Snagged from glimmerite *waves to her*

Not bad for a non-US citizen!



create your own visited states map
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It's back to work today after 5 weeks off. I'll be on gmail chat on and off all day *hints*.

My first task will be to do the budget for the coming year - cross your fingers that the PTBs actually let me have some of the stuff I ask for!!!!!!!!!

My second task will be the perennial fight to get myself re-graded. This one is very important and I'll be whinging about this a lot :D

Lastly - hopefully I'll get my belated con report up today. I'm going to scan our official photos today at work. My photo with Adam was terrible (I'm in it), but the little guy's one is awesome.

The last part of our travels. I'll do the con report with Adam squeeing seperately to save my family who just don't understand! :D

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Another picture heavy saga of our travels in America!

Our flight to Phoenix was uneventful and we went straight to the car rental place to pick up our car. ( Read more... )

Well here we are in Denver waiting for our reunion with moweasley and friends. Starfest (no link cause my computer hates the URL for some reason) starts tonight! Tomorrow Adam is here and we are excited :)

I've been slack (otherwise occupied/busy) and haven't posted about our travels at all! The horror! *giggles*

So read on for our recent adventures; in which the little guy and I have some great times, interesting times and scary times...Picture heavy so it's behind a cut( Read more... )

Well here we are sitting in the Yahoo cafe at Tokyo airport. Is it sad that I actually knew both where it was and how to find it? As usual I can:t find half the punctuation marks on the Japanese keyboard, so forgive the typing weirdness.

Anyway, we had an uneventful flight up from Cairns and reached the hotel just in time for the little guy to have a swim before bed. I forgot that even though the pool and gym are at the hotel I:d have to pay for their use, so that was a bit of a blow to my slight stopover budget. Otherwise we had a lovely stay and sleep-in and took a bus ride around the town near the airport. The scenery is much prettier this time around, with all the cherry blossom trees out in bloom and lots of flowers. The little guy is impressed with his first (remembered) visit to Japan and wants to come back for longer next time.

The next leg of the flight is 12 hours to Chicago and then it:s only a little way (relatively) to squish 67s!!! Yay! Hopefully we shall sleep on the plane and arrive with smiles on our faces...

The bags are almost packed. The house is relatively (only relatively) tidy, and the garden is not. I've written a two page essay for the house/dog sitter and finished my surf club letters. Tomorrow we're off!!!

We leave here at 6am and, more or less travel for 2 days till we get to xx_squish_xx's on Friday evening. There's approximately 22 hours of that in the air *sigh*.

I have books to read and god knows I have plenty of WIPs to work on. But I'd like some prompts too *smiles hopefully*.

Also -

Since I'll be in a different timezone for the next few weeks, SSWT - European edition will be on hiatus. We'll get back to our regular schedule the first weekend in May...

I found it!!!

The passport I mean. Or I should say - my niece's friend found it. They came round this morning to help me look for it and found it within 10 minutes! *face palm* I'm pleased to relate though that where it was found caused me to remember that a certain someone, who shall be dead when he gets home from school, was looking through my cupboards a couple of weeks back - and moved it!!!

This is a weight off my mind, it's so late I don't think I could have got a replacement in time before we leave. I need so many extra signatures and affadavits on official papers for the little guy, everything takes twice as long. Now I don't have to worry about it!!! *dances*

Thanks to all my flisters - who helped and reassured me. You rock! *cuddles extravagently*

At last I'm getting myself organised for our trip. Though sometimes it's frustrating, I love the planning stages almost as much as the trip itself. Very weird I know :D

The itinerary so far:-

As usual we fly from here to Japan and overnight in Tokyo.

Then it's Tokyo to Chicago and onto to Ohio to visit and stay with the wonderful xx_squish_xx. Next we're inflicting ourselves on ladytalon1 for a couple of days then onto Phoenix and the Grand Canyon.

I'm planning to drive from there to Denver, taking about 5 days and joining up with moweasley at Starfest. We'll be seeing elsibet34 there too! *twirls* I can't wait...

It's so great that I'm going to meet and see lots of my flisters :D

Thanks to all of you wonderful flisters who wished me luck last Sunday! *hugs all around* I passed!! *dances* And now have my Bronze Medallion.

I am happy because I made the run, swim, run without becoming dead and also did not fall off the board - despite the large seas! In my opinion my CPR skills weren't that great, but the assessors passed me - so that's good.

Thanks also to truthmaker, greenowl & sl_podcast for their info about transportation etc in Chicago. It really helped with my trip planning *cuddles*.

Now - before the internet crashes on me again, I'm going to do one of the memes going around. Courtesy of evilmaniclaugh and bugchicklv I give you....

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc. Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other!

I will answer, but expect delays as you would not believe the problems I'm having with my computer!

All I want to do is book online a flight from Chicago to Columbus. Cheap tickets com only includes European countries on it's drop down menu and American Airlines direct you to their worldwide sites, and there isn't one in Australia. It's aggravating.

I can book with Southwest airlines no trouble, but they leave from Chicago Midway airport and I'm flying in to O'Hare. Can anyone tell me how long it takes to get from one airport to the other? I'm losing my window to book a cheap flight *wails*.

I'll keep looking at the other sites I guess - but why is it so hard? Australia is an American ally and has even signed a dumb free trade agreement with them....

Has bitten again! I'm being totally irresponsible with my 'house' money and me and the little guy are going on a trip! My mother will roll her eyes and sigh and people will think I'm crazy, but who cares?

So here's the scene -

I have so much Long Service Leave accrued at work and they want me to take some

My friend in Colorado posted about a con that Adam would be at and offered me a place to stay beforehand

I got an email from one of the cheap flights places with cheap flights to the US

Put these all together - and - voila! We're going...

We fly out April 1st (I hope that's not a sign) and come home on about the 26th. I'm so looking forward to it :D

Now I've got to organise things! *bounces*

It being my RDO (Rostered day off) this Friday, my Mum decided a trip to the Atherton Tablelands, would be a nice birthday present. So we decided to do a food and waterfall tour over Friday and Saturday and here's some pictures for guinny_hamilton and anyone else who wants to see...( Read more... )

This post's a bit more travely than the last two. There's lots of scenery description ahead.

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Pictures and rambling behind the cut! Hope you enjoy :D

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Due to total verboseness - I'll post these reports in chunks. There's quite a few pictures, and as usual, I think they're a bit too big - sorry to those on dial-up...

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I'm home at last and I was so happy to see my Mother and the little guy, I missed them! They seem to have done very well together and my yard and house are so clean and tidy I hardly recognised the place.

I'm still getting over the jetlag, but once I stop falling asleep at all the wrong moments I have lots of things to do-

Describe the wonderful time I had at the Browncoat Cruise (hopefully pictures and writing tomorrow)

Write my prompts for nerd_herder and chuck_slash

Finish my Sweet Charity duties

Write my serenity_santa fics

Send out Christmas cards - they're all going to be late so I'm apologising in advance! :D

Try and finish at least one WIP

There's lots of other stuff too, but fortunately I've forgotten it for now :D

Yes today is the day! I'm off down to the hotel soon where all the Browncoats will depart for the cruise terminal - I'm so excited! *bounces*

I've been here in San Diego since Wednesday night( Read more... ) So I mostly stayed indoors and read books until it was time to go to early registration for the cruise at the Marriott.

It was great to see so many Browncoats already lined up and waiting for their tickets and it was even better to recieve them!!! I now really believe I'm going on the cruise :D( Read more... )

After my cruise, then I'm off to visit the wonderful cheshire_monkey. I just can't wait!

See you all soon *waves*...

Here I am at Narita airport on the next leg of my trip and whiling away the time till my plane leaves for LA. The Yahoo cafe here is offering free internet, so I'm attempting to catch up with my flist and email the little guy etc. Any strange punctuation blame on the Japanese keyboards...I keep pressing the wrong things.

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So now I have a nine hour flight to LA and then the train to San Diego arriving Wednesday afternoon finally. Talk to you all then :)

Here I am, finished the first leg of my journey. The six hour train trip to Cairns. It's actually only a 3 hour drive from my place and I was supposed to drive first thing tomorrow and park at my neighbour's sisters' place but that fell through. (Next time I want to try and meet up with my Cairns flister! she knows who she is :)) So I caught the train instead.

I've never caught it coming this way before, and besides the slowness, it was great. No stress with roadworks on the road and time to sleep :) I seem to be awfully tired somehow. I also had time to read a book and write a bit of my story, which isn't finished yet, sorry ladytalon. It will be soon I promise...

Tomorrow I'm off to the airport and on to my flight to LA. The flight goes via Japan and I'm actually going to get to spend time out of the airport! *bounces* I may freeze to death though - it's very cold for me about 8 degrees celsius and I don't have enough warm clothes :) No doubt I'll get by...

Stay tuned sometime Tuesday for a further report. Maybe the airport at Narita will have a fast internet connection where I can download some photos!