Update

SLAC (Stanford, California) from 4th January to the 10th. Yes, that is over my birthday. Should be exciting. I worry that it will be way over my head but I guess exposure to information is always good. One day I will understand everything, oh yes. It will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine.

And then I am off for bob knows how long from the end of February onwards. At SLAC. I guess it will be over a year give or take.

Well, I wanted to travel. Hopefully being on the west coast will spur me onto fufilling that other year-long ambition of mine- going to Australia.

Incidentally- I just hit my 6000th post. Here's the evidence:

A couple of months ago I found this in a notebook. I can't remember writing it... but it looks like an alternate beginning for Keppet's Last Stand (part one of the Keppet trilogy).

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Tied to rungs in the wall

With each limb held by ropes attached to rings in the wall, Keppet screamed.

“What do you want with me?”

Tears streamed down her face as she withstood bob’s latest torture. Even after nine months, her spirit remained unbroken and she was still human enough to recognise the atrocities being inflicted on her.

“And so ends book 8…” bob snarled at her.

“Please mistress bob… make it stop.”

“Book 9. And so the wheel turns…”

Keppet screamed but nothing could drown out the words, the sniffs, snorts and suggestions of bestiality with a horse called Bela. Keppet tried to think about braids but it didn’t help because braid pulling was part of the torment.

The torment lasted hours. Every time Keppet felt herself becoming unconscious, she’d snap back to reality on the words “I don’t want to be a bloody hero”.

Now and again, bob would poke her with a short leather rod. Keppet would howl with pain partly to humour the sadistic skutter and partly because bob would accompany the jab with a few bars of opera (bob had random Pavarotti syndrome).

Keppet had tried to escape 3 times before- once through the laundry shoot, another time through the garbage shoot and one time by disguising herself as a parachute. No time was completely successful and in the last case this was possibly a good thing otherwise Keppet would have found herself splattered across the English countryside along with whatever poor soul pulled the rip-cord and got Keppet leaping out of the knap-sack and not the life-saving device he expected.

No- none of the escape attempts worked. Somehow, on escaping the basement, Keppet would find herself drawn to the computer and would post messages, giving herself away.

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Thanks everyone for well, putting up with 6000 of my posts even if you never read half of them because they were in the television thread.