>> You have a lot of spare time in NZ. It's time dilated there indeed 
>> ?

168 hours - (7 x 4( for sleep** leaves 140 hours/week for other things 
:-).
How many hours do you have over there :-).

>> Could you pack for me on DHL one month of NZ time ?

Jumbo or Jumbo-Junior?

> Having met Russell, I can tell you it is not that time is slower in 
> NZ, it
> is that Russell is faster. He sounds like he has a permanent coffee 
> feed. He
> talks faster, walks faster, and apparently thinks faster. It is 
> rather
> amazing to watch.

:-)

The sad (or perhaps good) thing is that caffeine doesn't do any of the 
usual things for/to me as far as I can tell. A small % of people are 
not stimulated by caffeine and I appear to be one of them. Maybe the 
usually caffeine-stimulated portion of the brain is in my case already 
permanently fully on :-). What I DO get is very very bad hangovers 
from stopping consuming caffeine. Presumably a blood brain barrier 
diffusion effect and mine is more violent than for most. As long as I 
have or don't have caffeine in my system I'm OK. Transition downwards 
is the problem (upwards is painless). The trouble is that I seem to 
have a very low threshold to cross and it's easy to get caffeine in 
day to day foods quite by mistake, which leads to frequent headaches 
and general malaise. Also, some other food products seem to affect the 
results - eg Coke will push me over the limit with ease while Pepsi is 
much less effective even though both have about the same caffeine 
levels. Coffee seems more effective than tea despite similar caffeine 
levels. I find it easier to stay at least slightly above my trigger 
level by eg drinking a few cups of instant coffee a day. The higher my 
caffeine levels the longer it takes to hit "withdrawal" - it can take 
up to about 3 days, and by the time the first signs appear it's too 
late to add more caffeine without dipping into the withdrawal phase. I 
only adapted this strategy some time after I met James in mid 2003.

For many years I had no idea what was causing my withdrawal symptoms. 
I'd drink a few cups of coffee a day at work all week and not at home 
at weekends. So I had low energy, headaches and general death warmed 
over feelings across the weekends which went away when I went back to 
work. Charming. Worst was business trips to head office. Coffee on the 
plane to and from, coffee all day at meetings and in the hotel, coffee 
back again - and then back to normal schedule. Depending on timing wrt 
weekends the result could be truly terrible. A full caffeine 
withdrawal hangover has vast headache, body pains all over, total lack 
of energy, some nausea and a general feeling that dying would be very 
very attractive. So bad that one would do anything to avoid it - but 
for years I had no idea how :-). Now I try to stay slightly above 
threshold.

When I went to the US and visited James and Maria at the start of a 9 
week, 25 country journey, I anticipated that caffeine sources were 
going to be intermittent and probably dearer than useful so I'd cold 
turkeyed before we left with the intention of staying that way all 
trip. It took about a week of daily headaches and low level misery to 
decide that Coke and Coffee were necessary for a good trip. James got 
to experience me in the first week :-). I'm no less frenetic either 
way but I was somewhat more miserable than usual and also had 
equipment teething problems with my photo backup systems (where did I 
put the LiIon charger - oh dear, still in NZ,  the CD writer locks up 
the laptop if powered down during writing*, ...) and overall that 
didn't 'improve the result' :-). Excuses excuses :-).

Now, when James comes to NZ ... :-)



                Russell

* Computer backup of photos to external CDRW (a bad mistake) and 
external HDD was a constant nightmare. Buying a new HP laptop in 
Vienna helped heaps. US customs sealed the deal by spreading dairy 
whitener through my technical equipment bag (long story). Standing at 
a washbasin in the washroom in a Belgian motorcamp with a dismantled 
CD writer, scrubbing aggressively sticky deliquescent dairy whitener 
off the insides of a dismantled CD writer with a toothbrush may add to 
ones mystique but does little for one's general enjoyment. Sitting 
outside one's tent in a Dutch motorcamp soldering new HV FETs into a 
12V/230V inverter would have added to ones general enjoyment if it 
hadn't died again immediately afterwards. Two inverters that I took 
with me both died en route. The replacement that I bought in Eindhoven 
in Holland is still working.

** Only in short bursts!






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