Like yesterday, this post is being written at 9.45pm Saturday, not when it claims, I couldn't be stuffed to write a blog then.

I got up at 7am, went to have breakfast, I was freezing, shivering, it was shocking. I had been expecting to stay at a hotel, where I normally get a buffet breakfast, and then I can have cereal with orange juice (since I am lactose intolerant, and no one ever provides non dairy alternatives, even though lactose tolerance is not normal and is caused by a mutation in the body). So anyway, I had a couple of chicken rolls for breakfast, same as we had for dinner last night.

Again, I had been expecting to stay in a hotel, and have a shower in the morning, so I didn't bring soap or anything, and I couldn't be bothered having one anyway.

I was so cold, I went and got dressed properly (I was still in the casual clothes I wore to drive down in), put on my suit pants, a shirt (which I can't remember wearing since the last funeral I went to), and a tie.

The only issue at this point was that my hair was such a mess. I wet it and used my comb to try and sort it out, which doesn't normally work, but for once it did.

I looked half respectable, shaven face, formal wear, tie.

I went and had a cup of tea, that was nice. My mate went and told his daughter we were leaving.

We loaded the car, jumped in, and took off. It was 8am. About an hour later, we got back to an area where there is some GSM coverage, so my phone came back. I got a message my adsl mate had sent about 9.45 last night, wanting to know I was ok, I sent a message in reply, and left it.

We travelled the 2 hours into Canberra, and to the church. We got to the church about 10:05am.

We wandered across the road. My friend whose funeral it was' defacto was there, we greeted her, everyone started collecting outside the church, we signed an attendance book, and received the booklet. The picture on the front of my friend is a nice one, that was good.

We all moved inside at about 10.30. I sat a few rows from the front. During the service, my friend's brother got up to give a speech, he held himself very well, I couldn't have done it. He told us about some of the crazy things my friend used to get up to, some of them quite funny, which helped, it cheered everyone up a bit.

At the end, when they started to move the coffin, I got very upset. We moved back outside the church, they placed the coffin in the hurse, everyone was very upset. I chatted to my friend's defacto for a while, she told me about how she had gone to visit him in the morgue the night before.

We all drove in procession to the cemetary. We saw the headstones for my friends father, and 2 brothers nearby. The coffin was lowered into the ground, I was ok at this point, but when the sand went into the grave, I got very upset again. I moved away slightly, and then I moved away altogether, back to the car.

We left the cemetary, to go to the club where there were refreshments, we took my friend's brother around there with us, and chatted to him. He is a very nice bloke, he done the same as us, told the guy to make sure he got the engine checked out in his plane.

We got to the club, it was sad to start with, but within a few minutes, everyone was starting to cheer up a bit. I got a double contreau on the rocks. As I drank this, I felt the egde of my emotion softening, and I cheered up a bit.

I was able to have a good chat with my friend's defacto, and I made her feel a bit better (I think) by letting her know that recent events (before the crash) had been for a reason, and that inadvertantly things she had done were good.

I met the guy we've got down in Sydney that looks after the servers. Apparently one of our servers was down, so we tried to make arrangements to get that fixed.

I got another drink, the same again, everyone was cheering up a bit by now. We ended up staying here for around an hour, at which point we said bye to everyone, hopefully we'll see most of them in circumstances other than these in the future, but it never works that way does it, people never make an effort to come and see you, catch up with you, until it's too late.

We jumped back in the car, and took off.

I felt a lot better on my way back. I think I had closure. I was starting to finally accept that my friend is gone. I think I will go down and visit at some point in the future.

We headed straight back up to the coast, we stopped at Pennant Hills, at about 4.45pm so my mate could pick up his wife from the shop she works in. We left there about 5.15pm, and were back to my mate's place just after 6pm.

He ordered a couple of pizzas, went and picked them up, we ate, I had a beer, chatted for a bit, went and sat outside, I was a bit spaced out, in deep thought. We just sat outside and chatter for ages.

I left there about 8.30, I headed to my adsl mate's place, to let him know I was back, maybe have a chat. I told him about the day's events. I showed him how to crimp cat5 cables, we made up a cable for his suXbox, it still didn't work, I then worked out that the new adsl router he had bought wasn't configured properly. I explained dhcp to him, configured it on the router, and then the suXbox started working.

He signed up for some trial access to the online gaming thing. I just felt like a borg assimilation was going on. How can someone be so enthusiastic about giving their credit card details to Micro$oft?

I was going to go home at this point, but I was offered a drink, the beer must have been wearing off, he had some wine, I was in the mood for that, so I grabbed some. I sat and watched him playing the game for a while, it was all laggy and crappy and unplayable. Typical Micro$oft product.

I left at about 12:50am. I had been a very long day, and I felt destroyed. I have to get up reasonably early in the morning too.

As I was leaving, my mate asked me about how he could fixup his old computer to loan to someone. I started telling him how he could do it, and then realised I was probably wasting my time, so I told him I would come by tomorrow night to sort it out. He told me he would make dinner.

I got home, bummed around for a while, reading the 170 emails in my inbox, chatting on irc. Checked the Tivo, and found that it's filled itself with Sabrina and The Simpsons episodes, and trashed everything else because it's getting full. not too impressed with that.

I started looking around for details of the broken server, it is still down (as I expected) I had a look around in my friend's files on the server, trying to find anything that might help us. I noticed that a lot of things were having difficulty on the server, I found that stupid firewall rules that break everything were back in for some reason. I blew away the firewall rules, which fixed my problem with the webserver. It turns out it fixed other things, but I didn't realise..

I finally went to bed at 3am. my bed was a mess, it was hot, but I was too tired to sort things out.