Busted it - £2018 and more to come

Well, I've reached my target, gone beyond it in fact. There's still some gathering to do but it's time to close this blog. And maybe start another.

But before I do, I should really say something about Vegas, because it's unlikely that I'll ever visit it again, and indeed it's whole existence seems threatened at the moment, and it's hard to see how or why it should even, in some ways. Vegas combines two different American genres in a way that should never be combined. It manages o marry the cheesy with seedy. And that's not so good. What most people think of when they think of Vegas is 'The Strip', that corridor of hotels that jostle and compete to be the loudest, most opulent, showy and splendid there ever was.

We stayed in the Luxor, a huge black glass pyramid, that has an Egyptian them, complete with Sphinxes and obelisks etc.

It's almost as extraordinary from the inside as from the outside.

Even the swimming pools continue the theme

Next door to the Luxor is the Excalibur, my personal favourite, with its gaudy turrets and Disneyesque Arthurianism.

The MGM Grand across the road, themed around the Studio's movies and Lions - including some very sad looking real ones of permanent display in a perspex enclosure in the middle of the casino.

Then there's Paris, with the hotel built around the replica of the Eiffel Tower, complete with fake engineering and painted skys. Outside the hotel you can buy a drink from one of the industrial looking machine that serve cocktails like anywhere else would serve slushies. You can choose a souvenir drinks container from either the balloon or the Eiffel Tower. We didn't realise the balloon was a choice and went with the Eiffel tower, to share. Just as well we didn't attempt to have one each, as the drink was about 2 feet tall.

New York, New York and a view of the Statue of Liberty that's nothing like the real one.

And Venice, with a miniature canal system and even gondolas going round its tiny circuit.

The Bellagio is famous for its erupting fountain display which happens ever 15 minutes, complete with blasting music from loudspeakers concealed in the greenery.

And that's just a bit of it, it goes on and one, from one theme into the next. You'd need a few weeks to visit it all properly. And some of it is just weird and some of it is just opulent beyond reason.

We did some other stuff too, it wasn't all eating, drinking and scootering up and drown the strip. We went to see the Shelby Factory Museum, tucked away on what seemed like an industrial estate. It must be the smallest car factory in the world, with each body being made by a team of 2 men, from start to finish. The museum has collected the signatures of its visitors for years and there are walls and walls just covered in signatures. Our group was given its own corner to sign - nice touch.

The go-karting was quite fun, though rather hard work one-handed, but coming the day after the skydive it didn't have the same big excitement factor.

And finally, here's a few stills from the skydive video.

Wooo hoooo.

Oh so very close - £1,949.70 raised, that's only £45.55 (with Gift Aid) to go

I know it's about time I updated this with some more about the rest of the vegas trip - it wasn't all hurling oneself out of airplanes. But I'm still struggling to get over the jet lag, the ear infection and everything else, whilst getting bck into work mode. So I will do it, but in the meantime, I've had a few more donations, and the really good news is that I'm at £1,949.70. Once I've collected up the other sponsorship collections and the fundraising tins, I'm pretty sure that I've done it already. Phew.

Half a mile in 12 seconds

Yes indeed, half a mile in 12 seconds is how fast you go when free-falling out of an airplane. And this is what it looks like. Excuse unedited nature of the movie, I'll sort it out later.

In Vegas, oh yes

Well, here we are in Vegas and it really is as extraordinary as it is made out to be.

The journey was fairly hellish, especially the second leg from Newark to Vegas, where we had to squish into regular seats, with very little leg room, even for a short arse like me. The first leg was longer but we had more leg room and movie screens. I had booked wheelchair assistance for the airports and I was glad to have it because there's no way I could have done the walking, but it's quite an adjustment to be pushed around and not in control of my own movements. So I was very glad to have booked the scooter.

But hey, we got here, then while JC promptly fell asleep, I met the rep who handed over our breakfast buffet tickets and $500 cash.

In the morning we found the buffet, scooted down the "handicap/VIP" line and thus avoided the massive queue, ate as much as we could and then checked out all the indoor shops in the hotel. There's probably more shops in this one hotel than in the whole of Lampeter. 

The next thing was to arrange a room change as we were on the second floor, miles from the lift and our view out the window was of a large concrete wall. So now we're up on the 18th floor with a great view out over the pool and the mountains. And now that the sun is setting it's really worthwhile doing the move. And the air conditioning is better here. 

This afternoon we checked out the pool, and it felt lovely to get into the cool water, and really made it feel like we were on holiday. 

Later on in the afternoon we went over to the Mandalay Bay where the caviar tasting was taking place. We were given a talk about the four different kinds of caviar, the provenance of  eggs (chickens reared by a cardiologist on behalf of the chef), and the steak and salmon tartare. I wasn't sure if I was going to do the caviar or not, but after thinking about it for a few minutes, I came the the conclusion that since there is the possibility that I'm going to be splattered on the ground tomorrow morning, it would be rather silly not to. So I did. And it wasn't nearly as strong as I remembered, almost pleasant in fact. 

So now we're just having a little room break, waiting for darkness to come down and then we're off to see the fountains at the Belaggio, the exploding volcano and the sinking pirate ship. It's all very very strange, but kind of entertaining.

Organising, spending, counting, plotting

So, yes, I'm getting a bit nearer organising myself and I'm also finding out just how much money I seem to have to spend in the pursuit of a free holiday. I make some phone calls today and got a few surprise. Like, for instance finding out that calls on the mobile will cost me at least £1.29 a minute and 99p a minute to answer. So nobody will be getting called that way and if anyone does call me, I'll hang up. There's plenty of other ways to communicate, e.g. Skype, so lets talk about that:

And it's free so long as you have the free skype software installed.

I've bought a couple of spare batteries for my laptop to while away the hours on the airplanes, and I don't mean the one I'm going to jump out of. So far I'm still more worried about the 4 flights on big airplanes that I'm going to taking within just 4 days. There's the cramped situation, the having to be in such lose proximity to strange people that I don't know. Right now that's causing me more anxiety than the thing that actually should be worrying me because it really is dangerous. Proper dangerous. And it's not as if I'm not accident prone. And yes, that's a double negative but it's easier to say it that way, less blunt. Then again, the thing that would be most typical of me is to do several stupid dangerous things in a row and have no problem, but then have some kind of weird freak accident whilst doing something relatively innocuous. But that could happen anytime, so no point even worrying about it.

I've spent more money upgrading my insurance to make sure my laptop was covered, which it wasn't, but it is now.

And then there's the credit card. Every transaction cost me an additional 2.75% which is bonkers too. A few weeks ago I applied for an Abbey Zero card, thanks to Martin Lewis and the moneysavingexpert.com, and I was beginning to think my online application hadn't got through, so I had to phone them as well, and it was posted yesterday - but not by first class post, so it's a complete lottery as to whether it gets here on time.

Sometimes it's really great to get things wrong - £1697.44 and only £310.56

I got it wrong. And that was really a good thing. Although only because I realised what I had done wrong.

So... what was it?

It was something that made me add 2 columns to my spreadsheet and complicate my equations - though if I could have used IF and THEN functions I probably could have done in in a tidier way but...

So... what was it?

It was 28% gift aid. Not on everything of course, but on enough of it to boost the total by £229.04

Haha hoho hehe.

And that means that all I have still have to raise is £310.56, or £242.63 if they all count for  gift aid. So, if you ask me, that means I'm well on target.

Fried green tomatoes at the Bluehook café and funds raised so far £1,468.40

Yes, £1,468.40, I finally did a total up of what I've raised so far. This total includes two estimated amounts and conservative estimates at that, but does not include other people with sponsorship forms or the 4 tins in New Quay or the 8 tins in Lampeter. It'll be interesting to see how the tins fare as the 4 in New Quay have been there for months, whereas the 8 in Lampeter only went out yesterday, but they do have added dangly bits that state the date etc and have the photoshoped image of me doing the skydive (and now I'm kicking myself for not taking a photo, because they did look quite good) .

Though not, obviously in that boring old rectangle, oh no, I had to go and design a cloud shaped speech bubble for the picture and a separate one for the text, so that hey took ages to cut out, very laborious and  painful on the fingers though they did look quite good, even if I did say so already.

And the tomatoes? You'll no doubt be wondering.

I had to harvest the tomatoes today - all of them. This was due to a spectacular string collapse in the greenhouse. Partly due to the sheer weight of the tomatoes, partly to the rather ancient strings and the final factor being the nasturtium jungle that had grown up behind them and got so dense it was pushing the tomatoes forward, adding to the weight. It wasn't quite what I had in mind - I had hoped to harvest them gradually as they ripened - but I'm sure I'll find something constructive to do with them. Off to look up recipes for fried green tomatoes....

YouTube - Cared Witless 2/2

YouTube - Cared Witless (1/2)

Buying, selling and writing lists

Buying

Right, well, you can tell that it's getting closer to take-off time because I've started buying inane thing. Well, maybe they're not all inane, but just why I've chosen to buy so many Piglets is another matter, especially as I already have quite a lot of Piglets.

I bought:

Piglet Pin badge

Pooh and Piglet Pin Badge

2 Piglets, 1 quite large, 1 quite small

1 Small piglet

Very Small Piglet

500GB backup backup drive

... and case to put it in

Extra SD card

Spare batteries for camcorder

And now you maybe wondering why I bought pink PJs. If you know me you will appreciate that this is really just not my thing. The pink that is. PJs are definitely my thing. So here's the reason beside it.  I decided that maybe if I did something a bit different with the parachute jump, it could attract me more attention and get me more sponsorship. So I decided that one thing might be to do it wearing a Piglet costume. The only problem with that was in not having a Piglet costume and not being able to find one, anywhere. Plenty of costumes for small children but there's no way I'm fitting into a 6 year old's costume. So my next thought was to do it in PJs. Partly because I am such a big fan of PJs, but mainly as a tribute to the 'Pyjama Protesters', a group of people in a Leonard Cheshire Care Home who were fed up having no choice over when they were dressed into day clothes and put back into pyjamas, no choice when to go to bed or get, just very little choice about anything in the lives. So they protested by refusing to get out of pyjamas and eventually things did change. This is well-known disability history event, although documentation of it is very hard to find Read this article from the Leeds Disability Studies Website where there is a single paragraph about it. And it wasn't the only time people have protested in pyjamas but may have been the first.

Which is all very well, but I know that what you really want to see is me wearing pink pyjamas. Well, maybe later.

Selling

And the other thing I've been doing is setting my my online car boot sale to boost my sponsorship fund. I'm been rounding up anything that I might be able to sell and listing it all on eBay. So far I've listed about half the stuff I've got. I've taken pictures of the rest but they will have to wait now till next Sunday. Apparently the best day of the week for selling things is Sunday, in the afternoon, so that's my strategy. If you're not the sponsoring sort, but would like to help DASH in some way then head over to eBay and see what's in my shop. And remember... IT'S FOR CHARITY.

New Piglets

All the piglets