In which I discover that my life is emptier than I thought

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How am I going to get back?
I used the National Rail journey planner a few months ago. That was a disappointment.
Never mind. Debenhams is here to cheer me up, with a letter copywritten by somebody who has set the hyperbole level a little too high.
After all that stimulation I need a set of New Age CDs to calm me down. Alas the only ones I can find appear to tell a terrifying story of the gradual stages of Climate Change.
Talking of the climate, this January I saw no butterflies. Did see two bumblebees though, on different occasions. They were just flying about -- nothing like the skilled one I read about in The Independent.
Finally I have no idea why I found the following so funny. I dare say I should get out more.
Yup, apparently it's a real place but LJ can't find it. Technology is sometimes such a disappointment.
I have no intention of signing up to Facebook, as I don't have any friends I would want to keep in contact with via the site. Hmm, some might suggest that I should have stopped after the word "friends" there.
But anyway, I was looking at the sign-up page you get sent to when you attempt to look at someone else's profile, and I was quite taken with the site's anti-spambot random word generator. It looks ideal for generating the names of obscure bands that one could drop while talking to one's non-existent friends, or very short stories one could claim to have read.
That last one is a bit mean, trying to get the signer-up to type a word with an umlaut. We don't all have the ASCII codes committed to memory, y'know.
Am I alone in not bothering to invest any emotions at all in television commercials? But the research insists that I answer the question, and whether I say yes or no to each feeling my response will suggest I actively reacted one way or the other.
Also my retinas glow red, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe and it seems to rain all the time here. So much so that one evening I was prevented from making my usual journey home from work as there was a bit of an obstruction on the road (440Kb).
My Christmas visit to see the family enabled me to catch up with the Round Robins sent to my mother. I particularly enjoyed this opening gambit. No, the writer is not writing a parody - he is totally serious.
The rest of the letter failed to live up to that portentous beginning, sadly, but while I'm on the topic I'm going to quote a sentence I treasure from this correspondent's 2002 communication.
"We went via Batu Pahat, in Johore, where my paternal grandmother's favourite cousin died in a muddy creek in the jaws of a crocodile whilst trying to suppress rubber smuggling in 1927."
Like the unfortunate cousin, none of us saw that one coming. In copywriting, I find it is best to limit the number of ideas in each sentence.
Two surprises awaited me when I got back on New Year's Day. First off:
Released into the garden where the weather is mild and there may actually be the prospect of it finding caterpillar food... Dicey though.
And secondly those caring Spammers were working overtime throughout the Christmas break. Perhaps they thought I might be getting lonely. While their enthusiasm is obviously highly commendable, 1198 junk e-mails in 8 days is pushing it a bit, I reckon.