From a trip to the U.K., begun a week ago today:
The pretty 30-something Spanish woman behind the British Airways desk at Barajas airport in Madrid seemed to take a shine to me from the first thing I said to her in Castellano. Smiling, staring into my eyes, commenting on how well I spoke, giving me a window seat with no neighbor. As I walked toward the gate, it occurred to me I should have asked her if she's like to do something after my return the following week. Ah, well. Silly me.
The flight: fast, easy, sunlight pouring in the windows. Pouring sunlight faded as we neared Manchester, cloud cover taking over. When the pilot spoke over the P.A. shortly before landing, he said, "The weather in Manchester is... (pause) ...breezy." Breezy. That's nice. Everyone likes a friendly breeze. I stepped out of the plane, gale force winds nearly knocked me off my feet.
Rented a car, made the drive through gathering rush hour traffic, darkness falling as I started out, all sunlight gone by 4:30.
Stayed with my mate Dermot in his home in Newcastle-under-Lyme, where I spent a month last March/April. At that time he lived there solo. Since then his sweetie moved in with her two dogs, and a third dog has been temporarily given shelter. A crowded home now, but filled with life. My knock at the door provoked canine chaos. Within five minutes of entering, everything I'd worn and brought with me sported dog hair.
The first evening there: went to a local cinema for the opening night of Stranger Than Fiction (liked it, far more than I thought I would), the theater strangely close to empty. Outside, afterward, eight people stood about in the crisp night air, four with cellphones pressed to their ears.
Next day: Dermot and Tammy went off to their respective jobs, I spent a decadent morning in bed, the dogs camped patiently outside my door.
And I hung out in Second Life. My truculent little laptop had refused to connect to the household LAN -- a network I'd set up in March with my host -- so Dermot's sweetie loaned me a dog-eared laptop she had hanging around, which worked just fine. Life in my 2L haunts was its usual hilarious self, friends lurking about, new faces coming and going. Its usual goofy, hyper-social self, except for the storm of technical problems that had erupted in the wake of the grid-wide program upgrade performed by 2L's lords/owners the previous evening. Problems growing more disruptive by the hour, swelling in number and effect to the point that discontent and panic were visibly apparent, in-world. Like everyone else, I endured various glitches that seemed to be growing in frequency and nastiness, but I figured what the hell, I wasn't a paying customer, I was one of many hundreds of thousands of users enjoying 2L's amazing little world on Linden Labs' dime -- who was I to bitch and moan?
I thought that until one point where I was going through inventory my little character -- the evolving personality that functioned as my alter ego in 2L, as my interface with the 2L world -- had accumulated. Clothing, objects, animations, blah blah blah. And in trying on something, my avatar's face and hair changed -- the face completely, the hair substantially. Without warning, inexplicably, and not for the better. I looked for a way to reinstate original face/hair, couldn't find one. I didn't have a back-up file (hey, I'd only been into this with any seriousness for a week or so, it simply hadn't occurred to me that I might experience a disaster of any kind) and the undo undidn't function, wouldn't even make itself available to click on. I scrambled through available help materials, through the information database, found no relevant info. I fired off an email to 2L's live help -- by that time probably swamped by a growing mountain of pleading, cursing calls for assistance -- got a brief, unhelpful reply thirty minutes later. Totally unhelpful, the kind of unhelpful that could breed violent revolution, or at least head-shaking disgust.
Finally, all other options exhausted, I began the slow work of reconstructing my avatar's face and hair -- and anyone who has used the 'appearance' tool in 2L knows how complex that task can be. I had no record of the hundred or so different settings I had to play with, so experimented, adusted, prayed.
An hour later: me in the kitchen, taking a break, sipping a cup of tea, having made some slow, limited progress in crisis resolution. One of the dogs -- Saf -- wanders into the dining room, stands looking at me, expressionless. I hear a strange sound, a strange, alarming sound. Which turns out to be the sound of a dog releasing a sputtering stream of liquid poop onto the dining room rug. My body leaps into response-to-second-crisis mode -- meaning, in this case, hair standing on end, mouth opening, me shouting the word NOOOOOOO! at top volume. Saf continues downloading, an expanding, foul-smelling brown lake slowly soaks into the rug. Finally, after 20 seconds of that, she's done, stands staring at me as if she has no idea why I'm bouncing off the walls, searching desperately for paper towels, vocalizing at the top of my lungs.
I find no paper towels, but find a roll of toilet paper, begin pulling off handfuls, soaking up poop, tossing it all into garbage. I find a new, spongy cleaning cloth, begin a joyful process of soaking up poop with it, running into kitchen to rinse, running back to dining room, etc. Saf knows I'm suffering because of her, slinks quietly off to a corner, sits quietly observing the fun. The other two dogs appear, stand watching, knowing I'm in distress and looking sweetly concerned.
[continued in next entry]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Last Sunday -- downtown Birmingham, seen from the passenger's seat:
España, te quiero.
rws 4:51 PM [+]
Comments:
This dog-bug thing, could it be airborne do you think?
PS Go back to the airport and ask her, life is too short to pass the opportunity for a 'moment'
PS Go back to the airport and ask her, life is too short to pass the opportunity for a 'moment'
Got me -- anything's possible, I suppose, though it would be a long commute from Newcastle-under-Lyme to your part of the world, or vice versa.
As far as that moment, one of the things I love about life is that one moment passes and other moments appear -- there is no shortage. And I've been having many, many other moments -- all kinds of adventures. So there's no need to revisit that lovely woman at the BA desk. If I see her again, though, I may be more proactive. ;)
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As far as that moment, one of the things I love about life is that one moment passes and other moments appear -- there is no shortage. And I've been having many, many other moments -- all kinds of adventures. So there's no need to revisit that lovely woman at the BA desk. If I see her again, though, I may be more proactive. ;)