For those vaguely interested (esp jack trades, since I haven't heard from him in a while), since we are all sitting around enjoying our cups of brew:
Plans to stay in Hong Kong have been extended indefinitely. This evolved because of our trip to Perth, my home town on the west coast of Australia, 6 weeks ago. I was appalled at how quiet the place was. So, Sydney is now looking like a more viable destination in the long term. Sydney is too cold, but at least there are cars on the street.
We're now living in a place called Discovery Bay on Lantau Island in HK's New Territories which is much cleaner and greener than HK Island, and even my wife now admits she quite likes it (she doesn't like HK on the whole, but we're both greedy - the tax here is very small compared to Australia's 48%).
We went to Club Med in Cherating Beach in Malaysia for a week, too, a month ago, for the first holiday I have had since August 1999 - I have a picture of me on the trapeze - quite a drop to the safety net, but they rig novices up with safety ropes. The trapeze is part of a circus thing that people who are at the resort can have a go at - good fun.
We have been trying to work out what to do for X-mas. We thought about skiing but its bloody expensive over X-mas in terms of accomodation (we might do that over the Chinese New Year holiday in Feb): so we are a bit lost as to what to do, not helped by the fact that my wife doesn't have as many holidays as me. We'll be travelling for Hanoi for a weekend to go and check out the Parisian architecture there (which is apparently amazing), but Hanoi is hardly a place to spend X-mas (traffic and pollution is allegedly 5x worse than HK).
Regional travel, I hasten to add, is very cheap, which is why we're trying to do some of it while we're here.
We were going to go to Perth again for X-mas, but we have to go to Australia for my wife's exams (we are both doing distance education) in Feb anyway, and three trips to Perth in 6 months is a bit too much like staying in one's safety zone.
What else can I tell you all? Not much. I won't bore you with a weather report. We went to meet a dog yesterday, up for adoption, but the poor thing was 2 and not house trained which is a bit impossible for us. Although our flat is not big, we live at the front of some excellent open areas, mountains and trees, which would be good for a dog to have a frolic. But teaching a two year old dog not to poo on the carpet sounds like very hard work.
We're out on a junk tonight, with a bunch of other people, getting pissed (that's ""drunk"" for you Americans) on wine and cruising around the harbour, and will probably go out to a place called Lamma Island for some seafood which will be excellent, and something which I haven't done since I first got here 18 months ago.
I turn 32 in a few weeks, which is a bit of a shock. Enough said about that.
More on Heinlein - was he a fascist (Starship Troopers, Glory Road) or a hippie (Stranger in a Strange Land)?
I've exhausted all topics of interest, now, so I'll leave you all be, and will take a sip of my English breakfast. Would someone please pass the biscuits? I confess to being an unrepentant dunker."
