And, I'm Off Again

Off on another vacation.  Yay!

The plan is to eventually find myself in Sicily.  I've managed leg one of the journey, the appropriately-named "long haul" flight to London.  Am currently cooling my heels for about five hours in Terminal 5 at Heathrow. 

The journey went off fairly well.  I mean, OK, I had some trouble opening the lock box I was supposed to leave my house key in for the cat sitter, but I ultimately managed that.  (Must have looked like an idiot standing in my backyard wearing a pink bathrobe and cursing at an inanimate object, but, hey, it's just one of life's little moments.)  And I also had a huge amount of trouble with the digital download of The Avengers...

... OK, there are something like 4 different DVD versions of The Avengers available, and I bought some 4-disc combo pack with 3D and Blu-Ray (neither of which I have) because it was on super sale on Amazon and came with a "digital download," and I thought it would be nice to put the digital copy on my tablet as Avengers is, as far as I'm concerned, an IDEAL plane movie.  (Something I've already seen, but quite enjoyed, and could watch until such time as I fall asleep, without feeling like I'm missing anything.)  ANYWAY, the digital download of Avengers is such a phenomenal pain in the butt -- and an unsuccessful one at that -- I would have been really pissed off at that Marvel people were it for the fact that it didn't really cost me anything and British Air had the damn thing on the plane anyway.  (If, for some reason, you've stumbled upon this journal entry by googling about problems with the digitial download of Avengers, here's the summary:  If you want to play it on an Android device, you FIRST must upgrade your Windows media player to super-DRM status (which you can't do unless you log into IE as an administrator), and THEN your Android device must be Windows Media Plays For Sure certified, which mine, y'know, isn't.  So, THEN, I thought, OK, I'll put it on my netbook instead.  Only to find that I CAN'T put it on my netbook, because you can only put it on ONE computer and ONE "mobile device" -- and the netbook is a "computer," but I couldn't put it on the netbook directly because you need to load it off a CD, and the netbook has no CD drive... and ... Would it fucking kill you people to just give us a code for a free download of the movie from Google Play?)

Anyway, tirade over, because I'm in England, and even thought I'm just sitting here in the airport, I'm just naturally happy about it, because I'm in England, and I really have to figure out some way to be here long term (which would be problematic, as my marketable job skills are somewhat California specific) ... but, anyway, me + London = happy.  Basic math.

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I frequently forget to bring my watch on trips.  I own three watches purchased in airports.  (Two because I forgot to bring a watch, so bought one at LAX before leaving; the third purchased in duty free in Fiji because it turned out my waterproof watch wasn't.)  I mention this because I tried very, very hard to remember to wear a watch, and I succeeded!  My nice pretty (airport-purchased) red Swatch was on my wrist when I left the house!  Victory is mine!

Victory is short-lived.  When I put on my watch again (after not-quite-sleeping through Avengers), my watch said it was 7:30 and 42 seconds.  Which seemed a bit odd, as I thought it was actually closer to 9:00.  Upon further examination, my watch confirmed that it was still 7:30 and 42 seconds.  Stupid battery died.  I should have expected this.