Goodbye (for now)

How on earth did I miss Tony's return? I've been egerly folowing this tread for some time now!

Welcome back! I look forward to seeing your "voice of reason" in all the apropriate places.... :mrgrn:
 
And while I was gone, I see that I missed your arrival, David - an event of no small significance, and one that pleased me considerably.

(I get tired of arguing with Mercutio all the time. Now I can argue with you instead. :))

I must say, though, that Storage Forum just doesn't seem the same without Tea. I really miss her. I'm even thinking about running an ad in one of the Queensland newspapers, telling here to come on home by air and charge it all to my credit card.

But not right away: first I have to earn enough money to pay off some of the money she already spent on it before we parted, otherwise the bank will probably decline the transaction and I'll be in in even more trouble. Anyway, I'm not sure that she will ever come home. She likes it up there too much.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, I'm spending most of my time writing about the trip to make a sort of lavishly illustrated travel log on CD. It's been quite a while since I did much HTML coding and I'm making heavy weather of it. At one stage last night I nearly posted some code fragments here to ask Buck and the other SF gurus what I was doing wrong, but I think I'm on the right track with it now.

And then there are all the pictures to select and edit, and the text to expand an improve on. It will take quite a while, I think. In the back of my mind, I'm wondering if I should try to do a really good job of it and then take it to a publisher as a CD-based manuscript. People are mad on bird books and travel books and books with nice pictures in them, so why should I not do one of my own?
 
Why not? Go for it Tannin, and welcome back. Any chance Tea could learn how to spell while she's gone?
 
Hoolie Doolie! I just realized that Ballarat is 19 hours ahead of me! Here I am figuring out what I should eat for lunch, and Tony isn't even up for breakfast.
 
I also think your journey worthy of a published work. If you're going to crank out a simple version just for us anyway, might as well do it right and make the journey tax-deductable.
 
I think he is a she, Buck. A very pretty Barking Owl she was too. I took lots of pictures of her, and she will undoubtedly appear over on the Bird Forum before too long, and in my trip report also.

Right now I seem to be utterly snowed under with various small but time-consuming tasks, so my apologies for not posting much. Among other things, I decided to take advantage of a quiet week at the office to paint a small part of the front of the shop (long overdue) and, as always happens, one thing is leading to another and the paiting job has got quite a bit bigger. I doubt that I'll get it finished before the weekend. (There goes Saturday ... sigh.)

If Tea was here, she could answer the telephone for me and help Kristi out in the workshop. Better yet, I could answer the telephone myself and Tea could paint the shop - unlike me, she isn't afraid of ladders, and those long Inspector Gadget arms of hers would be just the thing for reaching the more awkward corners. Might end up with a lot of paint on the footpath and a striped white and spotted green-on-orange ape, but paint wears of eventually.

Red Hill is hard work with just two of us!
 
Boy I've missed a lot!

Congratulations, Jojo! May you and your wife have a wonderful life together! Care to share a few details about your wife and how you met, etc? I'm sure we'd all like to know a bit about Mrs. Jojo :)

---------

Welcome back, Tony! When I visited SF in your absence, I could feel a little something was missing from the mix, especially since you have always been such a prolific (and good) writer. I am waiting for your wonderfully descriptive guide to Australia with baited breath.
 
Hi everyone,

I'm back. And married-
Everything went OK, we just didn't understand too much about what was happening as everything, speech and papers, where in Thai. :mrgrn:

It wen't quite smoothly, until 2 minutes before everything was set, when the computer they used crashed (guess what operating system it had (hint, it had scandisk on it ) ), and after trying to get it working everyone left for lunch! So we wen't back to the hotel, waited a few hours, and then back to finish the whole thing. Guess if we were nervous at the hotel!

That happened on the first of this month, on monday. We arrived in Bangkok on sunday, so we were a bit tired after that :).

A great vacation. And right now I hate my work and being back home. It's great to meet the people, but I really, REALLY want to get back to warm Thailand.

Pic's coming later...:)
 
Congrats Married JoJo!

BTW, why did they need a computer to get you guys married?

Definitely a climate change going from Scandinavian Winter to the tropics and back. My mum works in Bangkok and she's coming over here to visit us for Christmas. Hee hee, we just had a foot of snow, record for this time of the year.
 
Congrats JoJo. I wish you and your wife many happy years together. Looking forward to seeing those pix soon!
 
Speaking of absences, Sol is back!

Sol was last seen disappearing off into the backblocks of South Australia, clutching an offer of employment in one hand an a credt card in the other.

He appeared here in Ballarat today, and was last seen leaving my shop clutching a 160GB Samsung drive in one hand and a credit card in the other.

He has spent the last three months working hard and driving huge distances, living in a hotel room with no air-conditioning and no internet access. I understand that he has learned to read quite a lot. :(

Next week, he gets to move into a house of his own, and will have ADSL broadband installed as soon as our meaga-wonderful telecoms quasi-monopoly can get off its arse and do something useful. :)

Also ....

Oh, excuse me. That was the phone. I have to go down to the police station now. Back in a little while. (I think.)
 
Damnit, Flagreen, you are the smartest guy I know. How the hell did you guess that?

I got a call late last night from Senior Sgt Kennedy of the Frankston police. Was I the owner of a very fat orange-coloured orangutan?

"Fat? How fat?", I asked.

"Enormous", he said, "the biggest ape I've ever seen."

Hmmm ... I said it didn't sound very likely, but I'd pop down and see if I could help. Ahh - which station did you say it was again, Sgt Kennedy?

""Frankston", he said.

Frankston? Frankston?

Why on earth would Tea wind up in Frankston? And a little rotund she might be, but never actually fat. Nope, as I'd already guessed, it had to be some other ape - which was why I'd sort of promised to slip down to the station and help out. After all, all those years living and working with Tea must have taught me something. Perhaps I could translate or something. And who knows? Maybe it would be a relative of hers, or (better yet) an ape who might be able to help me find her.

But Frankston? No way. Frankston is on the other side of Melbourne from here, as a round trip, the best part of a six hour drive. There are limits to all things, and I'd just found mine.

So I told Sgt Kennedy "no" and got off the phone.
 
Two hours later there was a knock on the door.

"Anthony Wilson Tannin?"

"Yes."

"We understand that you are the owner of a wild ape."

"Well, not exactly. You see ... "

"Look, son, it's like this. Either you nip down to Franskston and have a chat with Sgt Kennedy, possibly making a voluntary statement, or we take you in as an accessory before the fact."

That was a nice touch, calling me "son". The young copper at the door couldn't have been more than half my age.

Anyway, I got his drift. Three and a half hours later, after an inordinate amount of time stooging around the back streets of Frankston looking for the police station, I was there.

Sgt Kennedy had gone home. "Wait here" the officer behind the desk said. I waited.

And waited.

Half an hour later, they told me that the ape had been transferred to the Dandenong lockup, but that I could see him there, first thing in the morning. Seeing it was already after midnight, I figured the best thing to do was find a motel. I was dammned if I was going to drive all the way home again, only to come straight back again.

In the morning, I checked out and drove over to Dandenong. (That only takes a half hour or so.)

You know how you get a sort of picture of people that you've only met on the phone? Well, I expected Sgt Kennedy to be a big, thick-set copper with a paunch and of no determinable age. But he was nothing like that: he was tall and slim, with thinning blondish hair and about 30-something. He was actually quite a nice guy, once you got to know him.

We went down to the cells and there in 5B was the biggest ape I've ever seen. Not tall, but enormously fat; great rolls of belly like the Michelan Man, and a paunch that hung down so far that his bandy orange legs barely touched the ground. He had his back to me but I could see right away that it wasn't Tea. Possibly a relative, though. The pattern of the orange curls on his back looked somehow familiar.
 
He turned around.

My jaw dropped.

"Tea!"

"Who did you expect? Quasimodo?"

"What the f*ck are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you to pay the man so we can go home, what does it look like?"

I couldn't get over how fat she was. I mean, not just tubby, I'm talking seriously fat.

The long and the short of it is that Tea has been charged with the theft of a quantity of fruit, but Sgt Kennedy said he would let her out and drop the charges so long as I agree to pay for the stolen property.

Tea denies everything and says it wasn't her fault.

Anyway, now I have to find $17025.80 to pay for all the bananas. I've scraped up $3000 so far, and Tea says she has about a thousand of her own, but we need another AU$13025.

Can you help me out, guys?

(Luckily, being an imaginary ape, we are allowed to pay using imaginary money. But I can't imagine $17,000 all on my own, so I'm going to need some help.)
 
Cool!

That's .. er ....

$3000 from me
$1000 of Tea's
US$420 from Dave, which is ... er ... about AU$600 (the exchange rate is not helping us here)

Grand total = $4600

Still required: $12,425.80

Come on guys, we can do this!

(I'll figure out how to deal with the transport issues later.)

PS: I think we need to act pretty promptly on this one, guys. It's not for Tea's sake - as far as I'm concerned, she can stay in there eating bread and water forever, which is about how long she will need to slim down to a reasonable size again - but for the sake of Sgt Kennedy and his workmates. I don't think they have ever had to deal with a talking ape before, and I can tell you, she is driving them crazy!
 
Tannin said:
...but for the sake of Sgt Kennedy and his workmates. I don't think they have ever had to deal with a talking ape before, and I can tell you, she is driving them crazy!
Click to expand...
Good thing, I hate cops. Leave her slim down.

And all my imaginary money goes to my not-imaginary debts. Sorry.
 
Tannin's done a miscalculation. David's dollars are worth 1.33 Aussie ones, so David has really provided 559AUD.

Tea can of course have $1000 of my imaginary dollars as well. To make the math easy. :)
 
I don't know why you think he'd be offended. Rugby may be a religion in New Zealand, but it's only a sport here.

More seriously, Tannin lives in a state that abhors rubgy, preferring instead to go absolutely bonkers over Australian Rules football. So it's probably more a case of "Jonny who?"

Actually, I'm surprised that NZ didn't declare a day of mourning after the mighty All Blacks choked yet again. Apparently their economy took a hit though ...
 
The rugby was just by the by.
‘twas the maths to which I alluded. Which is such an insult that its only tannins near legendary magnanimity that made me doubt he’d take umbrage.
 
I think it's sad that Tannin has to make up such a ridiculous story.

Clearly, Tea looks so fat because she is a fallen ape who is reaping what someone else sowed. She only stole the bananas because she was eating for two.

Some of the bananas being somewhat over-ripe, she was arrested for being under the influence. The police remembered prior episodes involving brandy and bananas all too well.

Fortunately, help is at hand through the auspices of Michael Jackson. His New Years Resolution is to like children, so he has offered to raise Tea's accident as his own. Although there's still the question of why there was Bubbles in Tannin's Tea.
 
OK. Looking good!

Fool and Time, I am in fact an abberant Victorian. Put it down to my 100% Tasmanian blood or my formative years spent in the Territory. (Two years in the Territory should be enough to warp anyone.) I love Rugby Union! I took every possible opportunity to catch World Cup games during my trip, even organising myself in such a way as to spend a night in an Alice Springs motel (rather than in the proper bush) for the final. The week before, I was in a place where there was no TV, and we all trooped down to the nearest set, which was in a pub some miles away - it was packed to the rafters, standing room only, and the whole damn community watched the All Blacks getting hammered. Wonderful!

I was disappointed to see Wilco get that last shot, of course, but in the end, any other result would have been inappropriate. The Poms played magnificently, and although they faced superb opposition that never laid down and never gave in, if the Wallabies had got up we would all have had to admit that they stole it. It was fitting that the game went to extra time, and that the result hung in the balance all night long, but it was also fitting that the best team on the night won the day. In short, yup, we will take the 800 very generous guineas - which, if I remember correctly, adds up to 800 * 21 shillings = near enough to AU$2000!

On the other hand, I despise Rugby League. I'd rather watch gridiron than league, and rather watch two flies crawling up a wall than either.


Ahem.... To business....

$3000 from me
$1000 of Tea's
$560 from Dave (I'll work in Oz dollars)
$840 from JoJo (a rough mental conversion from his 500 Euros)
$1330 from the ever-generous Mercutio
$2000 from Fool. (A magnificent gift!)
$800 from Fushigi. I don't think that there will be any problem at all about the banana promise, my friend.

Grand total = $9530

Still required: $6494.20

I'm off to see Belinda and Kristi now. They are both very fond of Tea, so perhaps I can raise a little more from them.
 
Mercutio,
Guinea =
a; Some place whose location I can’t remember right now. (South Pacific?)
b; An archaic British unit of currency worth, as tannin said, 21 shillings or 1.05 pounds sterling. If, at any point, anyone wishes to get a better understanding of the English you could do a lot worse than to google up our pre-decimal units of currency, read the list, and consider that we resisted the change to 1 pound equalling 100 pence because it was thought to be too confusing.

Wilco=
Johnny Wilkinson, England’s fly half. And therefore the chap that scored the points that won the cup, etc.(genuflection is permitted).

Tannin,
$1992.22 AUD according to XE.com
and the Australia vs. New Zealand semi-final was probably my favourite game of the tournament.(either that or the Australia vs. Ireland game at the end of the group stages, or New Zealand vs. Wales also at the end of the group stage.). And, hand on heart, I’ve got to say that, once England got past the South Africa in the groups they were fairly heavily favoured by the draw.
 
If its imaginary money you be needing, and I can imagine all
my debts to be assets... Then I can spot you $1000 US into the
pot ($1330 AUD) as long as try and get her some zpelling lezzonz
during her incarceration.

I'd offer some of our (suddenly) surplus beef for a crash Atkins diet,
but I fear she is already mad enough as it is.
 
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