SEVERANCE CHEQUE

03 November 2001

We were hoping to have left by now but visa delays and a last-minute hitch in sending Momma the cat to the quarantine kennels in the UK have delayed us by a week. We do, however, have a departure date - the weekend of November 10/11.
We still have to get a British visa for Lisa and collect the carnet from the AA, but this is ready and waiting for us. Then it's off to the bank for more forex before the big task of going through our luggage a final time to get rid of things we'd like but have no space for, or think would be nice but will never actually use - like a comb for me!
We've also collected our laptop - a super-fast 486DX75 with 12 Mb of RAM - it runs Windows 95 and should just manage to give us text input capabilities. But that's all we really need - if you want to see pictures, you'll have to send us a digital camera and a new laptop. I didn't think you'd want to see the pics that desperately!
There's not a lot else to tell at this point. It's been a whirl of social engagements (we've been invited out with friends more often in the last two weeks than in the past year - they must be celebrating my departure and bemoaning Lisa's!) and patching up the last little bits. We spent yesterday shooting sticky sealant into leaky bits of the truck and we're spending today wondering if we used the correct sealant.
Three important lessons regarding silicone and other sealants: 1) Buy one of those gun-type jobbies for applying it from the big tubes. Having a trigger and nozzle makes aiming it much easier; 2) Lightly sandpaper whatever you want the silicone to stick to, otherwise it won't, and 3) To smooth the silicone into nice neat lines and shaped creations, nothing works like a finger-full of gob - use an ungobbed finger and it comes away full of silicone (it's naturally "lightly sandpapered") while the original substrate is left devoid of sealant. With gob-slobbered finger, the silicone spreads like, um, peanut butter and doesn't leave your finger all sticky. Admittedly, it's still gobby but that's easier to wash off than sealant. I just knew you wanted to know all that.
Oh, and Lisa has finished work. Left last Wednesday and spent Thursday feeling weird because she didn't have a "real job" anymore. Her colleagues gave her a healthy cheque as a goodbye present and we went straight out and bought, appropriately enough, a satellite radio so that we can keep in touch with the news while we're up there. Thanks for the present, Pretoria News people.
Not that we intend staying in touch with the world's warring ways much, we just want to hear if problems are moving in our direction - or us in the direction of problems. Yes, we could just listen to local stations, and we will, but the satellite radio gives us access to the Western news services like the BBC World Service and CNN (which hopefully will stop dancing to the US government's propaganda and start reporting objectively again.) As a special bonus, we also get one service no local radio stations will supply - a maritime weather service in Gujarati, an Indian language. Could we not get the service?!?!