Leaving The House Untidy

The problem with moments of clarity is that once everything does become clear you don't always like what you see. Yesterday afternoon, I had such a moment. I realised what a shit I'd been to people I called friends. I've done what I can to smooth things over without trying too hard to smooth things over, if you know what I mean. Trying too hard just makes things worse.

So, I'm not leaving things in the best possible state before departing for the AFT. But the AFT will provide space for everyone to cool down, which cannot be a bad thing, and I'm going to do my utmost not to let my own insecurities spoil the AFT.

Which brings us to the itinary. We fly out of Heathrow tomorrow around 2pm. Check-in is two hours beforehand. Now the most sociable Flightlink Bus from Warwick is due into Heathrow at 12.10, which doesn't leave us much leeway for potential delays. This leaves us getting the 7.20am bus from Warwick which gets in to Heathrow at 9.20am. That's right, we're going to be bumming around Heathrow for 5 hours tomorrow. I will have notepad with me, and my intention is that during the day there I will finish Chapter 2 of the much-neglected Faith In Prison fic, Targeted. This was the chapter that I had to leave unfinished in order to throw myself into NaNoWriMo. Then I'll move on to plotting the third chapter, and making the unprecedented step of reading printed material :-) Don't worry, Pepper Rats will still be worked on, but that will only be done on the laptop we're taking.

We land at JFK around 4.30pm, if I remember correctly, and then make our way to the plush Manhattan Hotel we're staying in. Sunday morning we're straight off to Best Buy to get my early birthday present of a Digital Camera. The Pay-As-You-Go phone will have to be acquired elsewhere, because apparently the exclusive deal Best Buy have is with a provider who, ahem, doesn't provide everything I want.

The rest of Sunday and Monday, and hopefully a fair portion of Tuesday, will be spent sightseeing with Alison. I'm not planning on drawing up a list of places I want to see until I get towards the end of the stay and there's places I haven't seen, but since Alison has a smaller sightseeing window I'm guessing we will work on a list of places we want to see together.

Wednesday sees the start of Alison's conference at the New York Hilton. Arrangements have been made for me to get a pass so I can wander in and out to see her as I please, and perhaps I can even help her out a bit if for whatever reason I get fed up of wandering around on my own, or if I suddenly see the need to go and show her all the lovely pictures I've just taken. Or something. Basically, I have a pass. And the rest of the time is my own. I'm trying to make arrangements to meet up with Julie while I'm there, and arrangements have already been made to meet up with Andy. The other main goal is to come up with somewhere really nice to eat on the Friday night, since the Friday night will of course be Valentine's Day.

We leave Manhattan on the Sunday to drive to Ithaca. Apparently we pick the car up in Manhattan, which is going to be very cool, because it means we get to drive across one of those lovely big bridges, a la any film you can think of. In particular I'm thinking of the end of Cruel Intentions, but I doubt we'll get anything with a top to put down, nor would it be warm enough to put the top down if we did. Current predictions from CNN and the BBC suggest the temperature out there is currently dancing around just below freezing. Brrrrrrrrr.

In other news, we got stuck outside our house on Wednesday night. We have those lovely UPVC doors with double-ended cylinder Yale locks. Somehow a key had been left in on the other side of the door, and this prevented my key from being inserted properly to open the door. On being helped by our next-door neighbour into the back garden, which incidentally has an identical door, I found that the back door was similarly un-unlockable for the same reason. We eventually got in after using a coathanger through the letterbox to try and remove the key on the other side, when it turned out that managing to turn the key so that it was upright meant that my key could push it out. By the time we got inside both Alison and myself had lost the will to cook, so we went out to eat.

While sitting down for our meal I started a discussion of some of the tracks on HBL I was unhappy with, and we came up with some alternatives, and on returning home I started burning the CDs. I ran out of yellow ink last night printing the artwork, but I should be able to rectify that on the way home tonight. Packages will then be sent tomorrow to those I promised copies to.

The only thing that yet remains to be seen is if KaZaA and broadband will live up to their promise and succeed in downloading this week's Buffy in time for us to watch it before our departure, thus meaning that we can watch next week's, well, next week :)

There may or may not be sporadic updates from NYC. We know there's a complimentary 24 hour cappuccino bar at the hotel, we don't know if there's complimentary internet connections :)