I woke up in the middle of the night for no reason (again) and reached over to check the time on my Palm. When I popped it on, I noticed that it wasn’t charging. I messed around with it for about an hour (it was around 2, by the way), trying to figure out what was going on and finally deduced that the transformer was smoked — fried the night before during the process of charging the Palm, though it had charged it successfully, even though a converter and a surge protector.
Even better, I’d woken up Jackie with my screwing around. We tried several other solutions and in the process did something that screwed up the Palm’s ability to take any sort of charge at all, though I didn’t know that at the time. Nothing was working as advertised, so I resolved to find a solution the next day.
In the morning I headed off to the mall built into the back of Vic station to find a better charger and had no luck, eventually getting referred to larger and larger chains of stores — I was starting to get the picture/premonition by then, so I also stopped at a book store and picked up a little pocket-book/pop-out map of London and Tube, since my handy dandy Palm-based guide to London and interactive searchable Tube map didn’t look like they were going to make an appearance today and hey: souvenir, right?
Eventually (after some crossed communications) everyone else set off for the British Museum and I headed for every electronics shop along Tottenham Court Road, which any Londonite will tell you has a metric assload of electronics stores (eventually, that is in fact what every Londoner that I asked said). Eventually, I found a really great little universal charger that works in the US, Britain, Austrailia, and Europe, for only about twenty five bucks… You know, the sort of thing I should have fucking well bought before I left to avoid all this heartache.
Really helpful staff at Micro Anvika, who didn’t have the charger on the shelves, but couriered it over from their warehouse inside fifteen minutes at no extra charge.
Anyway, after that I walked down to the Museum and found everyone while they were getting ready to eat lunch. I’d had all the empty memory cards for the camera with me and the one Jackie had had in the camera that morning was full, so I took the camera from Jackie, loaded it up, and spent the lunch hour going through all the areas the rest of the group had already been, essentially mainlining Culture like a heroin addict. I left the snifty new charger plugged in at the Cafeteria (the Bristish Museum Cafeteria — another touchstone of clandestine secret agent meetings since time immemorial) with everyone else and came back just as they were getting packed up — to find out out that it hadn’t worked — Palm no Chargee.
Damn. It.
Anyway, after a few moments and some deep breaths I resolved to just ignore the god’s blasted thing and enjoy myself.
I decided early on in the Palm incident (but not early enough to keep from waking up my wife at 3am with my futzing about) to just not think about it. Certainly, I could have purchased a replacement quickly enough, but I had to decide if (a) I needed it (b) if I was willing to risk a sizeable chunk of change on something very likely to cause me problems when I got back home. Also, I had to acknowledge how nuerotic that would have been — though it didn’t stop me from thinking about it for awhile.
It didn’t take much effort to put it firmly into the back of my mind (aside from the random wry comment about ‘well, that infomation was on my Palm’), and I found out later that it greatly pleased (and somewhat surprised) my companions that I’d done so, and done so successfully. Really, I went on the trip to vacation, not to do tech work.
It just wasn’t a very difficult choice, seen in that light.
***Dave and I went to the Albrecht Durer special exhibit (amazing woodcuts (a medium he decided early on to support as his life’s work to help it gain acceptance as viable art form) and equally amazing watercolors and sketches that showed what he could have done in other, more widely accepted mediums — amazing stuff); everyone else headed to the “Ancient Money” exhibit to drool over real-life hordes. Picked up a few postcards and feel asleep sitting up on a backless bench — I think I might have been tired.
After the museum (which I highly recommend, and more highly recommend not skipping in favor of wandering alone in search of electronic parts), we hit the requisite associated Gift shop and stopped across the street at Gosh! Comics where I picked up some trade paperbacks.
Gosh Comics is my kind of comics store — there are almost no monthly issues on display — ninety percent of the copious shelf space is devoted to trade paperbacks. I’m told this trend is common in England and is basically the exact opposite of the U.S.
Generally, “Collected Works” of publications seem to be popular in almost any genre/medium — I suppose, like apartment space, book shelf real estate is at a premium for most people.
Everyone split up at this point — Margie wasn’t feeling well and had been a real trooper through the Museum — she and ***Dave headed back to the B&B and DaveG and Lori headed back the same direction shortly thereafter, citing exhaustion. Jackie and I were feeling fine & wanted to catch a show that night, so we walked down to Leicester Square to check out the TKTS booth.
We’d been in London three days by this point and Jackie was pleased to feel as though she was navigating well — London’s signs are arranged admirably if you know where you’re going but particularly useless if you want to know where you currently are. Since knowing where she is on a map doesn’t really help her at all, Jackie was fine.
Initially, we’d been thinking of catching the Chicago stage musical, but Jackie suggested she was in the mood for something lighter and I realized I was as well. ***Dave had indicated he was down for whatever we wanted to see, so we picked up three tickets to the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “Complete History of the United States, Abridged”, which was playing over at Piccadilly Square. Jackie had never been there, so we walked over to preview the Square and look at the garish billboards and took some pictures.
It should be noted here that some of my fondest memories of the trip involve periods of time when everyone split up and did their own thing. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy my friend’s company — I love them all dearly (and amazingly even more dearly AFTER the trip than before — it could have gone the other way), but it was really nice to have that walk through town with just my wife, and later with Jackie and Dave. It works something like this:
| Number of people involved | Math Factor | Difficulty rating to make sure everyone enjoys themselves |
| 2 | 1*2 | 2 |
| 3 | 1*2*3 | 6 |
| 6 | 1*2*3*4*5*6 | 720 |
There’s a breakpoint between 4 and 5 people where the level of complication jumps from the 20’s into the hundreds — essentially, once you’re dealing with 6 to 8 people on a trip, you might as well be dealing with as many as thirty or fourty — it’s not going to get appreciably more difficult to cope with.
From there, we tubed back to Victoria to save time and walked to the B&B, picked up Dave for dinner at Garfunkle’s, a “mall” restarant chain that seems to be a sort of hybrid between a traditional British Fish & Chips pub and, say, Fridays. Despite that, quite good, if not particularly ‘authentic’.
Then to the show (which was funny and quick and adlibbed and exactly what we needed — kudos to my darling wife for suggesting it, and to ***Dave for pointing out the similarity to Firesign Theatre in his blog entry — that sums it up perfectly).
