While we were overseas on our recent jaunt, we took the advice of many people and wore our wallets in our front pockets.  They were also chained to our belt loops, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Since I have returned home, I have continued wearing my newly-acquired wallet (from Paris!  Probably made in China) in my front pocket.  Even though it is still not without pain, I find that my back feels a lot better now.  My assumption was that I had been sleeping better, but now that I think about it I believe that sitting without a wallet under one of my cheeks for hours at a time is the reason.  My wallet was often quite slim, too, as I hate having a Costanza-esque wallet.

My back still does hurt a little, but I think that it’s mostly due to the sedentary lifestyle I lead.  I find that when I do a small amount of stretching or exercise it feels a lot better.

So take it from me, wallet-sitters, you’re doing yourself damage.

On our first day in London, Justine and I meet a small teddy bear named Hamley. Hamley was just hanging with a group of friends when we met him, but he was polite — in the ye olde British sense — and friendly.

Since he was so friendly towards us, we asked if he would like to come along on our holiday with us. To our surprise, he agreed and gleefully left his friends for an adventure followed by a new life in Australia.

Imagine my surprise then, when a new flickr contact popped into my list earlier today.

It seems some teddy bears are more proficient with computers than I thought. I might need to password-protect the computers at home.

Well, we landed safely a few minutes to eight last night. We bought our maximum 4.5 litres of alcohol and instead of using the ePassport checkin, we went through the normal way together — the ePassport line was short, but incredibly slow so we switched — which was lucky since we had to go through together to get the booze in.

After impatiently waiting for our bags we were faced with an incredibly long line for customs, but like about half of the other people there, we pushed in to make things go faster. Nothing was confiscated, though we thought a wooden hat purchased from a lady on a boat in Thailand may have been. Probably wise to have declared it, though.

We were greeted by what I can only call the “cheering paparazzi” as we strolled out of immigration; very embarrassing but it was fun anyway. I’m disappointed they didn’t have a badly drawn up card with our names misspelled somehow.

On the hazy trip home — we only had a few minutes sleep on the plane and had woken up at 4am Bangkok time — Justine began to freak out that she’d forgotten a Venetian mask that she had been carrying in a separate bag the entire time since Venice (about three weeks) to avoid crushing it. We stopped and thankfully it was quickly found.

We had a bit of a chat at Dad’s house and I showed a few photos and then I drove home where, upon pulling into the drive way, things went a bit strange. On seeing the exterior, and then the interior of the house, for some reason it didn’t feel like my house even though I knew perfectly well it was. Justine mentioned the same thing before I had a chance to say it so obviously I wasn’t alone. Quite a surreal thing walking around your own house, knowing the place intimately yet it not feeling like yours.

When I woke this morning (not that I slept much, a few hours maybe) the place still felt distant but a lot better than the night previous. Since we both couldn’t sleep we got up and unwrapped all our souvenirs; it felt very much like Christmas.

It’s three o’clock and I have just realised that I have not yet had lunch, or eaten anything except for two chocolates at all. Isn’t being a zombie from jet lag fun? There are a few photos I had put online at http://storage.bludger.org/images/trip/ but in my current state I don’t know if they look very good or not — I know the photos are fine but the processing might be a bit off, which is why they are there for now.

We can almost count the hours using our fingers and toes until we leave now. Things are getting exciting! If we’ve forgotten to buy or arrange anything important before we go, it’s pretty much too late now.

The blog seems quite stable; I just upgraded to the recently-released version 2.2.2 and that seems to have gone well. I changed the Gravatar default images to a more interesting one, but if you plan on commenting here every now and then you should register over at their site to use whatever avatar image you like! Any other site that uses Gravatars will use the same image when you post on that site too; it’s not tough to install on your own site if you’ve got a blog.

Even though I’ll be computerless for seven weeks (a daunting challenge in and of itself), I certainly won’t be gadgetless. I have my backpack that thinks it’s a transformer (you can hide the straps away), my GPS receiver and datalogger to track our every move and of course the portable storage device to look after our digital photos (and let us watch TV and listen to music) so at least I won’t be out of the electronic device loop.

The “big list” of things to do before we depart is getting ever shorter, but so is the amount of time until we depart.  Obviously, one of the larger things I’d wanted to cross off the list is the introduction of this website, but there are still heaps of (very minor) little things left.

As I put on Facebook, I need to buy small bits and pieces (most importantly a new battery for my camera) but there are bigger things to organise, like accommodation.

We have accommodation in both London and Paris locked in, as well as preliminary bookings in Amsterdam and Munich, though we haven’t paid so they could be lost if we wait too long.  On the other hand, we also want to ensure we aren’t stuck having to travel across three countries just to make a booking.

Back on the topic of lists, the list of things to do when we eventually get back is growing longer and longer as well — there are things to buy, things that need fixing, things that need doing.  To put our lives “on hold” for seven weeks while we’re away has required us to almost put our lives on hold for months prior, as well.  Scrimping and saving are not enjoyable but will definitely pay off in the long run.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, yes, and it’s simply because I wanted the “Congratulations Justine” notice to stay front and centre so everyone could appreciate it.

For the past week or so, there have been a small but constant stream of ants crawling all over my desk at work. I’m constantly seeing an ant or two moving across my desk — even now as I type — and I’ll usually give them a flick or blow in their direction to fling them into something that’s on my desk.

My desk isn’t the only one with ants, and it’s not the only thing with ants in the office. The office pool cars also get ants occasionally which is not only annoying, but I’m sure incredibly dangerous. It might not sound dangerous, no, but when you are driving in traffic, and you see an ant crawling along the steering wheel, which takes your eyes off the road. Well, let’s just say it could be bad.

That’s my mini-vent for now, and I will try to get back into the habit of blogging as I will soon need to write a hell of a lot for our upcoming odyssey.

While driving to work this morning, I was listening to some music through the mp3 CD player in Justine’s car. I was listening to We Are Scientists when the player started skipping; the way it was skipping was quite interesting.

Instead of endlessly skipping a small section like with a broken CD, or jumping back a few seconds like with a scratched record, or even playing garbled sounds for a few seconds like with a damaged mp3, the disc was doing a combination of all three: it would jump backwards and forwards, play a few seconds and jump back, play a second and then jump forward. I let it go for around thirty seconds before I took the disc out of the player.

It was covered in condensation!

I’ve never seen this before, so excuse my apparent excitement in that previous comment. Almost the entire surface of the bottom of the disc was “foggy”, just like the car windows were this morning. Wiping the disc on my jeans while waiting at a red light, I put it back in and it played fine.

I’m not sure this is part of the normal operating environment for a CD player.