Jellyfish

19th December, 2008

After a late dinner on Thursday night saying farewell to Allan Varah who returns to New York the alarm went off too early at 7am.

Whilst on the way to the office by the unusually uncrowded metro, I started to think what needed to be packed and bought for the day. A reasonably clear diary at work allowed me to finish up a number of things and prepare my cover for the next two weeks.

At lunchtime, Alan Liddle and I went to Auchun to buy some last minute supplies for me and some things for the kids. We bought a lot of colouring in pens and pencils, plus some small toys for the children. I don't envy parents in this day and age, there is so much crap in the toy stores and very few quality, inexpensive and remotely educational toys. We settled for toy cars, beads to make bracelets/necklaces, some stupid pets of the world figurines, and heaps of colouring in pens and pencils.

As always, with the Americans becoming active in the later part of my day, there were a few last minute things to attend to and I left the office around 7:00pm and went home to begin packing. Througout the week I have been placing things on the spare bed as I remember or acquired them. Now there was a mountain of stuff needing to be packed.

Packing took longer than expected merely because I bought more for the kids than I expected plus AXA Tech had donated stationery, caps and other things for the trip. Packing finished up around midnight with the brief interruption of a few steamed treats from Chinatown. I'm looking forward to the day when I finally get an oven and can pop in a pizza or meat pie! (I don't think they steam too well)

Finally the bags are packed and by the door, my clothes for the next day are laid out and I'm climbing into bed around 12:30am. Alarm set for 5am.

At that point I remember that I still haven't sorted the fish out. Recently, Kim and I have started keeping a few fish. We started off with a couple of goldfish but then we progressed through to Siamese Fighting Fish, Angel Fish and finally little red crabs. I'm not sure at what point our ability to care for fish was exceeded by their resistance to sustained mistreatment but over the last few weeks a veritable pet cemetery has evolved with fish playing Russian Roulette each day in the game of life. I had to set up an automatic feeder as well as a timer for the light because through a process of trial and error I have worked that fish like both food and light. (Several fish met an untimely death whilst I figured this out.) With the instructions no where to be found it took the better part of 20 mins to set up what I'm pretty confident is the right combination. Only time will tell!

It was 1am before I got into bed after triple checking that my alarm was going to go off in four hours time. Even by my standards I was asleep in record time.

This was a good day.