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After such an exciting weekend, I wasn’t surprised that today felt just a little bit boring. I woke up exhausted, having overslept by an hour and a half, and rushed to the station, giving dad a lift at the same time. He’s was making one of his bi-annual trips into London and was catching the first off-peak train of the day (that’s how late I was).

So, there I was, eating my lunch and flicking through random pages on the net when, by a rather convoluted series of clicks I ended up on the homepage for the town of Rural, in Vermont, perhaps the most boring place on earth.

I thought it must have been a wind-up at first. Everyone on the site was very cheerful and happy, and the logo even said something about the fact you’d meet lots of nice people there, but it’s won a couple of awards for being the best community site on the net so I guess it must be real. Then… I found the diary of Alice Reed, who lives in the town and notes down the interesting episodes of her life. The most recent entry was November 6th, although she doesn’t say which year that was. It details the exciting adventure she had one day with her socks:

I know there are more than a few folks in town who would be surprised to learn I don’t fold underwear or match up my socks when I’m putting away the laundry. I consider it remarkable that I find the time to actually wash the clothes …[snip details of what goes into which drawer etc]… This morning I was pawing through my jumbled collection of socks, looking for a match to an olive one I had already plucked from the drawer. One that I knew perfectly matched the sweater I had on. Unsuccessful in my search for the muted green mate I happened to hold up a plum one of the same type …[snip the difficult decision to wear odd socks ('Did I have the nerve?')]… As soon as I stepped out of my house I felt instantly less sure. Truth be told, I felt rather panicked. I took careful, measured steps that didn’t cause my pants to shift too much. I was sure to be found out and it was going to be by someone important….

And it goes on… and on and on. You have to read it in its entirity to get the full effect. Editing it down to the essential details loses the effect.

What it did, though, is made my otherwise rather ordinary and exhausted day after the fun weekend in Manchester seem quite exciting. Editing copy, fighting the crowds for lunch, standing on a packed tube. Never again will I complain when I remember that I could instead be living in Rural, Vermont instead.

I also did the final count on the number of spam emails I received last week. The total stands at 241, and that’s just to my personal account, addressed to me. That doesn’t include mailing lists or spams sent to work. Not bad for one week, I don’t think.

Less good is the Brussels weekend, though, which is proving a little difficult in the planning. The Eurostar is scheduled to arrive at just gone eleven at night, which is a bit rediculous as it means you can’t do anything that day. Barry suggested we get in touch with the people selling the trip, which I did, but they said that because they were doing it through lastminute.com they couldn’t help.

Hmmm…

So, I’ve emailed the lastminute people and I’m waiting for an answer. Nothing yet, though, and as the trip leaves on Friday it’s cutting things fine.

Better is the fact that this week’s show is almost sorted out already… which is a relief.

I’m quite curious how people are finding my site. I just got my stats through this morning, which is never particularly good at picking up on the search terms people use, and it includes the following entry:

SEARCH ENGINE PHRASES : chinese cunt 100% [===========> 1

Quite why anyone would search on that in the first place I don’t know. It seems very specific. When they thought when they found my site is another matter altogether.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2002 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.