...time for some recap/wrap-up.

I'm not in the best of possible moods, alone and angry; is there something like "post-vacation depression"? Seems so. Or maybe it's just all the bullshit going on at work. The Unix Guerilla is stocking up on demotivator gear.

But first some pics and stories.

The annoyances of flying to AT I've already ranted about at length; in the end I didn't freefly at all and A$230+E21+E38 were absolutely wasted. This is how I started out going there: the glider bag contained a 15kg bag and the glider gear, and the onboard thingie held lots of heavy stuff (14kg in total).

The onboard thing weighs 4kg empty and is Andrew's; I decided to send it back to Oz by mail in order to avoid yet another airline fuckup (that's the E38 above and the parcel arrived Thursday; pretty quick service but I would have gladly settled for surface/ship-mail and less cost if it had been available).

Wasn't strictly necessary; the Viennese airline girl didn't bat an eyelash at my 30+kg (this time better split in 21kg and the rest) and thus I started the journey less pissed. VIE to LHR was lousy, bad weather and delays galore; I just made it to the LHR to SIN flight in time. Then I actually watched the guys load my two bags and thought "great; two out of three potential places to lose my bags cleared!" On this first overnight flight my reading light was busted and the movie selection lousy but the flight was on time. On the second overnighter from SIN to BNE my video-on-demand thingie was completely broken. Crawling off the plane in Brisbane, I cleared immigration without problems despite the two passports, quickly got my bags and the quarantine guys actually had me bypass the scanners and dogs completely. Neat.

Next time I'll try flying Emirates Airlines: it seems that their best offer would have been about A$300 cheaper than the "cheapest offer" I had plus they're flying Brisbane-Dubai-Vienna. I don't envy the stewardesses their work uniform, though (yes, this is a veil hanging from her silly hat).

Some pictures of Cornelia in Vienna, baking a cake for the grandparents and on her 10th birthday.

My parents had let us kids do weird fun things at times. For example, once in a while we were allowed to "eat like the lions do": spaghetti with sauce, plate on the floor, using no hands. Results in very dirty but happy kids.

Cornelia wasn't interested in doing that (dunno why), but to to annoy Barbara we faked some pics :-)

Shortly before Conny flew back to the USA, we went to the Viennese amusement park (Wiener Prater) - Cornelia, my sister Nina and I. Nina had to do lots of chuck-up rides with Conny, while I got away with Haunted House and go-cart rides. This kid seems to have a cast-iron stomach.

Cornelia didn't really like me spending any time without her, but at least the late evenings belonged to me. One of these was spent with friends in the Passage, an old pedestrian underpass converted into a club. Pretty cool (if bloody expensive).

Most of the evenings I went to more mundane places though, meeting most of my friends at least once. (Some of which were casting me roses by the bucket, online, about how great a friend I am and how they owe me lots of what they know today - what do you think I look like, a bloody teacher?!? - how very embarrassing & untrue; a better friend wouldn't have buggered off to the other end of the world and I think I've learned at least as much from anybody as they may have from me.)

But I digress. Some pics from the week in Salzburg/Hochkönig. The dead car looked worse in reality. Well, I relaxed nicely during that week...only occasionally doing some work on the lapdog I had brought.

BBQs are not just an Aussie thing; a week on a hut without some tasty carcinogens is unthinkable. My sister Julia plays some kind of gnome in her latest D&D game, so using a halberd for making kindling came pretty naturally.

And a final few pics of the sisters gardening and the parents enjoying life.

And now I'm back here. Caught up with most of the things that piled up in the meantime. My house is still standing. My plants mostly survived and I didn't miss any bills. And I could have watched an Austrian film on TV this week: SBS ran Hundstage (which beats Inspector Rex anytime) but I declined.

Guntis (one of my flying friends) bought my old Bolero and I've thus got the money for a new & shiny GPS. Which I might buy pretty quickly as I finally made it onto the roster for the Canungra Cup, a paragliding competition held around here in a few weeks: I'm ranking pretty lowly on the national ladder and the comp was oversubscribed (which meant assignment of places by ranking). We'll see how things go; hopefully tomorrow the weather will be flyable (yesterday and today we had stormy weather with up to 90km/h winds).