This morning I was awoken with the dulcet tones of The Chemical Brothers’ Salmon Dance, or in plain English, my mobile phone ringing. I’d obviously had the first good nights sleep in my new abode because whilst frantically swinging my arms in haste to grab the vibrating, noise emitting brick that is my phone my eye caught a glimpse of the bedside clock reading 10:00am. Pretty happy with that, 12 hours of solid rest a first since returning from my overseas holiday, but I digress; the call was from my mate Stu to inform me he was on his way to drop off my Guitar Hero 3 he’d bought on my behalf and then drag my sorry arse out to lunch with the other boys from Hundred Pennies and their respective better halves.

An hour later and still unshowered Stu, Fu, Gav, Jackie & Helen rocked up guitars in hand ready to smash out some tunes before heading off to lunch. Whilst I avoided the temptation to join them in an early day beer (I’d just brushed my teeth) the alcohol started flowing at around midday to coincide to the rocking tunes that were pumping from the latest addition to my xBox library. Have to love Guitar Hero, any moron can be a rock god in their own living room. I like to think of it as the heterosexual version of Sing Star.

All rocked up and ready to kick on we made our way to The Standard Hotel in Fitzroy for a few quiet ones and a spot of lunch. I can’t remember the last time I actually went out into a beer garden on a Saturday afternoon, sunlight on your back is a strange feeling. It felt like I had a giant warm hand caressing my back holding me upright as the cool flow of liquid heaven swirled and digested inside me. Serene. Is this what it’s like for normal people? Do they get such a thrill of outdoory-like-ness if they do this every weekend? I’m guessing it’s like anything and you’d get used to it and the novelty would wear off over time but I was rather enjoying myself to my amazement.

Six or seven beers later (well I had about three, Stu had a hundred) feeling well feed after some lovely beer battered fish & chups (that’s just for you New Zealand folk) and a little sleepy the group parted ways and I went home for a little snooze in preparation for tonight’s events which low and behold involved more drinking and socializing.

I may have in fact slept a tad longer than I had wanted, waking up at about 8:30 I went for a jaunt in the now cooling early evening glow of sunset to grab some chicken and chips (yes I ate crap all day) to lace the stomach a tad before embarking down the road of alcohol once again. Food down, another shower, change and a work call later I was in the city celebrating Laura’s 30th. Now this was about 10ish by the time I got there, I know there was a lot of alcohol, a lot of drunken talk and jager shots, and NO missing internet. 48 hours baby, yeah I rock!

In your face global network! IN-YOUR-FACE!

Right-o lets not beat around the bush here… I have no, I repeat “NO” internet connection. How could this be possible? Seriously taking away my internet is, I would say, almost equivalent to taking away my insulin. I need it to survive! Gee, who sounds like an addict here?

So lets get to the obvious question of “How on Earth could you get yourself in this predicament?”. Well, there’s nothing particularly exciting about how I’ve found myself to be internet-less unfortunately. The reality of the situation is that I’ve had to move house this past week. Whilst this shouldn’t be a big deal, simple relocation of services really, especially when you tell your phone & internet provider two weeks prior to actually moving. Things rarely go smoothly in the telecommunications world though do they now!? You see it turned out that in the three years that this apartment had been in existence with six different tenants not one of them had decided to connect the phone line! So you see I now find myself in the position of waiting a lovely 5 working days for Telstra to get off their fat arses and come around to plug in a couple of wires. Now add another few days for the services to churn from Telstra to my ISP and then have the DSL turned on and I’m looking at a good 2 weeks without DSL. Granted I could get considerably desperate and use dial-up once Telstra have done their business but to be honest I think that’d be even more torturous than no connection at all!

With all that in mind I thought to myself what better way to share my agony and boredom than by diarizing the entire journey that is my life without the internet. You know, tell you how I bought coffee at 9:00am then came home to check my email. Oh hang on, nope can’t do that, don’t have the internet so turned to a new addiction of cocaine and heroin. Yeah, it’ll be fun and I know the whole world is just dying to hear about it.

Now I know you’re slowly putting one and sixty-four together and asking yourself “If he has no in-ta-ma-nets then how is he going to ‘diarize’ these events online?”. Well it’s pretty simple really, I write the entries offline on my fancy little `puter thingy-ma-jigg and then when I come across an internet connection, like when I go to work on Monday or I’m at a friends or walking around the neighbourhood looking for open wireless connections, I upload them for all ye online peoples to read to your hearts content. Jebus, I’m already delirious!

With the explanation of what the hell this is all about out of the way lets get on with the show with the excitement that was “Raj’s first day without the internet”. I was sick, end of entry. No, I wouldn’t leave my loyal following with such a short description. I was exhausted after moving for the last three days after work days and couldn’t keep any food down until about four this afternoon. You see, the short description was probably all you really wanted to know after all now wasn’t it. I slept; I watched DVD’s, I highly suggest the movie “Hot Rod” for a cheap laugh by the by; and low behold Mr. Cricket entertained me with yet another stylish Mike Hussey century!

So at this point in time I’m doing OK without my old friend “Internet”, I haven’t really had the opportunity to miss him (or maybe it’s a her, hell maybe it’s a hermaphrodite?) but just to be sure I’ve made the following list of things to do should I need waste time.

• Work (ahhh, yeah right)
• Unpack. I mean there’s only 30 boxes full of crap sprawled across my floor.
• Read a book, hell why not “Write a book” instead.
• See what daylight looks like again. And ruin my milky white skin!? I think not!
• Play xBox. The new Guitar Hero is awesome, not to mention Call of Duty 4.
• Catch up with people in the real world, you know, just for something fancy to do.
• Get a girlfriend. Not as easy as it sounds and the plastic ones just aren’t as durable these days.