Doesn’t look like I’ll ever get to fly on Concorde now. Very sad 🙁

I continue to be intimidated by ovens. What is it about these seemingly-innocuous cooking devices that I can’t figure out? I always follow the instructions, and yet disaster always seems to strike when I use ovens.

Tonight I tried to heat up an oven pizza, which should have been simple — the label on the pizza said preheat the oven to 450 degrees F, stick it in, and then take it out 20 minutes later. Easy, right?

About 10 minutes after I put it in, I start hearing these little “Sssss!” noises coming from the kitchen intermittently. I check, and a few drops of cheese have melted off the edge pizza onto the floor of the oven. “OK no problem,” I think, “there was probably just a bit of cheese too close to the edge of the pie.” I go back to my computer. By 15 minutes, I realize the sizzling is now pretty much a constant white noise, and find that most of the pizza has melted through a hole in the pie’s centre, and through the slats of the oven tray, onto the bottom of the oven. And the pizza is stuck to the tray. Nice.

Well, it’s almost a whole month since I last posted anything here — tempus fugits, etc. etc. Quite a lot’s happened in that time — some of it good, some of it not so good…

Not so good: Getting unwelcome news from California on the telephone, and then having a long uncomfortable red-eye to the U.K. to churn it over.

Good: Seeing a lot of family and close friends in Kent, London, New York and Arlington, Virginia.

Not so good: Having to rescue my car from an evil and devious garage that have messed it up good and want to charge me over $1,000 to make it driveable again. Mike at Salamis Service Center, 21-15 38th Ave., Long Island City, NY — this means you. May you break out in malodorous pustulous sores, you greedy dishonest crook.

Good: Completing the painstaking editorial process with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model at a marathon 4-day CRM Special Interest Group meeting in Oxford.

Good: Watching the England v Turkey Euro 2004 qualifying match in two different pubs in South London (The Landor for the first half, the Duke of Edinburgh for the second). The score was 0 – 0, but the football and the atmosphere were amazing — particularly as a draw was all that England needed to qualify.

Good: Hearing the news that the Aussies are demonstrating in Canberra to protest of George Bush.

And soon it will be November.