Day 1: sundried sundries

I got my ticket fixed, hooray. After three tries calling the hotline (which will personally come over and give you a pedicure while changing your ticket, going by the rate at which they did not become available to be handled by me), I went to the local tourist information which doubles as a NatEx ticket agent. As fate has it, I went there around 10:30, now wanting to book onto a coach less than 7 days in advance (Thu 8:30), so I ended up paying 12 or 13 pounds instead of just a five-pound fickleness fee, which the lady was more worried about than me.
What else? Skipping back to breakfast, which was nice (after a nice and quiet night, too -- my room is facing out towards the alley and the worst were a couple of seagulls in the distance at dawn -- much quieter than living on a cobblestone street that is a shortcut between student dorms and a night club), it transpires that several of my co-guests are here for horse or dog racing. For those of us not into that, there's a bowl tournament going on. (I've not inquired further as to the rules, because I think they'll tut if I compare it to the french game. ;) OTOH, maybe there'll be prizes awarded by the mayor, wearing an amount of ornamental bling that would not seem out of place on carneval de Rio.)
What else? While I'm skipping back and forth anyway, expect three pictures to come up at some point: "Holiday Camp", "Disapiered" and "You can 'quote' me on that". Maybe the Empi, too -- one thing that's rampant here is signs missing letters, and while I can see how that happens on a side window of a snack bar on the pier, how about the big illuminated signage at the Nelso 's Hotel, or more impressively, a huge stone block easily 40ft above ground at the Empi(re).
I'm a spork. If you expect me to cut steak, it's not going well, and saying "we will just need to cut steak every day ever and all people who have previously eaten with you are idiots and I hate them" does not make me less of a spork. So in the end, I told her to spork off, and that's all you'll hear about that today.
Anybody have any writer friends in sci-fi? I had a thought about Dyson spheres. (A Dyson sphere is a shell built around an entire star, being able to hoover up (pun intended) all the star's energy.) But of course, energy doesn't go away, unless you manage to convert it into matter, you just convert it to less useful energy, from electric energy, electrons marching in lockstep to do your bidding to heat, atoms having a bit of an uncoordinated wibble around. So if your advanced species has a dyson sphere, you will not, at first, see the star anymore, but as the energy has to go somewhere, you'll probably see something warm and dark. (Bonus inappropriate sidejoke: like your momma's butthole. Why is it never your daddy? Wouldn't that be more insulting?) So anyway, once we think about the radiation going out, here's the plot kernel: what's telling us there's not already a advanced civilization living in a dyson sphere in what we think of as sun?
What else? Food -- I found me a Sainsbury's, so my dinner just now was a family-size, if your family is fairly small, rhubarb pie. Because I can totally have pie on my own, and also, pie is not something that really exists in Germany, so I have to make up for years and years of lack of pies, savoury and sweet. I also have a bunch of tiny beef pasties, some "ripen in the bowl", i.e. just nice and crunchy, and half a dozen mincemeat pies. I am amused to see that the UK is just as good at puttng christmas stuff intostores in September, but in this case, I'm happy, as I've never had mincemeat pie before. (I bought a jar of mincemeat once before, but since I'm not Simon, I'm not eating it directly out of a jar (again).)
So, lots of bad food for me :)
And that's all I can think of for the moment, so I'll stop and make myself a nice cup of decaf tea.