h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello!! Thanks for dropping in to my space!!

It was a pleasure...

Feel free to drop in here anytime - there's a virtual cellar, and large amounts of . I think there may still be a few people in the cellar, after a thread we had a few weeks ago. Perhaps I'd better go and check.

Oh!! I like !!!

There's lots of - I grew up near a winemaking district, and I find it impossible to be without the stuff...

I live in a wine-making district today.

Which district?

I grew up near the Barossa Valley in South Australia. *nostalgic sigh* Magnificent shiraz and grenache country. There are a few wineries in this district (Canberra), but I find their products rather lacklustre.

Oh, I live in ever-so-boring Southern California. So we have wine all over the place.

All over the place? Isn't that rather messy? Do you need a mop, and some buckets?

Nah, we bathe in it...

So people in Southern California aren't really tanned after all - they're just wine-stained! That sounds very civilised.

Civilized does not even begin to enter into it.

And I don't know about other people, but I am as far from tanned as possible. I think it's the Irish blood.

I don't really tan all that much either. I'm lily-white, thanks to Baltic blood. It's either that, or the fact that I don't go out in direct sunlight if I can help it.

Lol. Same here. No direct sunlight for me.

The sun gives me headaches.

I tried a bit of healthy outdoorsy activity on Christmas Eve - oh, OK, some light gardening - and I ended up spending Christmas Day and Boxing Day lying down in a darkened room, thanks to sunstroke. 'Festive season', my foot.

I hope you had more fun than that...

I sure didn't. I spent most of the day being yelled at by my parents because I wasn't being festive enough.

Our washing machine is broken and I refused to get dressed because I have no clean clothes. Apparently a 20 year old is not allowed to sit around in PJs all day long...

What is Boxing Day?

My mother has been known to sit around in PJs all day, and she's 62 in a few days' time. In her case it's not so much a lack of clean clothes as an ingrained Baltic nihilism. (I tend to take after her in unimportant details...)

Boxing Day is 26 December; a British colonial relic. Nothing to do with fist-fights, but nobody's completely sure where the name comes from. The most likely thing is that it used to be the day when the servants and tradesmen and other underlings would be given boxes of money, leftover food and who-knows-what. These days it's a public holiday, usually spent lying around recovering from , feeling as though you've been repeatedly hit in the head.

Oh... can I move there then? I love days like that!

It is very civilised, I think. For visa enquiries, I think there's a consulate somewhere in LA.

Probably. I'm sure I can work something out on a student visa in a year or so... College is so helpful like that.

What are you studying?

(By the way, I really will be off to the shops quite soon, so there's no need to rush to reply. )