18th April 2010 (Sunday)

Once again – huge thanks to the Pie for such a fantastic ‘comment’ more of a post than the original, as ever. Hope the Natural History Museum proves to be of great entertainment tomorrow. Damn it, everyone loves a Natural History museum, they’re great. You’re bound to have a good time. And I have to say, the U.S. postal service seems to be bending its inefficiencies entirely to your favour, it’s quite extraordinary how many strange encounters you’ve had with it already, considering you’ve only been in the country a short while. Excellent finding another non-Californian – rock on, that’s what I say. You should definitely form an underground movement that brings up children ‘old school’ and cracks open a bottled of wine per evening at least. They’ll never find you, and once you’re strong enough you can take over the world. … sorry, getting carried away. By now have a rather vivid image of ‘California Fascism’ – shall we call it ‘Califascist’ for short - and the image is thoroughly hateful so of course gorges rise at the thought, and visions of revenge emerge. I do beg your pardon.
Doings. Over here. Hm. Well, decided that we MUST get out (no longer being strapped to the loo by necessity) so we went to the Hunter Valley Wetlands Centre – as a local attraction that was as yet unvisited. Hm. Well it would have been perfectly pleasant if a) there were any animals - b) apart from mosquitoes, the size of tanks. Of course, we lathered up with insect repellent before setting out, and it made not the slightest difference – all we did was return as bumpy as toads. Now there were some Magpie geese and some ibises, but apart from that the place was a desert of cracking mud, mosquitoes, reeds and brambles and an unearthly hum and crackle of vast powelines busily poisoning the area immediately above the walkway. Well it was nice to be out in the open, anyway. When we were out yesterday, the Non was walking along and suddenly exclaimed – ‘I have two feet!’ … to which I explained to the Mr that we’d been indoors for a long time. We also noticed that there was a large glowing orb in the sky, which hurts if you look at it directly, and apparently it’s called the Sun, or some such. Have you heard of it? Extraordinary.

Having dealt with the wetlands centre quite conclusively (including leisurely picnic lunch) by 1:30), we decided to tackle the problem of the still-non-functioning television at the local stores. Well we thought we’d solved it admirably – got a separate set-top box to decode, a hard drive usb attachment) to record, and a DVD player, all for well within $300, including the adaptor plugs and so on needed. All seemed to be working well for a while but after a minute or so the DVD player started making a crackle like a microwave with something very metallic in it (we unplugged it very quickly after this, with a little touching as possible), and the hard drive wasn’t recognised by the set-top box and moreover emitted a deafening high-pitched whine while plugged in. Now, the good thing in all of this is that the set-top box does decode the signal, and we have Australian television with sound now. Woopee. And, we watched a ‘new’ Doctor Who on the television this evening. However, there are a hell of a lot of details to be ironed out, so it’s hardly sorted.

Ah well, there we are. Can’t think of aught else. Lots of love to you all, V xxxx