Vinny’s memorial went very smoothly, considering all the planning and organisation involved, and I was relieved that there were no technical glitches with the presentation. The PowerPoint file became massive and unwieldy towards the end, but it posed no problem during the program. (Whew!) I will upload the presentation to this site after I get home.

My flight leaves in a couple of hours, so I decided to pull an all-nighter to get the photo orders printed so I wouldn’t have to pack around this extra paper stock and cartridges (I’m in excess baggage territory now, with Ryanair) or deal with it when I return to Canada.

Also, the neighbour pointed out to us late into the night that the clocks moved forward an hour. Without her informing us, I would’ve missed my flight to London!

Took a slew of photos this afternoon in the harbour when a bunch of us went for a boat trip and around town. Some friends of Berit and Jez arrived from England, so we took the opportunity to be tourists and enjoy the sunny (and rather brisk) weather. I haven’t taken many photos all week, so I made up for it by shutterbugging like there was no tomorrow and slowing everyone else down.

One big score today: I brought my portable photo printer with me to print pictures of Vinny for guests, but I needed more paper. We passed by a shop today that had a couple of boxes of 108 sheets (equivalent to 3 boxes of the usual 36 sheets), but they didn’t know what to charge me for it because one of the boxes had been opened. So they sold me nearly two full boxes of photo paper and cartridges for 20 euros total. When they were looking up the price, I said I didn’t want that much paper, it was too heavy for my bags. When they said I could have it all for 20 euros, I said without hesitation, “I’ll take it!!” For just over the price of ONE box, I got almost SIX of them!

I’d been looking forward to the boat trip, since it was the only touristy activity I had on my agenda here in Hamburg. The photo uploading will have to wait, though — my internet connection benefactor pulled the plug sometime yesterday, and every other broadcasted signal is password-protected. The internet connection to the PC here is via a cable LAN-type network that uses some kind of propriety network protocol that I don’t have (QoS-Paketplaner?), and PPoE — but the password is hidden and I doubt either Berit or Jez know what it is… anyway, the long and the short of it is I can’t get online. I’m using the PC to post this.

Which is just as well, anyway, because the memorial is tomorrow and I still have some scanning to do. At the moment the presentation has 133 slides in it (!!!), and many of them have 3 photos to one slide. I’ve added transitions to about half of them. I bowed out of dinner tonight to work on it, partly because I’m still stuffed from our tapa a couple of hours ago. I doubt I would’ve been able to eat, but there are some friends there from Brighton whose house I stayed at in 2002; I’ll see if I can catch up with them tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s a big day. The memorial will be covered by the German press, the same media group who published articles about the accident last month. The guest list is over 150 people, but I have a feeling more will show.

OK, back to the presentation…

A late start today, partly due to the late end to yesterday (I was on a bit of a tear, scanning away until the wee hours), and sleeping in a bed. The previous two nights I fell asleep on the couch and woke up naturally at 06:00-06:30, even though my stuff was set up in Vinny’s room, but last night evidently broke the cycle. We have a morning meeting at the airport, so tonight I’ll have to try and return to an early rising.

Berit had errands in her home town of Dannenburg, an hour and a half east of Hamburg, so we took the car and spent the afternoon there. It’s been more than seven years, but I remembered the café we stopped at and remarked on some gentrification changes in town centre. Dannenberg is near the former East German border and when I visited before, Berit took me across to tour through a nearby village. The buildings, cars, and overall look of the area suggested economic differences that may have evened out since; we’d probably go again if we weren’t short on time.

Where we took the dog for a walk happened to be near Berit’s old school, so we stopped by and she showed me where her class made inscriptions back in their graduating year, 1989. { continue reading… }