Russell's Blog

Disasters of the week:

• The itinerary I received from the UCLA travel agency said that Mimi would arrive at Luton at 9:05. I thought this meant 9:05 PM, because I expected to still be in Culham on Saturday morning. Indeed, I had written 9:05 PM on my itinerary, and no one spotted the error.

  In the two days before she left Paris, I called her hotel several times. Not only was I unable to reach her, but she never received any of my messages. Also, the only emails she actually received were ones with messages like "See you soon!!!!" The two emails where I asked her to confirm the arrival time never left my mail server. Evidently, my mutt key-bindings are not UK-keyboard-friendly, so my "save message to queue and sent it" shortcut instead turned out to be my "postpone message to drafts."

  In fact, she arrived at 9:05 AM, and waited at the airport for eleven hours. Fortunately, she found a place to check her email, and figured out what I'd done wrong. Amazingly, she did not kill me.

• My payroll back at UCLA is busted, and so I'm not getting paid any more. I don't think I'll be able to fix it until I get back to California. That leaves me without $2200 I was counting on.
• Something is wrong with my bank, so I cannot transfer money from my savings account to my checking account. Upshot: I'm completely broke.

All in all, I amazed at the number of things that can go completely fucking wrong. In spite of it, I'm having a pretty good time. London is a lot of fun. We went to see Donkey's Years, which was highly amusing, and a great exhibit at the National Gallery of bohemian art culture. I used a few of my last readily-available pounds to take Mimi to a nice sunset-lit dinner by the Thames.

Update: My bank suddenly un-fucked itself, and my payroll came through. That knocks my blood pressure down a couple of megapascals.