a chapter of accidents

1)  yesterday evening the six of us gathered in my hotel room to run through our talks and make adjustments and generally have a collective panic.  Quarter way through the proceedings we ordered beer from room service, and a bit later on we ordered another round.  Ten bottles of beer (I don't drink beer), one ice bucket and a flimsy tray later, everyone else left to put away their laptops and meet in the foyer to go out to dinner, leaving me to clear up my room.  The flimsy tray didn't like being picked up and threw two of the bottles off onto the bathroom floor.  Glass everywhere, including my finger.  (It's fine, the bleeding stopped pretty quickly).

2)  On the way to dinner last night, I stopped to get some more money out of an ATM, having the princely sum of $7 in my purse.  The maching spat my card out and asked me to contact my financial institution.  Now, I had telephoned my bank the day before I left London to say I was off to America so I was quite concerned about this - and concerned about how I could manage on $7 until Thursday night...

3)  I woke up at 4.00am (still jet-lagged, can you believe!) to the most attractive cold sore on my lip.  However, one good thing - I rang my bank and sorted out the money problem.

4)  Dr Hippie was freaking out about her talk this morning so we arranged to skip a lecture and she would come to my room so that I would help her.  Dr Hippie is always hungry so I ran across to the 7-11 and bought a bag of pretzels.  We both dove straight into them - and a huge chunk of filling broke off one of my teeth.  The pain is currently being kept basically under control by anti-inflammatories and all I am hoping for now is that I can get through my talk tomorrow and get home on Friday with minimum pain.

5)  And just to finish off this excellent 24 hours, somewhere between the CVS pharmacy down the street from the hotel (Advil run) and my room, I lost my key-card...