The beaver is a proud and noble animal

This is wrong in so many ways. Download the video.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Yoinked from wtf_inc

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY
1. Richard
2.
3.

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD
1. talisker
2. flubu
3. sega

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF
1. My brain
2. My eyes
3. My cynicism

THREE THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF
1. My flab
2. My allergies
3. My tendency to stress and worry

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE
1. French Canadian (by birth)
2. English Canadian (by adoption)
3. Multicultural insane friends (by choice)

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU
1. Anything that goes buzzz
2. My allergies
3. Dying alone

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS
1. Coffee
2. The Internet and my email
3. Things to keep my brain busy (TV or books)

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW
1. kimono
2. boxers
3. bellybutton lint

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS (currently)
1. Pink Floyd
2. Coldplay
3. Kruder & Dorfmeister

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS (currently)
1. Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon (album)
2. K&D – The K&D Sessions
3. Coldplay – Everything's not lost

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS
1. Lose weight
2. Exercise
3. Kidnap Katy on a permanent basis

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP
1. Trust
2. Love
3. Respect

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE (in no particular order)
1. I have four tattoos on my body and want more
2. I'm a packrat
3. I want a big dumb dog.

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX (or same) THAT APPEAL TO YOU
1. Boobies
2. Booties
3. Eyes

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES
1. Reading
2. Cooking
3. Watching TV

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW
1. Be with my kitten
2. Have a meaningful job
3. Do more things with my hands

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING
1. Software developer
2. Gourmet chef in an allergy-friendly restaurant
3. Bookstore owner

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION
1. Ireland
2. Scotland
3. Austria

THREE KID'S NAMES
1. Xavier
2. Sofia
3. William

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE
1. Be happy
2. Be loved
3. Travel

THREE WAYS I AM STEREOTYPICALLY A BOY
1. I have the boy bits
2. I scratch myself in public
3. I pee standing up

THREE WAYS I AM STEREOTYPICALLY A CHICK
1. I can cook
2. I cry watching movies or listening to music
3. I scream like a girl

THREE CELEB CRUSHES only three?! How cruel!!
1. Kate Beckinsale
2. Alyson Hannigan
3. Alicia Witt

Urgh.

On my first day back at the office:

– I found out that I'm losing my office. Niiiiiiice.
– I recieved email from the building receiving dock telling me that we received a bunch of hardware from IBM. This is problematic because not only have we not even agreed on what we should be receiving, it shouldn't have been delivered to this building and we have no place to store it.

We are not amused.

The good news:

As I'm writing this, I'm uploading the pictures I took on my trip to my website. The link is http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/london-jan2005/

Here are a few thumbnails to wet your appetite:

The bad news:

IBM are being dorks and delivering hardware out of the blue, without giving us lots of warning. I have no clue what's being delivered, and I have no clue who's going to install the damn things. Ah, what a nice way to get back to work after a vacation.

I'm back in Montreal, and I'm tired.

All the traveling finally caught up to me and kicked me in the head big time just now. I'm all unpacked, and I think I'm going to get ready for bed.

Tomorrow is going to be a bumpy ride.

I just posted all my trip entries. They're back dated, so for your convenience, here are links, and yes, all links are polite and pop new windows:

Day 1 – Thames water front
Day 2 – St-James Park, Buckingham Palace, Leicester Square
Day 3 – Madame Tussaud & Baker Street
Day 4 – British Museum & Imperial War Museum
Day 5 – Tate Gallery and Cirque du Soleil

I'll be posting pictures as soon as I'm back on broadband.

I have tons of LJ entries that I wrote on my laptop when we were in London, but the lack of internet access prevented their posting. I'm going to get those online in the next few days, as well as pictures from my trip. In a nutshell, I had a blast. London is big, bustling, fast, lovely, quirly, loud, expensive. Getting back into the day to day grind is going to be rough, especially given that Katy is still there and I'm here, and that's going to suck the big hairy ass.

It's 10pm local, therefore my brain thinks it's 3am. Loads of fun. My last meal was… way to long ago, really. I'm hungry, so I'm going to type this entry and go grab a bite to eat and then crash HARD.

— this is something I wrote while sitting at the gate

It's 2:30 and I'm sitting outside my gate. Katy is on her way back to Leicester as I write this. This has to be the quickest check-in in history. Baggage checking took a whole 2 minutes and the security scan didn't take that much longer. I didn't beep! Not once! Not even a small one! So now I'm sitting outside my gate with little over 2 hours of waiting time in front of me. I had a bit of a scare when I tried to open the gate doors and set off the alarm, but it was nice and shut up when I closed the door. The gate isn't opened yet. From what I've been hearing up and down this lounge, I take it I'm not the only one to have done this.

I miss Katy already. It's going to be rough not having her close. I've decided to kidnap her when I have a better idea of her schedule.

As a side note, the Luggage tried to eat a small child. Go Luggage!

—

The flight was uneventful, and I spent 7 hours sitting on my duff reading the DaVinci Code. I'm almost done. It's a good book.

FOOD!

Today started slow but ended with a bang (or so I hope). We went through the usual morning routine of snoozing the alarm 5 times, Katy kicking me out of bed (supposedly so I could have the privilege of showering first, but I suspect so it's because she wants to sprawl on the bed) and then breakfast. I flipped throuhg the hotel's yellow pages to find a good italian restaurant that was close by – and still in existence.

We headed towards the Tate modern art museum. It's a very ecclectic mix of stuff I found really cool, like original Mondrians, Warhols, Dalis, Matisses and Rodins and the rest, which I can classify in the following categories:
– stuff I could do myself
– stuff I find ugly as sin
– stuff I just don't get

A few times while we were wandering the exhibit halls, I caught myself asking “is this a sculpture or did a workman just forget his tools here?”. I also ran into my favourite type of person to hate, the goatee-sprouting beret-wearing pseudo-intellectual mofo, who just oooohs and aaaaahs in front of a sculpture of a brain getting penetrated by a dildo.

Once the gallery was done, we took the tube to Oxford Circus to do the last bit of shopping. I went completely mad at Whittards and bought something like 20 pounds of tea and coffee. Sa-weeet! We also went sock shopping for Katy, but again the selection was found lacking. It was better than the other day's shop expedition, but still, meh. We went on a vinyl expedition to go look for a friggin copy of Floyd's DSOTM. After 5 shops, we finally found one but it was too expensive for something I will basially hang up on my wall. Damnit.

Got back to the hotel to drop off the packages and I took the opportunity to pack my suitcase. It surprised me that everything I bought fit inside! I knew that I had lots of presents coming in, but damn, I know I did buy lots of stuff while I was on this side of the pond. Still, I'm not complaining. The Luggage (and yes, it deserves a capital L) will be hellish to lug aroung the underground tomorrow, especially given the fact that the Picadilly line isn't going all the way to Heathrow because of line maintenance.

After a bit of weird british daytime TV, we went to dinner. It was plentiful, it was tasty, it was filling, it was well served, and best of all, IT WASN'T DEEP FRIED! Hmmmm, pasta. That was our treat for the week. A nice little Italian cafe on Kensington High Street called Sopranos. Had lots of nummy food and a bit of booze (on an empty stomach, which probably explains the drunken, after-dinner underwear shopping trip which, though brief, yielded 4 tops and a pair of undies).

Walked to the Royal Albert Hall, picked up the tickets and headed to the bar (of course) to wait until the doors opened. Katy quote: “The most important thing you have to remember when you show your ticket is to look sober!” The show was good. Lots of wows. The juggler is, if anything, better than the last time I saw him.

So tonight is my last night in London. By this time tomorrow, I'm going to be in Ottawa and by the same time on sunday, I'll be in Montreal. I'm going to be jetlagged as hell, and I'm going to be missing my sweetie. Going back to work seems surreal just right this minute. It's always like that after a vacation where you completely disconnect from your day-to-day reality. Monday will bring back the duldrum of dealing with IBM and a 5-hour time shift with Katy. I'm really not looking forward to that one. I've gotten used to being in the same timezone; hell I've gotten used to being in the same bed. Le sigh. I really need to get the girl setup in North America. I was telling her this on the tube. Best case scenario is for me to be in Montreal, with Katy and a Tesco. She's going to work at it.

This morning was spent with a constant erection. The British Museum rocks, mostly. To make it extra-super-duper, hordes of screaming children should be forbidden (and fed to geese, according to Katy). Older children should be kept on leashes and gagged. Besides that, the museum is simply BEAUTIFUL!

We saw the egyptian, sumerian, greek and roman galleries, as well as a room dedicated to japanese swords. My favourite room was the Enlightenment Gallery. DROOOOOOOL! When I become filthy rich, as opposed to simply being filthy, I want a library like that one. I understand what they meant when they said that it would take a week to properly look at everything in the museum. It's…. wow. I saw the Rosetta Stone, frescoes from the Acropolis, century-old katana, millenium old mummies…. what's not to be humbled by.

On the way to and from the museum, I amused myself by taking pictures of cool doorways along Bedford square. Cool pictures – I was feeling inspired (and silly, a dangerous mix).

Came back to the hotel to empty out the memory card and get new batteries for the camera – I managed to kill two sets of rechargable batteries at the BM, Lounged around a bit, then headed out to the Imperial War museum.

Another wow museum. It's in the middle of nowhere, really, but it's a very interesting place to visit. My dad would have loved it. I took lots of pictures for him. Imagine seeing Monty's battle tank, a V2 rocket, and loads of WW2 memorabilia. We walked through a Holocaust memorial that was… powerful. They had a scaled model of Auschwitz… It was powerful to see, and realize that it was setup as a killing factory. Trains coming in at one end and leaving at the other, with big ovens in the middle…

After the museum, we were really hungry and we'd made plans to go to an italian restaurant recommended by the travel guide Nat had given me. Big big big HUGE piece of advice. Never make eating plans based on a 6-year old guide… We tubed it all the way to the end of a really posh residential neighborhood, only to realize that the restaurant wasn't there. Niiiiiiice. That really wasn't cool, as both Katy and I were getting hungry and we had to fall back on plans to go to Garfunkle's. Meh. I'll make it up to her tomorrow, as I'd promised her a good dinner.

London is bustling, crowded, and if I lived here for a long time, I think I'd end up killing someone. People have no sense of personal space on the street. They'll bump into you, cut in front of you, and generally behave like obnoxious barbarians. It's like road rage, without the road.

Took the tube to Bond St. this morning to go to the Canadian High Consul offices to get information about immigration. Things are promising. The tube is still an exercise in incongruity. Some trains on the same line will end at different stations along the line. If you want to go further, you need to exit the train you're on and jump on the one that's behind you. Oh, and mind the gap. Oh, and don't leave your baggage unattended.

Bond Street is where the money is and it shows. It's not everywhere you see an international yacht broker. It's also a prime shopping area, which we made full use of later on in the afternoon. Katy bought trousers (not pants, trousers. The difference is subtle but significant :) [katy edit: pants are underwear!!!] and I got her a backpack and raided Thorntons, a chocolatier.

We went to Madame Tussauds. It's sad. They pronounce it like Two-Swords (with emphasis on the final S)… From what I gather, there really wasn't a lot of people compared to the usual crowd that's expected there. Still, I wanted to murderize some people. There were just too many of them. People kept walking into us – especially Katy – and walking into camera shots. Bastards. The statues are impressive in their likeliness. Admission was bloody extortion though, but hey, I'm happy to have seen it.

After Tussauds, I satisfied a jones by going to the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker St. Basically, it's a victorian house that they dressed up as described in the novels. Dr. Watson was a good-humoured but cynical gentleman that looked bored senseless. The shop was amusing. Stick a Holmes profile on anything and it'll sell. I lusted after old Strand magazines, but at 70 pounds, they were too costly.

Random quote:

– K: Are you going to take a picture of the door?
– R: I'll take a picture of a shoe if I think it's cute.
– K: OK, take a picture of mine.

– I'm offended by their lack of selection of socks.