AT LAST -- St. Ives or Bust!

Ah, December… glorious December, literally the 10th month oddly placed at the end of the calendar year as good old number 12, just to confuse. One thing we weren’t confused about is what to do when that last elusive day slips by and becomes not just a new month but a whole new year as well. Cheesy intro, I know, but you gotta start somewhere…

So there we were, Darren and I, sitting at home one day staring at the walls because we’ve reached the stage where we can no longer stare at each other’s ugly mugs, when the phone rang. (To be honest, we were probably debating the semantics of which is more proper – “aluminum” or “aluminium” or where to put the emphasis on a name, for instance Mau-REEN or MAU-reen. Because we’re just that interesting…) Well you get the idea, we were at home when the phone rang and it was Darren’s mate, Matt. He had come up with a great idea for UFOria’s first big trip of the year – take a group down to St. Ives, Cornwall for the New Year celebrations there.

Great idea! And we were off… designing posters, handing them out in the streets, leaving hundreds in all the university campuses. Unfortunately all our efforts were for naught as not one person contacted us. Luckily for us, Darren has about 100 friends who all love to travel together. And in the end the 16 passenger seats of the minibus were taken up by 14 of Darren’s friends, me and my friend Brooke who traveled all the way from Tennessee for the occasion (she didn’t know when she first bought her tickets that we’d be adventuring down to the southwest coast but she was up for the journey as were the rest of us). Alright, so we didn’t get full paying passengers that we could gouge for the big bucks, but we had people we knew and could have fun with. (See online photo album at my Kodak Gallery for verification of said fact.)

The long story short is this: Darren, Brooke and I picked up Dave, Sally, Lou, Stu, Anya and John from Dave’s place in the minibus early on New Year’s Eve morning. Then we hit the highway (a.k.a. motorway) and met with Dave B. and Lynda who brought Pete and Dtor (couple from Thailand, not brought from Thailand but London) and Matt K. and Kel (Kerry) brought Matt W. and Nuala. And thus Abraham begat Cain and Moses begat Jeb… yadada ya, that’s when I fell asleep.

The 6 hour ride down to the coast was taken up by chatting with Brooke, navigating and feeding Darren (not sandwich in his hand) and munching on food bought from service stations.

At last we arrived at our wonderful little hostel in Penzance about 7:30pm on New Year’s Eve and donned our costumes.

About 9pm the illustrious host of the hostel drove another minibus full of other residents into St. Ives where the party was a-happenin’ and we followed in our minibus.

He showed us a cool place to park the beast while we ran wild through the streets. We all broke into different sub-groups to divide and conquer our night. Some went straight to a pub to begin with drinking their dinners, others stopped for a Cornish pasty to line their stomachs first before the liquor flowed. Then the food party finally, after much searching and being turned away by burly bouncers, found a pub of our own for the night –

At first it was so crowded, you couldn’t stick your toe in the door. Then it thinned out and we managed to cram all of our group in, as you can see.

With one minute to go before midnight, suddenly some folk wanted to be beach front as the fireworks went off. So they bolted, through the door, down the street, turn right at an innocuous hidden alley and down the steps in time to hear the bells chime and the people cheer. The remainder stayed in the warm pub and counted down the clock with other drunkards, no fireworks but a fireplace. I was a bit confused as to what the plan was and thus ran out the door initially with the others but then realized Darren and a few stayed in the pub and so at 00:00, 1 January 2006, I was running back through the door and into Darren’s arms.

Now, I’m not overly superstitious, but I’ve heard that how you spend New Year’s is a sign of how that year will turn out for you. For example, last New Year’s eve I was in Ireland smooching a random Italian (who, turns out didn’t speak English) and this year I’ve had more boys falling at my feet than in the past few years combined (not just Darren, there are others but for now I have eyes only for one).

Ummmm… anyways… after closing down the pub at 2am we headed back through the gale winds up the windy lanes to the minibus, and from there went back to the hostel for a rest.

Dinner time – To Be Continued……

Averting Disaster

I want to make it known that for the past two weeks since the Christmas and New Year rush I haven’t been sitting on my ass not blogging and not attempting to either. Therefore I will bring you into my world of the past weeks so you may be less inclined to be angry at my long blog silence. First, obviously there was the run-up to Christmas which saw Darren’s temp job ending and our mad rush to finish present shopping and other errand running. Then there was the Big Day and the subsequent week when Darren and I didn’t return to our home for three full days (two more than originally planned). And finally to my joy, Brooke joined us for the New Year’s week, so that obviously was spent touring as much of Britain as possible, as well as taking a trip of 17 people down to almost the very tip of southwest England for New Year itself.

After we returned from the coast and Brooke left, and I mean right after, both Darren and I got horrendously sick. We were sprawled on our little couch for two days staring at the tv and eating soup only (bear in mind that Daz doesn’t watch tv much, in fact he didn’t own a television until I arrived here, so he must’ve been super sick to watch 8 hours of it in one go!) After that I spent the next few days trying desperately – and failing horribly – to transfer pictures of the festivities from my camera to my computer to Darren’s computer (which was the only one connected to the internet). Unfortunately, for some strange, yet undiscovered reason every time I transferred the pictures over to his computer, they wouldn’t open, but the computer would decide of its own accord to shut down the file and thus the pictures.

That is what I’ve been dealing with until two days ago when I finally decided it would be easier to reinstall Microsoft Windows XP English Edition on my computer and see if that corrected the problem. Let me backtrack a bit… while I was in Ukraine my laptop was acting up and doing odd things, therefore my good friend Sasha – computer programmer extraordinaire – decided to reinstall windows and at the same time partition my drives so that I’d have a c:/ and an e:/ drive. What this means is that all of my personal documents, photos, programs, etc. would be kept in the e:/ drive while only the windows installation files would be in the c:/ drive. Well, becoming completely fed up with the non-compliance of photo transfers I spent Wednesday night reinstalling windows on to what I believed to be the c:/ drive, thus saving all my files and wiping away the horrid Russian bootlegged version of Windows.

Once Darren and I had debated for over an hour (at the commercial breaks of a very enlightening and heart wrenching program about the torture methods at Guantanamo Bay) about what to ‘name’ the computer (one of the last steps in the installation process) and finally decided upon Asimenio (Greek for silver) I pressed the last few ‘Next’ buttons and off it went. At the end of it all, the computer looked like a newly washed and waxed car – well the innards of it looked that way I’m sure, the outside was still a bit dusty from non-use.

Then I happily clicked on one of the several links to My Documents and as it opened my heart sank… no documents. Then I tried another route… nothing. As the reality started to sharpen in my mind an invisible hand grabbed at my heart. Everything started to go black… I got up from the couch, where Darren was still sitting talking with his mom over the phone, and ran downstairs. It was then hyperventilation set in and I just wanted to crawl out of my skin.. “this can’t be happening.. I didn’t just erase ALL of my files.. all my pictures from since I left Colorado.. all my essays and research from DU.. no, it can’t be true.. but there’s nothing there!! Not there! I looked… it’s…… all……… GONE!!!!!!!!!”

At this point Darren had come down to figure out what the hell had just happened. I tried to blurt out as best I could in between sobs and short breaths that I’d accidentally erased my files with the new version of Windows. He wasn’t buying it though… he kept being optimistic and hopeful, kept saying “There must be a way to get them back.” “They can’t be all gone darling.” Finally annoyed by his disbelief and overtaken by the mourning of being bereft of my life’s work, I grabbed his hand and dragged him upstairs to show him my irreversible blunder. This time I went straight to the e:/ drive and there sat 4 folders where before there had been 3, one of these was a Windows folder, evidence to me that I had placed all the Windows files on the e:/ drive wiping off my files. Then Darren asked me about one of the other folders which said quite plainly – My Documents. It didn’t look the same as my old link, the icon was plain rather than stylized. I clicked thinking – “what’s the use, it will be blank” when suddenly… all of my files began to appear, slowly but surely each and every document, all the folders full of pictures, films and programs. All I could do was look at Darren and say “Oh.”