Time to say my Christmas greetings to the world from Libya. For many celebrating Christmas, save a little sausage meat for me and some beer and liquor chocolates for that I’m in a country where alcohol is illegal.

I’ll be enjoying wall-to-wall sunshine for Christmas and that I will be returning back to the UK on leave in 3.5 weeks and have my belated Christmas dinner.

Some of you might not be aware that there is a gallery on my website here. I’ve put up lots of Libya pictures (poor quality ‘cos they’ve been resized with MSPaint) in this album.

Here’s a couple…

I find myself teaching english to some people at work – they are mostly enthusiatic Libyans keen to improve their english.

For once. its not correcting native english speakers which makes a nice change. Unfortunately whoever taught them has convinced them of the need to misplace aspostrophes after an abbreviation, even if its not plural:

“I lent him my CD’s”
“Two PC’s broke down”

*cringe*

It is a pet hate of mine putting dodgy ’s here and there – I’m not perfect but I do try and keep my written english as good as possible. So, it is two CDs, or a CD.

They like me to teach english because I have a “Scottish” accent and that I rarely use slangs so I am apparently easy to be understood.

Well that’s a first for me!

Urban Dictionary is my new friend to explain common slangs to them.

–
written on a mobile phone in the middle of a Libyan desert

We landed at a desert airstrip, and a group of us were waiting to get into our 4×4s. I needed to use the on-site basic facilities to answer a call of nature. Seemed I drunk too much water in preparation out in the desert.

I made my way out after finishing what need to be done, and the cheap brass door handle snapped off in my hand. I couldn’t open it, however which way I tried – peel the metal outer frame back, leverage using the broken handle, stuck a key down the side and even the old credit card trick. It will not budge.

I must have shouted, banged on the door, and stamped my foot to get attention for about 20mins.

The WC room was reeking the whole time, someone obviously haven’t put an exit airflow for the sewers so the smell was coming in through the loo.

Well, just about made it!

Got up at 4.30am, had what I thought was a quick bath, closed up my bags, and off to the local 24hr garage for shampoo and shaving gel.

Well, I learnt it wasn’t 24hrs anymore and that it was 5:20am – check in was supposed to shut at 5.30am and need to cover 15miles. Also I needed to get paper tickets from another desk before that.

I put my wallet on the dashboard so I wouldn’t forget. Mum drove at high speed round a sharp bend and the wallet slid off to her side.

The airline put me on standby as the flight was overbooked, and if I don’t get on this, I will miss my connecting flight in London.

They held me to the very last minute and then was ‘escorted’ to customs (by means of running as fast you can through a staff route). Just as I put my bag into the x-ray, I realise my wallet was still in my mum’s car! I forgot it slid off.

So in a mad panic, I ran down the flight of stairs, and must be 1/4 of a mile to her car, just as she was getting in. Managed to pick my wallet up and made it back just on time.

Got through the date, plane left just as I sat down, panting like there’s no tomorrow and my throat got very raw, so I was coughing every 3 seconds.

Still, I was pleased just to have got onto the seat on the plane with everything I needed.

Oh, its a nice 21c in the city and wall-to-wall sunshine. Superb! Still, I’m moving out to the desert tomorrow, so it will be vry different again.

I’m going abroad for my job for six weeks, so I won’t be back till late January – I’ll be working in an Arab country in North Africa, so it will be a good “Christmas” and an interesting “new Year”.

As I don’t know what facilities will be like, it’s probable that I might not post an entry for six weeks unless I got lucky, or something has gone wrong!

Till then, have a Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year!

Amazing when you put your mind to it – after spending two days trying to fix my invalid RSS feed, staying up till 3am last night fiddling with the xml parser to no avail.

Now it turned out it was all because of a blank line in index.php which causes a blank line to be injected before the [?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?] tag.

D’oh! It’s the simplest things that screws everything up. Anyway, I’m a happy man.

Someone showed this picture to me… poor ducks.

And I noticed that my blog’s RSS feed isn’t valid, and I’m having a hell of a time to fix it, as I can’t see exactly what is wrong with the XML.

I don’t usually think about this, when I do, it’s because I read it somewhere – this time from a blog – Keep Buggering On!! She has a spinal cord injury which means she is confined to a wheel chair. Her recent post asks “Would you, should you?” – referring to whether you want treatment for your disability.

Well, for me, because I’m a “hearing” deaf*, I would take up treatment if there was one available… as long the process can be improved upon in the future as I don’t want to be stuck a minor improvement for life only to find out a few years later, a radical improvement can be made with a new treatment.

However, to be honest, I can’t see that happening in my lifetime, and with that outlook, I don’t get false hopes and just live life!

*apparently there are broadly two groups of deaf people – one who is reliant on or prefer sign-language – this group has their own subculture, and those who don’t/can’t/won’t use sign-language, which I fit in. It’s a funny old divisive world out there.

This weekend, I was away off-roading with my brother and his mate, at Robin Hood’s Bay, near Whitby in North Yorkshire. Pictures on the 4×4Jamboree site I do for them – direct link to the correct gallery here.

So we decided to take a carvan, cos it’s a fair ol’ drive south, and the three of us might as well make a weekend of it.

Now playback to June/July. My brother left some burgers in the fridge inside the caravan. It survived(?) the heatwave.

Someone broke into the caravan at some point and nicked the fridge and tossed the two boxes of rotten burgers onto one of the couches. This would form part of a triple bed.

The caravan stunk like there’s no tomorrow. It actually smelt of shit, so intense, it would be like someone rubbing shit onto your nose. No one managed to be sick though. We couldn’t get rid of the smell, despite the 80-miles journey airing it out to Robin Hood’s Bay.

I slept on the offending couch as I didn’t fancy sleeping in the middle and figured my synthetic sleeping bag would keep the smell out cos it’s not very breathable. I slept like a log, the other two didn’t sleep as well because as everytime I turned over, they would get nasty whiffs of burger remains from the couch.

Picture of Robin Hood’s Bay: