My dad e-mailed me raving about some Taco Bell promotion to give everybody in the United States a free taco if Mir hits a target in the South Pacific. I figured he’d picked it up from some bogus e-mail forward. Turns out I was wrong. Now I wonder, how do they determine who’s eligible for this? Is it everybody physically located in the U.S.? What about tourists? What about illegal immigrants? In other words, how do I (theoretically, of course) get my taco??

Dark Horizons is running an interview with Colin Firth about his role in “Bridget Jones’ Diary.” You know, Colin, you’re really starting to piss me off with this whole “I’m-not-Darcy-and-I-hate-all-my-fans” thing. It’s like Russell Crowe. If you choose to be a movie star, you gotta accept the consequences and stop bitching about the very people who pay your salary. And what the hell is that bit about fighting Hugh Grant? That’s not in the book! Their characters are never even in the same place! Grrrr…

I’m still working on the photos. I’ve discovered an upside to jet lag: you get a lot done in the wee hours of the morning when everybody else is asleep. I’ve got about 60 done and 30 to go. Should be up tonight. In the meantime… let the blogging begin!

Leaving before it kills me…
In eight hours I’m leaving sunny Australia for the neverending gloom of the U.K. As if that weren’t depressing enough, I tripped on a sidewalk running to catch a bus yesterday and wrenched my ankle, which is now the size of a grapefruit. I can barely walk. I’m talkin’ serious pain here. On the plus side, my sister would’ve loved it. (She finds pratfalls to be the height of comedy.) I mean, painful though it was, I can see the inherent physical humor in a person trying to simultaneously run, turn, and remove a bus ticket from a backpack, which leads to said person tripping on a crack, stumbling forward, skinning her knees and hands, and finally belly-flopping on the pavement right in front of her astonished boyfriend, a bus driver, and about 30 bus passengers of various nationalities. And let’s not forget the other catastrophes of this otherwise wonderful holiday: I fell on my ass in Snookums’s garage (resulting in an egg-sized bruise on my bum), I had a land leech attached to my right foot (which left a bump that began to itch like mad a week later), I was caught in the worst floods Australia has seen in fifty years, and I got fried to a crisp after spending a mere 20 minutes in the sun (resulting in peeling shoulders and my having to cover myself in SPF 30 every time I set foot out-of-doors). Like I said, it’s probably best that I leave the country before it kills me. The next time y’all hear from me, I’ll be home in the boring (but safe) U.K.

Blog problems: A) What happened to Max’s site? I keep getting errors. Has it moved? B) Amer, please lose the green background quick. You’re Korean, not Irish, Sis. 🙂

Am I on holiday, or what? I can’t help posting. I go to check my e-mail and end up reading blogs and examining my site statistics. This one is too good to pass up: I’m the #2 result when you search for “paceyporn“, second only to the site itself! I swear, I didn’t think that up on my own. Somebody actually found my site that way.

Nasty big wet floodA disastrous turn…
Um, yeah, so that rain I mentioned? It turned out to be the biggest flood in over fifty years. Snookums’s parents’ house is seriously located right in the middle of the swath of destruction, yet luckily they’re up on a high hill and most of the bridges near us were still passable. We couldn’t get back to Sydney til Tuesday though, when we lucked out and discovered a train that was still running. Now we’re back in civilization at Snookums’s sister’s house (hooray for cable modems!) and planning our tour of the city. Since the flood cut into my time in Sydney, we managed to call my office in London and convince them to let me stay an extra couple of days. I got Qantas to move my ticket, and Voila! I’m here til next Tuesday. Apologies to my patient visitors for the extended sabbatical, but I promise to have lots of interesting stuff to share when I get back. Later…