angharad_gam | Entries tagged with travel

...and it was moderately amusing, and since I am currently sitting in an airport departure lounge, trying not to spend all my travel allowance on books I thought I would have a go.

The idea is that you type the starting phrase into your phone's message software and then see what the predictive text throws up. You can keep going withe predictive text as long as you like I guess. I've done short and slightly longer versions of each...

Phrase 1: "I am the god of"
Short result: I am the god of the morning
Long result: I am the god of the morning by the sound of torrential rain

Phrase 2: "I woke up worried"
Short result: I woke up worried about the warden
Long result: I woke up worried about the warden the power of the morning

Which suggests that a) I text about mornings a lot b) I have been playing too much Dragon Age (the warden is the player character in one of those games) and c) I may be slightly concerned about my new role as god of the morning.

Actually, I just now noticed that I tend to select the right most of the two initial suggestions my predictive text makes. If I choose the other one, I woke up worried about the vomiting, which makes a lot more sense. Still the god of the morning though...

I didn't realise how long it had been since I posted. To be fair I was in Canberra for nearly a week with bad hotel internet, and then, not long after I got back, we were shaped for a few days. Also I have been spending a lot of time playing ESO lately and that requires me to use Andy's gaming laptop. There's no way this slow old thing could cope with ESO, but I don't want to set up any of my accounts or anything on another computer, so I haven't been checking email much and mostly doing other internet things on my phone. Supposedly we will soon (which probably means in about two years) be getting BYOD capability at work, and then I will get a lovely and exciting new laptop that can do all the things. That is my ultimous dream anyway.

The doing my boss's job and mine at the same time thing seems to being swinging strongly towards mostly doing my boss's job and not doing much of mine. However, I rather badly need to start working on some slides for a talk I am supposed to be giving at a conference in July, so I hope the pendulum will swing back the other way a bit next week. I have managed to wheedle my way out of the travel I was thinking I might have to do the week before the conference, which is helpful, but I think I have actually just postponed it until later in July. August is going to be the month of falling in a heap.

Today we had a rather nice lunch at the Blue Gums Hotel in Fairview Park. Tomorrow is gardening. Tuesday is catching up on all of my Monday meetings as well as my usual Tuesday ones.

And believe it or not, Santa has delivered...

I've been meaning to update for a while, but lazing about on holiday keeps getting in the way. There are a few things to write about, but let's start with the house...
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1. Get taxi to airport
2. Check in
3. Wait half an hour until boarding time. Discover plane has been delayed an hour. Le sigh. Thank the Elder Gods for free internet at Adelaide airport
4. Discover that plane has been further delayed for technical reasons
5. Wait total of three hours and find out that flight is cancelled. Door is broken. Concede that this is good reason not to get on plane.
6. Call hotline for new flight booking. Get told that because you booked through a travel agent, airline cannot alter booking. Think 'Now I'm screwed as I cannot contact government travel booking service unless I am actually at work'
7. Notice that colleague has managed to call hotline and is getting new flight booked despite this
8. Try hotline again. Talk to different person who rebooks flight.
9. Go home, for a total of 4.5 hours round trip going precisely nowhere.
10. Get taxi to airport. Get stuck in terrible, terrible traffic. When it seems it cannot possibly get any worse, get stopped at level crossing by train.
11. Arrive at airport 10 mins before boarding time.
12. Notice that check-in queue is very, very, very long. Join anyway.
13. Notice that most other people in check-in queue have boarding passes for your flight. Guy behind you says he was also stuck in traffic. Begin to feel somewhat safer.
14. Get to gate just in time to start boarding
15. Fly to Melbourne (yes, Melbourne)
16. Sit in Melbourne airport for 2 hours
17. Get on plane to Canberra
18. Arrive in Canberra at 3pm the day after you intended to get there, having missed a large (and important) chunk of the conference you were going to attend.

It must have been the week for it. Several other colleagues also had issues with significant flight delays or cancellations on the way there or back.

Liam was still ill on the weekend, and got worse, so we took him back to the doctor and got a diagnosis of pharyngitis. Then Erin got it. And I have had a stuffy head since the weekend too. Which was unfortunate because on Tuesday I had a short sharp and shiny visit to Melbourne for a big meeting. As a result of which I've spent the last two days with my left ear blocked up. It seems to be going at least, which is good. I once had my ears clogged up for more than two weeks after flying with a cold. It was not fun.

And the hayfever on top of that, of course.

Despite the lurgy I came home from yoga feeling pretty good this evening, only to find my first rejection slip in my inbox. Which has put a surprising dent on my good mood. I keep telling myself I will take these sorts of things in my stride and it totally never works. Although I think the cowardice that kept me from having this experience earlier in my life has possibly done me good service here. I might once have found this discouraging. Now the overwhelming feeling is 'dammit, more work!'

So I suppose this becomes a kind of confession - yes, I write. Some of you probably know this. I've been writing for, well, pretty much since I could. There seem to be two kinds of writers - those who keep it to their chests and those who rush about showing their work off at every opportunity. I morphed from the latter to the former some time during the massive crisis in self-confidence that was partly why I dropped out of university, perhaps understandably. So I don't talk about it much. I also came as close as I ever have to stopping writing for a while around the time I got pregnant with Erin (losing 50k words of the book I'd been writing in a hard drive meltdown probably didn't help).

But then when Liam was a baby and I was having somewhat of another mental health crisis I picked up the pen again, and I haven't really put it down since. Things progress slowly. Very slowly. I don't have a lot of time, and I don't devote as much energy to it as I should. But somehow I seem to have written a book.

Also I just got a copy of Guild Wars 2. I've avoided MMORPGs so far because I just can't afford the time to get sucked in. But this one looked so good on Good Game. If I'm not back in a week someone may have to come in and get me.

Current Mood: surprised

...anyone know anything fun to do at Sydney airport?

Apart from drink lots of tea because this coffee shop appears to be the only place in the whole airport with a power point?

Actually, I've ridden out most of my stopover time here already, and I only have an hour-ish until I can board my flight. I don't envy the person sitting next to me. It is now about 48 hrs since I had a shower and it was awfully hot in Ottawa before I left (as I believe I have already mentioned). However I'm not too tired as I managed to get about seven hours sleep on the plane from Vancouver. Over all coming back seems to have thrown me out far less (so far) than going over. Not sure if it's inherent in the direction of travel, or just the timing of the flights - the flight from Vancouver was both late night/early morning Canada time and evening/night Australia time so by either clock it was a reasonable time to sleep.

I have made it this far relatively unscathed. I was a bit worried about the zip on the front pocket of my suitcase because I stuffed it so full of books that it broke when I tried to close it (serve me right for buying a cheap suitcase - to add to which the handle broke when I pulled it off the carousel here in Sydney). However I fixed it and it seems to have survived thus far. Only two more baggage-handling crews to get through. Maybe I should get a Kindle. The only other problem so far is that I left a packet of stuff on the plane that mostly contained receipts and other non-vital stuff. Well, the receipts are important, but not urgently so. By the time I discovered this I was already at the Sydney domestic terminal and I couldn't face going back (it would involve leaving the domestic terminal, getting a bus back to the international terminal, possibly going through security again, leaving the international terminal, getting the bus back to the domestic terminal, going through security again...I probably had the time for it, but so not the motivation - I just want to go home!). Anyway they will mail it to me, so that is ok. And I will just have to fob off the travel people reconciling my receipts and so on for a few days.

Okay so maybe I lied about the tired. I'm just not as tired as I know it is possible to be...

Current Mood: indescribable

Pretty brain fried tonight after doing what I actually came here to do and working all day. But then I was kind of tired yesterday too. It's all starting to catch up with me I think, and I'm beginning to look forward to coming home.

Anyway, yesterday I went to the Museum of Civilisarions and took a few pics, some of which worked out better than others.

The Museum of Civilisation is pretty much directly across the river from the parliament, except that side of the river is actually a different city called Gatineau, which is actually in Quebec. So not only does Ottawa have a passing resemblance to Canberra, but also to Albury-Wodonga (or possibly Ankh-Morpork).

And there are lots of big photos, so I'm putting in a cut...

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Current Mood: tired

...car maintenant je suis en Ottawa!

Ironically enough I had one of my first meetings at Statistics Canada this afternoon and they said they couldn't give me a report on the project I was interested in because the report was written in French!

The trip from Montreal to Ottawa was relatively painless - albeit on one of those little planes that feels like a tin can (I don't know how they managed to squeeze my suitcase on there - it has mysteriously acquired 3kg while I was in Montreal (I only bought three books there, and they weren't even very big ones)). It got a bit bumpy coming in over Ottawa and the lady sitting next to me was looking very nervous.

I managed to navigate my way to Statistics Canada by bus, but wussed out and came back by taxi because I was starting to feel a bit meh. I am feeling a bit tonsillitis-y, but I am hoping that this is just the tail end of the mucous monster, as I would like to get out and about in Ottawa over the weekend. The museum here is supposed to be quite good, and there is a Van Gogh exhibition on at the art gallery (although I wonder what the queues are like).

Last night was the conference dinner. I went back to my hotel room and passed out for half an hour first. I probably would have slept right through it if I hadn't set an alarm. Then I would have probably had a reasonable night's sleep except that someone from Australia tried to ring me at 3:40am.

This hotel is a lot more upmarket than the one I stayed in in Montreal, but I think the food prices are going bankrupt me (no more room service for angharad). Also there is no kettle just a coffee maker - which I have finagled into producing some slightly coffee flavoured tea for me. However it may be worth it just for the bathroom...oh my god the bath in this place...

Quack!

No, I have a cold. I starting feeling stuffy yesterday shortly after I got up and now I'm feeling stuffier. You know the way some colds are little sniffles that make you feel a bit rotten and snuffly, and others are total mucous monsters? This one is a mucous monster. Fortunately I have some Codral, and there is a pharmacy just around the corner anyway. Hmmm...I wonder if Canada still has cold medicines with pseudo-ephedrine in them, as the 'new formula' stuff with pseudo-epephrine in instead has never seemed to work as well to me (here's a hint pharmaceutical companies - just because the name sounds the same doesn't mean it does the same thing!)

The colleague who was on the same plane from Sydney as me is also sick, so I'm guessing this is an example of

irreparable's plane crud. Yay!

However I did manage to actually have three fairly square meals yesterday and between the cold and the codral (or possibly finally beginning to acclimatise) slept three hours when I took an early minute from the conference and six last night. I also spoke to a conference attendee from NZ who was having the same sleeping problems, which made me feel rather more cheerful and relaxed about it.

Current Mood: sick

...and how!

Came back from the conference this afternoon and lay on the couch for a moment. When I opened my eyes it was suddenly four hours later. Still I slept badly last night and, of course, hardly at all in the 48hrs preceding so perhaps not entirely surprising. Of course I have now slept right through the dinner hour and can't really bring myself to eat at 10pm in the evening. Strangely I'm not hungry, which I hope is because I had a large lunch and not because I'm going to wake up ravenous at 5am. As opposed to waking up at 5am just because that is when the sun rises here at the moment.

And just now there was a street protest which seemed like a strange time for one (at 10:15pm on a Tues night) given the streets were pretty much empty. Perhaps they just didn't want to go out in the rain. It was raining Queensland style for most of the afternoon. There was another protest on Monday at lunchtime, which seemed like more sensible timing. All something to do with students and the grand prix or something - I haven't been watching the news much.

Anyway I got the two talks I was due to give out of the way today, so hopefully now I can relax and enjoy the rest of the conference. And maybe try to get my sleep/eat cycle in some kind of order.

Current Mood: groggy

So I made it to Montreal. I am badly in need of a shower and a long sleep and my stomach is completely out of synch with the time of day, but I'm here. I have basically crammed two and half days on planes into the last 24 hours or so. Time travel is not as much fun as it's made out to be. Also, business class is awesome.

First dazed impressions of Montreal - there are a lot of those concrete freeways on stilts, there is far more French here than I expected (all the billboards and other advertising are in French) and tipping is freaking me out. I need to go spend some money so I have some change. First plans for the morning might be find a convenience store to buy milk and tea (only non-dairy creamer powder in the hotel room :-P).

Off to have that shower before I fall asleep on the couch....