[possibly undeserving paranoia mode: on]

First off: has anybody heard from vermachtnis lately? Anybody at all heard anything? I haven't seen anything from her in a while and it's beginning to make me edgy. Silence worries me, not least of which because there's this thing called the Atlantic Ocean between myself and most of my online contacts and I can't do anything about it. I suspect the most likely explanation for any silence is the siren call of World of Warcraft or whatever that game was called, but all the same the mind tends to fill in the gaps with the more alarming possibilities first, only substituting perfectly normal explanations for silence like 'wrapped up in online gaming' or 'bored with the Internet' or 'on vacation' after things like 'house fire', 'rampaging herd of rather confused moose' and 'Freddie Kreuger'.

Besides, I miss hearing from her.

So yeah, has anyone heard from her, or of her, in the last week? This isn't a plea for emails or anything (It's my go anyway and that email should be out sometime soon) or any demand that she show herself - it's the Internet, nobody has to go online for any reason at all ever if they don't want to. I was simply wondering if anyone'd heard anything from her lately so I could stop wondering what was going on like the overtired paranoiac that I am.

kthxbai.

[possibly undeserving paranoia mode: off]

Update: Ah, the moose didn't get her after all! Hooray! Boy, talk about coincidental timing, though...

... on that note, I guess I might as well run with the theme of generally misplaced things for this update, simply because I can.

There is a duck living in the garden of the hospital I am on placement at. Yes, I really did say there was a duck there. It's living quite contentedly in the largely paved garden area of a busy teaching hospital in Central London (though the place does have quite a nice little pond in the middle ofthe grassy bit with a fountain in the middle of it, which is presumably what attracted the duck to the hospital garden in the first place). And it has just had nine ducklings.

No, I haven't been smoking anything.

No, we're not quite sure how it got here either. Best guess is it came from Regent's Park, which is pretty near the hospital I'm placed at. It seems perfectly content in the gardens, or it did when I headed down there on my tea break this evening in an attempt to get away from the constant Wimbledon coverage. Gah. Am I ever sick of Wimbledon, I'll be so glad when it's finished. The ducks were far more entertaining. Baby ducks are like anarchy. The mother was constantly losing them because they scattered all over the place every time she turned her back on them.

It took me ages to count them. I kept coming up with seven or eight because I kept losing them in the grass, or missing one of them because it had wandered off somewhere completely random I couldn't begin to have guessed at. Eventually I got nine twice and so I was content.

It's quite as mart place for a duck to stay, actually. Yeah, the pond is small, but there are no predators in a garden in the middle of a hospital. Nobody's gonna hurt those ducklings, people have even been leaving out food for them. The only problem is that the garden is going to be way too small when they get a bit bigger. They're tiny lil things right now, but when they grow slightly larger and become more like small ducks than ducklings, that pond is going to be far too small for them.

Maybe they'll have to call the RSPCA in.

Anyway. The other mislaid thing thing I have to talk about tonight is me.

Yup. Me. I was walking home this evening with heavy shopping and stopped at the top of the hill to rest before carrying on back to my home, when a total stranger pulled over and asked me if I was okay then offered me a lift. He seemed rather insulted when I turned him down. I feel kind of bad, retrospectively, because he was probably quite sincere. Probably he just wanted to help and my refulsal offended him because it implied I didn't trust him. Probably nothing would have happened save I would have got home marginally quicker and been slightly less tired.

But what if it wasn't? It's the 'probably' that was the problem, and it was why I turned him down.

Because it's probably going to be all right doesn't quite cut it with me when it comes to personal safety. I haven't survived for twenty-three years in this particular part of this particular planet by playing around with 'probably'. Yes, in all likelihood nothing would have happened to me, but I don't want to risk it when I could easily walk home by myself. Tired or not, five minutes' walk with heavy shopping is extremely unlikely to kill me. Getting into a car with a stranger is rather more likely to turn out to be dangerous than simply walking home could ever be. Simply and plainly, I didn't like the odds.

Why not? Well, I'm young, I'm in good general health, I'm reasonably strong. I have no real problems with carrying heavy shopping home - blame the combination of tiredness and the steep hill I had just climbed for my breathlessness. It's not like I was eightysomething and genuinely needed any help hauling home my groceries. And, being in good general health, I caught my breath within minutes and was well able to head off home again. I wasn't in any risk from carrying my shopping home. Even if it was only the desire to 'White Knight' that had this man stopping to help, was it really worth risking it when there was absolutely no need for me to put myself in such a dubious position?

Well, no. Of course not.

Whatever his motives may have been, there are guys out there who would see a woman in need of help as nothing other than an easy target. The guy looked respectable enough and I'm hardly Miss World, but there's no 'type' of man who does things like that, just as their targets don't have to be pretty and blonde. I didn't think it worth the risk. A couple minutes off a journey home versus possibly getting in deep? Hm. Yeah. Exactly.

And really, if the guy had been half as nice as he was trying to appear, he would have understood why I had no choice but to turn him down. That he didn't was perhaps a warning sign. Perhaps. You see, I don't know that either, and it's the 'I don't know' that's the whole problem.