Tales of Travel and Woe

So now that we have some distance from it the travel leaves not much to tell. Monday was the longest day ever. The alarm went off at 4 am PST so Sara could run the kitties to cargo at 4:30. We started cleaning up and packed our luggage into the van to make our getaway and had breakfast with my parents (the last real waffles I've had since: sadness). Then errands and waiting. We mailed my computer some of Rona's toys etc. (which have another 2-4 weeks to arrive) and headed to the airport. Rona travled pretty well and even handled the sprint in the backpack from one side of the Minneapolis airport to the other. Things went sideways once we actually got to cargo in London to pick up the kitties. Someone forgot to stamp out paperwork so they couldn't let them into the country without paying for a UK vet to come check them out. So it was either pay $300 to get them checked out, $300 to euthanize them or another $1200 to send them back to the states. This sucked up pretty much all of our free time in London to see slownewsday and giantlaser We touched down at 9 am GMT but I didn't leave the airport until 1 pm with Rona so we could sort of catch up with slownewsday.

( it just kind of keeps going on like this )

Pretty much since then it's been go to the store, buy electricity (our meter is inside the flat and you prepay), go to school, walk around. I did make it out for a day of shooting the town and we have in the past few days finally gotten into a decent routine. We have library cards. Our landlord is awesome enough that he was willing to wait for our bank account to be open before he demanded October's rent (the account should sometime in the first week...) rethought invited us to dinner last week to meet Jayne, neepheid and percible and sometime in the next week or so I'll get to start playing in a 2nd edition (for retro purposes) campaign. We are very excited to be here still. Grateful to have had even the little time we did with Jayme and Tyler and looking forward to have so much less traumatic adventures.

Edit: Jane probably spells her name the normal way rather than like the hero of Kanten. Apparently she does. I am still, obviously, a huge nerd.

Hey Kids!

New photos starting here!

Why Does This International Move Hate Me So?

Things I discovered today that I really didn't want to have learned:

The speedtouch 330 USB ADSL modem is such a piece of shite that attempting a video conference in iChat (which I enthusiastically sold both mine and Sara's parents on) will hose my entire internet connection.

ichat can have port conflicts with Vonage our stateside phone service (which is still an answering service since I got such a crap modem to begin with.

And to think I hated my old Arescom DSL modem.

frickin razmafrazzin farbot