You have to love the US Post Office. If not, we'd all go berzerk and find AK47s and destoy them all! If it's Saturday, you can tell that I'm probably getting up disgustingly early to treck down to the local post office to personally pick up the -priority mail- parcel that the bastard postman lied about trying to deliver on Friday. I kid you not, this is a continuing saga with almost everything I order online that gets delivered here. I really don't know what it is with the parcel delivery crews. The regular postman is ok, well ok if you don't mind having your mail delivered after 4pm every day. But the parcel crew have serious issues. I have already escalated the situation to the Postal Inspectors enforcement unit and my local congressman's office. I suspect the postman on my route thinks he can do as he pleases because this neighborhood has a high percentage of immigrants who he thinks are afraid to complain. Wrongo buster, this girl knows how to complain.

Returning from the post office, parcel in hand, I made some coffee and settled in for 40 minutes on the phone this morning chatting with Alan mostly about business. Late in the afternoon, almost 5pm my time, 10 PM Alan's time, we met again online in Fed2 (Alan's new sequel to his originail game Federation - see the link in the left column. In cyberspace we chatted about family, his parents, the copy of 1421 I sent his dad, Andrew's studying for finals, going to WorldCons and finally as it always does the talk turned to the usual topic of couples far apart. The man is wicked. And he's very good at it. I'll check flights and tickets in the morning and see how quickly I can get back to London.

One of the semi-personal topics we talked about was the women who try to have a go at Alan. We both make it quite clear to people that we're in a long term comitted relationship so one wonders at the obvious moves of these women. Most of them come under the heading of "star-f'kers". In the internet games world, the Game Designer is the star and the target of would be Elf Princesses, Lady Pirates, Cyberspace Red Sonias and wannabe Fantasy Dominatrixes. They are generally so strange or socially dysfunctional that normal standards of reality and behaviour simply never enter the picture. It's the non-internet over-the-line flirts that we really wonder about. Since when has it become acceptable to proposition someone in front of their partner?