So I headed over to the UK for my mum’s 80th birthday. It’s the least complicated trip over to the UK that are done for a while – although I managed to make the ending really rather complicated, but we’ll get to that in a second. The flight over was fine and apart from me screwing up the day that the rental car was meant to arrive and thus on landing having a flurry of angst inducing text messages followed by some frantic phone calls… But even that I managed to work out.
Despite fascist TERF Island being…well, itself, the weather was lovely and I had no actual issues. In fact, my mum organized a facial / makeover and it was delightful. She’s seen the same place for years and for much of the time had the same beautician. It was a all in all a super positive experience.
We spent several days up at her home striking out on day trips to Looe, Totnes and Padstow, and just generally having a pretty chill time. We obviously dropped in to the Dutchy garden centre, because it’s impossible to visit my mum without going there. Then she’d found, and her husband had booked, a house on the coast in Fowey (which is pronounced foy, incidentally). That was absolutely lovely and had delightful views of the ferry and the river.
My unwillingness to go eat in a restaurant or sit in a jam packed pub wasn’t, I don’t think, too much of an issue. I keep reading the COVID research and long term it’s just shit, so until vaccines take us to a flu-like level of death and disability I’m probably going to just continue masking.
So yes, we pottered around. I spent a lot of time talking to my mum, and I read readme.txt and The Keepers Six. I’m so glad that I got to be there though.
the journey home though has been a bit of a nightmare, although that is at least in part my own fault because I foolishly decided to believe Google. See someone nice on Mastodon shared with me a link to someone who was willing to sell a “sold as seen” z88 at non-ebay prices. Google said that this would only add 20 minutes to my journey to the airport.
I don’t quite know what caused me to believe Google in this case because I’ve driven around the area and know that the roads are tiny and slow. I think really it was just my excitement and desire to have the Z88. So I set out this morning and leaving at 5:00 a.m. having got up at 4:45. The weather forecast was pretty rough but when I got in the car it was dry and above freezing. However, the weather rapidly deteriorated and I did most of my driving today in sleet or snow, or at best rain. At various points I was stuck on single lane roads behind trucks, or better still a truck stuck behind a tractor. The extra hour i’d tacked on in addition to charging vaporized with the Volkswagen ID3 suffering from the cold temperatures and charging super slowly. It also additionally vaporized after I took a wrong turn which then led to me being stuck in a road closure / diversion situation where the diversion wasn’t really signed posted and the Google was unaware of the road closure.
…And adding a final layer of you ain’t getting to the airport on time, the final charger was broken and all the other charges at that site were in use.
Thankfully I made it to the airport and through security…where I then realized that my flight was delayed by nearly an hour. The flight itself was fine and actually I got a whole row of seats all to myself which was very pleasant, but unfortunately today someone has chosen to drive the wrong way up i-5 leading to it being closed and traffic being terrible. Which means that my beloved who is doing her best to come and collect me is stuck in the world’s most tedious traffic — and I am facing down 24 hours of being awake…
so forgive me if this isn’t the best written post.
