like ours would never be ploughed. Only main roads would get that kind of attention. He found the idea of ploughing all the roads, no matter how minor, rather amusing until I reminded him that in New England you might have to wait three months for it to melt by itself...
Created at 23:25
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
Tomorrow we have guests coming for New Years (weather allowing), so it's housecleaning day once again.
I made some more changes to the Movies pages; I entered ratings for a lot of the movies, and as a result ended up creating a Movies - By Rating page. Well, it was either that or start the housecleaning, wasn't it?
Still haven't switched back to using !Diary yet. It seems best at this point to wait until 1 January; if I switch back now, I'll have to put all the December entries in manually, which is probably more work than it's worth.
The lab post office copy still isn't finished. Good thing I didn't try to do it overnight. I can't really complain, though; at least it hasn't lost the connection and dropped the copy halfway through. Yet. Hmm. Probably shouldn't have said that.
(Later)
Yep, definitely shouldn't have said that. Around the time the file copy must have finished, I lost the tunnel. The firewall at H&A probably crashed. I've done most of the reconfiguration dialled in via pcAnywhere, but there's a lot I can't do. Rats.
Meanwhile, I've had another go at MixPix, which is my wallpaper shuffler. I wanted it to handle jpegs as well as bitmaps, by using a command-line utility Mike found to convert jpegs to bitmaps as necessary. I've got that mostly done, except for scaling issues, rewriting it to accept both .BMP and .JPG as valid extensions at the same time interchangeably, and general cleanup. It's always scary to get back into an app I haven't looked at for months; I have to remember what the heck I did, and why...
Created at 23:49
| Archive | Previous Day Next Day | Previous Month Next Month | Back to Top |
| Copyright © 2000 Lisa Nelson. | Last Modified: 30 December 2000 | Back to Top |