"You can't take a guess for another two hours?"

My number one clue should've been the ridiculous number of screaming, coughing, completely unsupervised children racing around the plane. No really, I don't mind your child running up and down the aisle of the plane, slamming into my elbow and hacking as s/he races past. Whatever gave you that impression? Thankfully, I had my headphones, plenty of decent time-waster movies on the personal video player, and a smart-ass old Scottish man sitting next to me who grumbled as much as I did. :) 

Since I obviously wasn't getting the hint: "You WILL be sick because of this plane ride!", I got a much more obvious one: about three-quarters of the way into the plane ride, the lead stewardess came over the intercom, asking if there were any doctors or trained medics on board the plane. I started giggling, because I desperately wanted to call her over and say, "Oh stewardess, I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor." Of course, he would've had to have been wearing a stethoscope while sleeping, and he wasn't. As I heard a few different seats ding their call buttons (either they were doctors themselves or, lucky them, were in fact seated next to Doctor Rumack), I started remembering instead the episode of House where House and Cuddy have to treat what looks to be an outbreak of SARS on a flight overseas. Of course, since that was simply a case of the bends (geezes, spoiler alert!), I calmed myself and instead went back to imagining multiple eggs coming out of a woman's mouth or having to calm a panicking woman with a crowbar. 

As odd coincidence would have it, the family that I was seated next to on the flight from London to Seattle was sitting right in front of me on this flight, and we ended up walking together to the gate for the Amsterdam-London portion of the trip. It was an adorable little plane - we had to walk out onto the tarmac to board (as I was still a little high on my anti-anxiety meds, I started giggling again, imagining Eddie Izzard's take on it, complete with squirrels screaming your name); the flight was less than an hour long (which absolutely whizzed by, compared to the previous nine and a half hour ride [please to note: I was about to put "absolutely flew by", but realized that it might be construed as an attempt at an awful pun, and thus changed my wording. You're welcome] ), but we were still offered a snack of some sort - maybe it was just the travel fatigue, maybe I was already sick, but I quickly turned it down, thinking it looked like the worst bit of "food" I've ever seen. 

Upon landing, I wandered my way through customs, picked up my luggage, walked right on through the 'nothing to declare' hallway, and found my way up to the DLR (Domestic Light Rail) platform that shot me along to Waterloo Station, where I found a train waiting to depart straight to Bournemouth in only ten minutes. What service. By the time I wedged my luggage in front of the seat next to me and set the tickets in my lap, I was fast asleep. In between train stops, I kept dreaming that I was somewhere completely different - one time I'd be at SPU in the loop, another time wandering backstage at ACT's Christmas Carol, a few times in the old house, and at each stop the announcer's voice would jerk me violently out of sleep - while it was nice of her to inform me where I was each time, she could've turned down the volume a bit. During one of the naps, I woke to discover that the ticket officer had punched my ticket without waking me up. He gets massive karma points for that. 

I hopped in a cab once I reached the station and, arriving back at Bourne Chambers, quickly unpacked and - despite it being about 1PM, fell into bed. I think I posted on facebook that the room was spinning, but it would be more accurate to say that I had an approximation of sea legs - that feeling you get when you've been on a boat for some time and, even once you're back on solid ground, feel that you're slowly bobbing up and down. Sometime around midnight I woke up and paid an unfortunate visit to the loo - thankfully, I was still too tired to remember anything beyond "I vomited copiously" - the memory details are quite vague, though. I stayed up for a few more hours, too exhausted to actually sleep. 

I woke up around 6PM New Years Eve, and took the rest of the day easy - I still felt feverish and dizzy, but I kept a bowl of noodles with olive oil down, drank all the water I could stand, and watched the rest of Mad Men season two. Oooohh... sooo good. A little before midnight, I bundled up in as many layers of clothing as I could reasonably fit onto my body and made my way down to the pier. I passed on the way multiple clubs filled to capacity, and chuckled that my goal for the New Year would be the same as many peoples': to not throw up on oneself. 

There was a very strong, very cold Westerly wind (westerly meaning going towards the west, right?) and a slight hazy fog through the lower gardens, but the water and the pier itself were crystal clear - you could see quite a ways in either direction along the shoreline, the stars clear as day, and the water gently reflecting back the lights of the city in undulating, dreamlike swirls. The countdown began - I couldn't quite hear the numbers being shouted by those on the beach, but I'm pretty certain they weren't always going in sequence, as one person would be shouting a countdown, to be drowned out by someone obviously trying to correct him. There was no big signifying "boom" to mark it definitively, but eventually everyone with a watch decided that it was near enough to a unified "one", and began shooting off fireworks - all along the coast you could watch the flights flash across the sky, as each group struggled to out do each other. 

To properly delight my inner English major, I stood on the eastern side of the pier to bid farewell to 2008 and watch fireworks, then walked around the edge to the western side and watched from there for a bit. For whatever reason, the fireworks were going on the eastern beach, but not from the western (well, further down the coast yes, just not right next to the pier) - here families were... well, I overheard a family explaining what they were doing, but thinking it over later, I'm a bit confused. "They put "fire" in a "carrier bag" (plastic grocery bag), then let the wind blow it away." I'm not sure how the fire didn't just destroy the plastic bag instantly, and it's not like it was in a votive or something like that, as the wind picked these up and let them float away on the breeze over the water. That said, they were a beautifully eerie and almost supernaturally spiritual sight - a small flicker of light, like a candle in a distant window, borne aloft on the wind, drifting and gliding aimlessly this way and that over the water in the inky blackness. It was one of those sights that feels like a metaphor, but one so big that you don't want to destroy it by thinking it through - you much rather simply feel the enormity in the miniscule and watch it go on its way. I returned home, tired and quiet, and ready for bed once again. 

Since then, I've been feeling much better, but on an unfortunately truly bizarre sleep schedule that despite my best efforts I can't seem to get turned around. Also unfortunately, I've been dealing - most crankily - with my not-dead-but-useless refrigerator. Sometime while I was gone for Christmas break, the whole unit decided that it didn't want to keep things cold anymore. Upon first opening it, I discovered that the upper freezer area had completely thawed, dripping all its thawed water onto my previously frozen and now also thawed and moldy meat - which had, in turned, found a way to leak onto into the fridge below, covering everything in the somehow-now-warmer-than-my-flat fridge with a layer of moldy-germy-thaw-water. Everything that needed to stay cold to be viable as food had to be tossed. Anything that could possibly have had water leak in had to be tossed. Anything with a paper label had to have the label (now soaked with the water) peeled off, and thoroughly wiped down with disinfectant. The small amount that hadn't been tossed was moved to my larger freezer unit which, even on the warmest setting, has managed to freeze ice chunks into my milk carton and make the ketchup non-moving. On top of this, despite four thorough washings with disinfectant spray, two with a baking soda solution, and a tray of baking soda left in the fridge for a day now, the fridge still REEKS of death and decay - each time I open it, I half expect to see animated skull-and-crossbones come flying out, moaning aloud in despair. The odd thing is that it's still plugged in, the outlet switch is still set to "on", the circuit breaker isn't popped (and, perhaps more to the point, the light still comes on when you open the door), yet it is nowhere near cold, nor does the temperature change at all when you change the coldness switch in either direction and leave it for a few hours. I tried calling James, only to find - surprise, surprise - he's still off on holiday, and won't be back 'til Monday. I've tried to work out what the problem could be beyond, "It's very old and probably just dead", as the thought of having to wait for James to haul it away and bring in a new one fills me with dread, as the stench has already begun to filter out of the fridge - I can faintly smell it even across the room with the fridge door shut and absolutely nothing inside it save a plate covered in baking soda. (grumble)