Christmas
When I was a boy, Christmas was a big cart full of exciting magical surprises, shackled to a tiny, geriatric snail. Nowadays it feels more like a lorry full of concrete with an annoying siren on top, that you can hear and be mildly irritated by from a long way off, but then comes roaring over the hill when you least expect it, giving you only a fraction of a second to leap out of the way, and every year that lorry gets upgraded with a bigger, faster engine and even more concrete.
I used to be such a fan of Christmas as well, even well into my adulthood. I am worried that my growing Scrooginess may be an early symptom of turning into my dad.
We are going back to Texas this year, and even though the date is approaching quite rapidly and causing a little last-minute panic, I am looking forward to it. Even the actual travel isn't too bad. It's a long flight, but sitting about reading, playing my DS, and having food brought to me - even if it is some of the worst food known to man - sounds like a good way to spend a day to me, though the inevitable airport security faff I could live without. Rest assured, I shall be nailing my passport to my forehead. We wouldn't want a repeat of the Munich incident, would we?
Don't try robbing our flat when we're away, as we have a cat-sitter keeping our little furry brats company, who is an expert in the deadly arts. Possibly.
Labels: christmas, diary, travel
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Sunday, October 14, 2007
Stupid, Stupid Day
Right now I'm supposed to be on a 'plane flying to Munich. For dull, worky purposes, yes, but I was looking forward to visiting a new city I had never been to before, and getting a change of scenery for a few days. This day has been, however, not mine. The shower breaking down for the nth time was irritating enough, and the taxi driver deciding that the heavy-but-moving traffic on the motorway was too busy and choosing a heavily-clogged back-road instead made me nervous that I was going to miss my flight. I got there without too much time to spare, paid the man, jammed my passport and ticket into my back pocket, and high-tailed it through the car-park to the terminal entrance, only to find when I got there that my passport was no longer with me. I retraced my steps three or four times, asked around, went to the lost-property office, but to no avail, and had to slink off home, defeated.
I had assumed that someone had lifted it from my back pocket. It seemed to be in there quite securely, when I headed to the terminal, and there were a lot of people around. Surely, if it had just fallen out, someone would have spotted it and caught up with me. But no - I got a phone call this evening from the airport to say that it had been handed in. Where it had been in the intervening hours, I cannot say. But man, do I feel like a tube, and I'm not particularly looking forward going into work tomorrow and telling the whole embaressing story over and over again.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Big Skies
To someone used to the green hills of Scotland, the Texan landscape can seem pretty flat and monotonous. But if there's one way in which the state does trump my homeland it's in the quality of its skies, particularly at dusk. As we drove towards downtown Austin this evening, the skyline was backlit by pale yellow/green clouds, occasionally split by great stabs of lightning. Texas doesn't mess around when it comes to weather.
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postHotel San Jose
On Sunday R started feeling poorly again, but insisted that I go to the reception and represent Sid's Glasgow friends. I was glad that I did. Partly because it was a lot of fun, partly because the food was awesome, and partly because other than the best man and his wife none of Sid's other friends from the UK were able to make it. He's a fairly taciturn individual but I think he was glad to see someone from home other than his family. Moving to New Jersey from Glasgow is going to be a huge adjustment for him, and I hope he does well. He'll will very much be missed both as a friend and a colleague - though he will still be working for the company, so we'll keep in touch via MSN and email, and he'll probably be back in the UK a couple of times a year.
I did feel bad leaving R hurting in the hotel, so left early and went back. Here's a quick travel tip that certainly applies to hotels in New Jersey and probably elsewhere in the US. If you go down to the front desk and ask them to order you a taxi, chances are they've made a deal with a "private car" service and will order one of those instead, costing you (as we discovered to our expense) an arm and a leg. Better to find a local cab company yourself and order your own.
Anyway, it was just as well that I didn't stay too late, as we had to get up early in the morning and fly to Texas. R felt poorly on the plane, but ever since landing on home turf she's been much better. We've had a couple of days of family time, and today we drove down to Austin for some welcome relief from having to run around like headless chickens, as per most of this trip so far. Last Xmas we spent a couple of days at the San Jose hotel, and loved it so much that when we decided we needed a relaxing treat after all our latest drama we chose to book another stay here. Right now it's warm and muggy, and I'm sitting on the porch outside our room taking advantage of the free wi-fi and listening to peals of thunder in the distance, drinking red wine, and feeling pretty good.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Karmic Payback
So, after yesterday being amazing, today has, thus far, been shite. Due to directional mishaps and unreliable cab drivers we have missed the actual wedding that we came all this way to attend, and are going to have to just go to the reception this evening.
I am less than happy.
A Good Day
My life is pretty boring for the most part. A dreary cycle of work and tv and drizzle. But every so often you have a moment which makes you go "wow - is this really my life?", and I had one of those today, while in a yellow cab being driven at frightening speeds through downtown New York. My actual thoughts were something along the lines of "Fuck me! I'm in a fucking cab in New York! Fuck!"
The day got off to a shakey start, as I mentioned. We did manage to drag ourselves into the city, but R was still feeling bad. We got on the uptown tour bus, and stayed on it for most of the loop around one side of Central Park, around Harlem, and down the other side, getting off near the Whitney Museum to meet R's friends Kaylene and Dan (plus their three-month-old son Easton.) R started to feel better after a wander around the psychedelia exhibit and an awesome bloody mary in the cafe, and afterwards we went for a wee walk round Central Park, before getting a cab to the East Village to meet up with Joe. We went for sushi, then he took us for a walk arond his neighbourhood as the sun was going down. We went to see Hitchcock's Rope at a local cinema. It's a great film anyway, but the audience were really into it, laughing at the innuendo and gasping theatrically at the tense bits, which made the experience even more fun. We could have stayed out longer, but it's been a long day and we have to get up in the morning to go to Sid's wedding.
I realise I'm dashing this off quickly before bed, and it's rather dry and sparse on detail, but I just wanted to get down some little sense of what was an awesome day before I forget about it. I just wish we had more time in New York. Two days was never going to be enough at the best of times, and with our currently reduced capacity it's even less so. There are a million more things we'd like to do, but we'll just have to come back another time. It's truely an amazing, exciting city.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Something about mice laying things.
So we were up early as planned, but R is feeling poorly so we're going to just take the day as it comes. If we manage to get some quality tourism done then grand, but if not... well, the situation is not ideal and we both came prepared to spend time convalescing instead of running around town. We'll just have to come back at some time in the future when we're both in better shape, physically and emotionally.
We spent most of our time in the city yesterday on a tour bus built in Glasgow (yay!) and owned and operating by gay-hating Brian Souter's Stagecoach group (boo!). It's one of those tours where you can get off at any stop along the way, and get on the next bus to come around when you're done. Though we weren't able to get off and explore as much as we liked, we had several different tour guides, the best being a quite funny and intensely Brooklyn-proud Gilbert Gottfried soundalike, and worst a dude who sounded just like Cat Face. ("This was the home of Washington Irvine, author of the book Rip Van Winkley.")
Anyway, we've arranged to meet some friends of R's for lunch at noon, which gives us plenty of time to get ourselves together, though will require some navigating in the big city. Yesterday was swelteringly hot, and although it's quite cool and cloudy this morning, the forcast is for even greater heat later today. Yikes. If we survive, we're pencilled in to have dinner with my mate Joe this evening, who has invited us to crash at his East Village apartment tonight. That would be cool but I think returning to home base will have to be the plan.
NYC
Sweltering in Secaucus, a New Jersey suburb whose only saving grace is that it's a 20 minute bus ride from downtown Manhattan. We got in on Wednesday after an uneventful flight to find the state cool and cloudy. The taxi ride to the hotel would have yielded a good view of the New York skyline from the New Jersey turnpike, but with all the low cloud all we got was an unpleasant distopian landscape of smokestacks and powerlines, which nonetheless made me smile, the pleasing sense of unfamiliarity reminding me that I was on holiday. For the rest of the day we stayed in the hotel and surrounding environs, trying to stay awake until a reasonable time, and straying no further than the mall on the other side of the highway. When we got there it looked closed, but we tried a door and found another creepy future scene, or perhaps one from Dawn of the Dead. All the shops, bar about four, were shuttered and empty, as though a plague had swept through the place overnight. The few that were open all had defiant "We are not closing down! We are here to stay!" signs outside. Creepiest of all, though, was the huge white head that grinned at as from behind one set of anonymous shutters.
Today we were up at the crack of dawn, still not quite on local time, and got the bus into New York. Stepping onto the street in downtown New York for the first time, you experience a degree of sensory overload that makes it hard not to just panic and stand slack-jawed. It takes a while to get used to the people, the noise, the traffic, and long skyscraper canyons. We paid through the nose for tour bus tickets, and we spent most of the day being stereotypical New York tourists. It's an amazing, exhilarating place, but man, it's hard work.
I could write a lot more, but I'm flagging. Tomorrow we're planning on getting up early and getting the very first bus into the city. Today some of the tourist attractions were just too busy to deal with - the Empire State Building had a queue stretching around the block - and we're hoping that we'll beat that by getting there first thing.
Labels: new york, photos, travel
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postMonday, July 16, 2007
Iceland officially "Happiest place in the world"*
According to some study or other.
It is a place I'd love to return to, but could I live there? It'd certainly be an adventure, but I don't know how I'd cope with those long winter nights. I find winter in Glasgow hard enough.
* - Well, ok, in Europe. I really should actually read the things I post about first.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Supersoggy
Back from a very wet Birmingham and the very loud Supersonic festival. It looked like it was going to be a bit of a washout when we arrived on Friday, and after getting something to eat and checking into our accomodation we took a look at the downpour outside and decided to give the short opening evening of the festival a miss and ended up just staying in and watching telly.
Fortunately the sun came out on Saturday and dried the city out, allowing us to toddle around the shops and check out the botanic gardens before heading over to the Custard Factory for some sonic abuse. I won't go into the actual bands, since a Diskant article is on the cards, but a good and loud time was had by all present.
This morning the rain returned with a vengence, and our wee prop plane go a bit of a battering on its way back to Glasgow. Now I'm full of takeaway Chinese and wondering if I've got tomorrow off or not. I put in for the holiday last week through the work intranet but never got a confirmation, so I might be working and I might not. Bah.
When I clicked "Post and publish" on my first version of this entry, Poster threw an exception and lost it. Believe it or not, this is a good thing, since it's allowed me to spot and fix a bug. I lose posts so you don't have to!
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
New York I love you, but you're freaking me out.
Still stupidly busy, this time with stupid work requiring me to work stupidly late. On the bright side, though, our mate Sid is getting married in New Jersey in August, and has invited us to the wedding. This I am stupidly excited about, largely because I want to be there for him when he gets hitched - I'm not sure how many of his friends are going to be able to make it over - and largely because it's just a short drive between there and New York: a city I've wanted to visit for a long time, and finally will. I cannot wait. While we're on the North American continent, we'll also be taking advantage of cheap internal flights and heading down to Texas for a week or so, which will be grand. If I don't burn to crisp. Texas in August is HOT, and not in a nice summer holiday way. Still, given the driech non-summer we're having in Scotland, some scorching heat might be welcome.
My calendar for this weekend contains precisely bugger-all. For this, also, I cannot wait.
Labels: new york, texas, travel
link | 2 comment(s) | links to this postFriday, December 29, 2006
Hotel San Jose
"I'd crawl over broken glass to sniff the exhaust of the truck that took her underwear to the cleaners."
- Patrick, a very drunk Dubliner now resident in Austin, describing his wife Andrea last night.
Posting from the San Jose hotel, Austin, Tx, the morning after an excellent birthday night out. In Dallas we had to scrape ice off the car, but down here it's like the height of summer in Scotland, and we wandered around last night in t-shirts quite comfortably. We hung around the hotel bar for a while waiting for Jonathon, who never turned up, but wound up talking to the aforementioned Irish/Texan couple who talked a mile a minute, bought me birthday drinks, and after a quick slice of pizza across the road, took us to their favourite dive bar, the nearby Horseshoe lounge. On the way we passed a goat in someone's front yard, and a large cannister of liquid nitrogen just hanging out on the pavement.
God, I love Austin.
Anyway, we didn't get obliterated, just nicely drunk, and got to bed around 1am. This morning I just have a slightly fuzzy head rather than a full-blown hangover, which is just as it should be.
The San Jose isn't the swankiest hotel we've ever stayed in, but it certainly is the coolest. Tastefully minimal decor, friendly staff, and lots of cute little details, such as the iPod dock on the clock radio, and the warning sign on the heater controls being written in haiku. Pretentious? Aye, but so what? I'm having fun.
It's raining a little bit this morning, but it's still warm, and the pool is heated so I think we're going to a have a quick dip before going for some breakfast. Big cheesy grins all round!
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Merry Christmas from Texas
Although it's technically not Christmas in more in the UK, but I'm trying not to think about that since my body clock is still as confused as confused can be. Despite being delayed for 24 hours, our journey over was as smooth as smooth can be, with both flights departing and arriving pretty much on time, and even a decent selection of in-flight movies on the trip across the atlantic, including the sentimental-but-good Little Miss Sunshine. We were stuck in the middle row, but being at the front of economy class meant extra leg-room. We had no windows in sight, unfortunately, making the flight a somewhat abstract experience, particularly when landing in Dallas, when we thought that sudden bump was us entering a bad path of turbulence, then realised that we were, in fact, on the ground.
Christmas dinner was spent at one the house of one of R's many brothers, and a good time was had by all, despite the presence of a great number of over-excited nieces and nephews. Right now, though, I am craving vegetables and brown bread, having eaten so much enough fatty food over the past few days to give an elephant a heart attack.
Tomorrow we hit the sales, and then on Thursday (my birthday) we are heading down to Austin.
Hope you are all having a fun and low-stress festive season!
Labels: austin, movies, texas, travel
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postSaturday, December 23, 2006
Feliz Navidad
Hello. Remember me? I used to blog here once upon a time. Anyway, Merry Christmas to you. Right now we should be 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean on our way to spend the holiday season in Texas with R's family, but the thick blanket of fog that has shrouded London for last couple of days has delayed our departure until tomorrow. It's a bit irritating, but I'm not too wound-up about it. There's not much that anybody can be expected to do about it, other than book us on the next available flight. We're just trying to have a nice, chilled Saturday. It looks like the weather is improving, so we're not anticipating any further trouble, and we should get there for Christmas day.
R and I have already exchanged presents, since there's no point in flying them to the US just to fly them back again. Amongst other things, she got me the excellent documentary about the Pixies "Loud Quiet Loud", which we watched last night. We haven't bothered with a tree this year, since we're going to be away, but we did put the fairly lights back up in the window, and for the first time I started to feel quite festive. I think I've been a bit stressed out about the million-and-one things I had to do before we went away, and the extra day's delay has helped me relax a little.
I've started thinking about New Year's resolutions already. I wasn't going to make any, since they are largely the same every year and are never honoured, but being in an unusually "glass-half-full" mood, I suppose that if you make them, at least there's a CHANCE they'll be kept, and my documenting them the embarrassment of not doing so might inspire action. Or depression. But anyway... in 2007 I shall endeavour to:
- Make more music.
- Lose some weight.
- Procrastinate less.
- Blog more.
Do wish me luck.
Despite resolution #4, it may well be the New Year before I blog again, so have a good one and see you then... link | 0 comment(s) | links to this post
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Icelandic Photos
I took over 120 photos over the weekend. Lucky for you I only have a free Flickr account, so here are a few of the best ones.
Labels: iceland, photos, travel
link | 1 comment(s) | links to this postWednesday, September 13, 2006
Back
Iceland was cold, wet, and gray...
... and I loved every minute of it.
More soon, once I get the pictures uploaded.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Bagger
Last Sunday I went hillwalking again, and bagged my first Munro by climbing Beinn Chabhair. It wasn't a bad day, even though it had rained before we arrived, required a lot of squelching across boggy marshland to get to the bottom of the hill proper. Getting muddy was all part of the fun, though. Sadly, my camera ran out of batteries, and I had to make do with taking inadequate photos of the amazing scenery with my crappy cameraphone. It was hard work, and I arrived home completely exhausted, being, as I am, exceptionally unfit, but there's a definite sense of achievement, also.
One down, 283 to go, then.
This next week will be a busy one, culminating in our trip to Iceland. The flat is a total state, and since we've got a friend coming over to look after the cats while we're gone it could do with a tidy up. Plus R needs a jacket and some decent walking shoes, we're going to see A Scanner Darkly tomorrow afternoon and Devendra Banhart in the evening, and we might get along to the Indian Summer festival on Sunday, if we have time and funds. Jings.
Feeling in a bit of a rut today, though. Partly it's cyclical, but it's exacerbated by the state the flat is in and the stalled projects that time and inspiration have put on hold. I was writing an article about The Wicker Man for Diskant, which I hoping to get finished before the remake came out. That was yesterday and it's still not done. Grrr...
Labels: movies, music, scotland, travel, walking
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postThursday, August 03, 2006
Hello... ?
I don't seem to have anything to say any more. I should probably just stick to noises, then.
We're going to Iceland next month, though. I'm looking forward to that.
I've just ordered a DS Flash Cart that will allow me to run emulators and homebrew apps on my favourite console ever. I've even been browsing some tutorials on developing for the thing, and it looks slightly less impossible than I had imagined.
Labels: diary, games, iceland, travel
link | 1 comment(s) | links to this postSaturday, April 22, 2006
Fluhffeh Buhnneh
"Make sure you take your brolly. It's an awful wet place," said my mum, queen of the optimists, when we told her we were going to Manchester.
Naturally it was warm and sunny the whole time, and the first rain we saw was upon leaving the station on arrival back in Glasgow.
Calexironandwine were fab, though the Manchester academy is a hot, hot place in which to be.
R is tickled with the Northern English accent - particularly around the Bolton area - and we had fun listeneing to the accents change as we travelled down and back again.
I had never been to Manchester before, but liked the little we saw a lot, and would happily go back. Many, many great record shops, amongst other things, and we had to keep our blinkers on to stop us from spending far far far too much money. Anyway, a fab little break, and one all too short.