Today

A little over £113 got me my €150 for Athens. Lucky me, a Canadian who works for Network rail dropped by the office yesterday. She was from Calgary but more importantly, she had been to Athens recently. To my relief, she told me that €150 would be plenty for three and a half days there. "Could you manage Ottawa on about $215 spending money for three and a half days?" she wisely put it to me.

Talking with her, I won't deny a little homesickness crept in. Actually, I've been wrestling with it on and off for the past two weeks. Partially because summer is coming and so my mind drifts back to last summer, one of the best in my memory to be sure. Then there's some recent family events which have brought thoughts of mortality to the forefront and made me have a few lingering thoughts about being so far away from my parents. Not to mention the little things, like Toronto's secret swing, concerts in Montreal or the Manx pub in Ottawa. Oh and maybe my friends, I guess.

But I'm still only nine months into this two year experiment of mine. Progress from the second to the third draft of Momentum is much greater than from the first to the second - I hope to have a draft worth shopping around before I leave for Athens. Though I've signed up for a little more time at Network Rail, job offers are coming in and eventually the right one will come. Though I don't like to prattle on about, what with my desire not to make the people I meet feel like their every move is being reported on the Internet, I have managed to get the seed of a social life to bear a little fruit. Being a writing hermit stopped being romantic after awhile!

The jury is still out on whether or not I'll stay in England for the extra-long haul. I have to say that on the negative side of things, I find it difficult to cope with how crushingly backward this country is when it comes to the general populations attitude towards the importance of the environment. More than once now I have hear a good deal of resentment directed towards the issue at large and I've even heard more than one person say "I fucking hate the environment".

What?

Is this not like a fish saying it "fucking hates water"? Perhaps while chewing a sausage roll and reading The Guardian?

Plus the culture of fear in England is much closer to America's hysteria than the general attitude of Canada. I know I was poking a bit of fun with it, when I made my posts about Brasseye, but pedophilia nonce-sense is still pretty bad. Though the Labour party has done a lot to block a lot of the proposed anti-terror measures which would bring England in sync with America's draconian, crippled joke of a legal system...it is still a contentious issue. Running parallel to both topics, the newspapers are just as shameless in exploiting these fears to sell paper as they were (and often still are, somehow) in exploiting the Princess Diana escapade of the late 90's. These are all things which can wear me down on a tired or otherwise down day, to be sure.

I'd like to have a clear conclusion to this train of thought, but I guess the point is that I don't!

Apparently you can set off an atom bomb in the sky without the general public knowing?

Tom just, quite fairly, asked me how on Earth he could miss this?

I'd like to ask, how did I? How could anyone? Was this ever given proper news coverage?

Great Gumblin' Gumbles

Huzzah, first world (computer) problems have been surmounted!

So I mailed back the overpay....and I guess it was the right thing to do. Heck, apparently I made "Temp of the Month". If only I could articulate how that makes me feel.

Tomorrow I'm going to nab some Euro's. They aren't as wonderfully cheap as ye olde Canadian Dollar but the pound still trumps it by a reasonably consistant margin. When I checked this afternoon I saw that 100 pounds would net me 147 Euro's which is roughly what I've been recommended to acquire for the trip. Red swimshorts have already been selected.

Job hunting is proceeding apace, but I may have to work at Network Rail another couple of weeks. I think I could survive this, now that I know that since my initial contract has been filled I can just give two weeks notice like a normal human being. There is one production house which offers one year, paid contracts for runners which would be a good way of getting my foot in the door. The contracts become avaliable in July so it's just as well that I can get a few weeks more out of NR. Plus I still get my vacation, so that should at least recharge me.

Nowt much else today, but lasers saving the earth and talking paper!

Addendum: www.firstworldproblems.com is mine! Nothing up yet, but it's on the way...

A £1,700 Kick in the Crotch

So! I have recieved a kick square to each testicle.

Kick #1) I checked my bank balance and I seemed to have been paid about £1,700 more than I usually am in a given week. I know in my tiny, robotic heart that I will have to call my recruitment agency on Monday and tell them - but god damn if it isn't a hell of a tease to think for even a moment that you, all of a sudden, have enough money to guarantee visiting Canada in December, move house to somewhere closer to the centre of London and take almost all the stress off of your current hunt for employment.

Kick#2) My damn computer has a corrupt system config file which means it can't start up. I don't have a Windows XP backup disc because of a shared stupidity between the retards who packaged my computer and the retard currently typing this message. So I guess my "e-presence" will be "e-much less" until I get this sorted, which will be tricky if only because there doesn't seem to be such a thing as a proper comptuer store in London - only retail outlets where the employees only know how to sell, not how to fix or help, and computer pawn shops which I wouldn't let my laptop near in a hundred years.