Messages from the Past

I'm en route to Kuwait, sitting in a Holiday Inn in London, near Regent's Park. You can tell by looking at it that this used to be a part of the Forte chain. It looks identical to the Forte Crest that once housed the UKCAC comics convention.

But it's a Holiday Inn now and I got it on Priceline for a song, after studying BiddingforTravel.com carefully.

I spent the evening with old pal Peter Moore and his 5-year-old daughter and nearly fell asleep on the District line on the way back to the hotel.

Then I got my second wind.

And I thought I'd do something I've been meaning to do for a few years. I'm getting all my old SMS text messages from Uganda off of my GSM phone. Things ended so unpleasantly with HM there that I never had the heart to look at them again until a few months ago. I thought I'd store them in a Word doc and shove them deep down into a hard drive and forget about them until I need to refer back to them for a writing project, but since my GSM phone doesn't work in the States, I found myself unable to get the messages off the phone and into my computer.

But since I am in London with a working mobile phone connection, I thought "Now's my chance." And I am SMS-to-emailing the messages onto my MacBook.

Some of them still make me queasy. But others (sent by me) were entertaining.

"A bat in my room! 4got 2 take foto. 2 busy not screaming :)"

"6 poachers forced 2 pull tourist van out of mud!just in masindi taxi."

And the classic, which made Herr Marlboro turn around in his truck and come straight home to see if I was okay.

"Baboon in yard."