Oh we made one another cry

Rat has her song of the week. I have my song connected to a memory thing. Its not a regular weekly thing. Sometimes there will be many songs in one week and sometimes there won’t be songs for many weeks… it’s all up to what iTunes Party Shuffle throws at me and how often I switch it on (as an aside, my boyfriend and housemate think I really should be working for Apple’s iTunes division… they can’t get me to shut up about its virtues over such lesser players as Windows Media and Real Player for example)!

So anyway, today, I heard The Games People Play by Tesla. Like any other 13 year old at the time, I was only familiar with that extremely happy reggae version of The Games People Play by Inner Circle. And then my extremely cool, 18 year old, heavy-metal-listening family friend made me listen to Tesla’s version and he even recorded a tape for me with it and all sorts of cool songs that I liked at the time or which he thought were cool. I remember there was Roxette’s Vulnerable (I looooved that song) on it as well as East 17 (how cool were they at one point)!! Anyway, he was a family friend from the day I was born, he attended all my birthday parties (till I made them exclusive to my friends from school), he had a younger sister around my age and he treated me like one too, he teased us mercilessly when we were growing up, he pinched our cheeks and stole our dolls, we played Red Indians (or was it Cops and Robbers) and Hide and Seek and someone always ended up in tears or with a bloody knee, our families (and a few others) went on picnics and trips and we swam in seas and lakes and swimming pools and we went Christmas Carol singing every year and so the torture continued.

And then he grew up… he still teased us, but in a nice way… his position as chief torturer was taken over by many other more juvenile boys and now we’d just say to him, tell them to leave us alone and he’d tell them to leave us alone and they would actually listen sometimes!! Around this introduction to Tesla time I spent a lot with him and his sister at their house… quite often I’d stay over and we’d stay up all night talking and laughing and listening to music. When I was 13-14, my Mom used to let me go hang out with his sister and him and his friends… I was allowed to go for movies and concerts sometimes… we spent three New Years Eve’s together from ages 13 to 15, him and his sister and a few of their friends and a few of my cousins. So anyway, I’m not sure what my point is anymore or if there was one to begin with. I suppose at the naïve age of 14 or 15 I just thought that him and his sister would be my best friends until the day I died. It didn’t really turn out that way… from ages 16 till now I must’ve met them around 15-20 times. He even got married just last month and obviously I wasn’t there. And I remember their mom once said the test of true friendship is whether you can pick up wherever you left off since the last time you met.

So yeah, maybe they’re not my best friends anymore and maybe I don’t hang out with them all the time anymore, but there are times I remember them (like today) and the fun things we did growing up and there may be times in the future when our own children will play Cops and Robbers together (or more likely, they will battle for supremacy on a PlayStation or Xbox)!

Everyone has these family friends that you spend your whole childhood with and if you’re lucky enough it continues beyond that. Since they knew you from the time you were a cranky baby, there are no pretensions or stereotypes involved in hanging out with them. They bore witness to all your tantrums and fussy habits of eating only curd rice and French fries and they listened without complaint to you singing the same nursery rhyme over and over again (apparently I did this)! They are the closest thing to family (duh, that’s why they call them family friends I suppose) and sometimes they’re dearer than some random members of the family you don’t really care about or see often!

I just remembered something else about this song… when I was listening to it in the car with my grandparents once, they were rather confused about why I was listening to hymns… they only caught the Glory Hallelujah part!

Oh, something else I remembered... Rat had a HUGE crush on him when we were 14.

Taking Stock of Last Night

Last night our department attended an end of financial year dinner and drinks thing. Before anyone asks what is this cool job and what is this cool company, please let me say it is not all that cool. We work our asses off (well, sometimes) and they’re definitely not paying us as much as they should, so the least they can do is give us a fucking dinner and a few drinks once in a while.

Venue: Picture a glass-fronted room on the banks of a quiet lake. The lights are bright enough for you to get a good view of beautiful Albert Park (this is where the Australian Formula 1 race happens every year) but dim enough to not be intrusive. There is a tall spiral tower that you can climb for lack of better things to do but I didn’t waste my energy on such pursuits. And the black swans in the lake are fairly friendly until they start fighting amongst themselves. Anyway, here’s a picture so you don’t have to think too hard about how it might look.



The only non-blurred one in this photo is my back!!



Food: Absolutely brilliant! This restaurant is one of those “Modern Australian” cuisine places and such cuisine is always really suspect, to me at least. Most times when I dine at one of those places (which is not often because as I already mentioned, I think the food is rather suspect), at least three words in the description of the meal will be unfamiliar to me and I just cross my fingers and hope I get something edible (I am a super fussy eater so I don’t leave much room for what “edible” can be)!! Anyway, this meal turned out to be quite normal and not all that “modern”. True, the calamari entrée was rather small but the folks who got the potato gnocchi seemed to enjoy it. And with the mains, the menu said Roast Porterhouse with pommes purees and root veg jus and it turned out to be just good ol’ steak and mash and some rather bitter tasting sauce which I totally avoided – I assumed that was the root veg jus part which literally translates to root vegetable juice I think! Of course the chocolate silk tart was just a tad too rich considering I was drinking alcohol. If I had just smoked a big fat joint though, the chocolate silk tart experience would have been almost orgasmic!

Alcohol: It was a beer and wine thing because that’s all the budget would allow. Here’s where we had some major dramas. There was this one table that was being slightly rowdy and drinking too fast and the maitre d just decided to stop serving them alcohol until they had some more food in their system. This did not sit very well with them and they just got rowdier than before. However, their glasses were topped up during the main course and this placated them somewhat. At dessert time, one of them specifically requested the sticky date pudding over the chocolate silk tart and as this was an alternate serving thing, each table gets half of each choice and either you eat what you get or try and swap with someone else. So he didn’t get the sticky date pudding and didn’t try and swap with anyone and this totally pissed one of the other guys off. He got up and started talking really loudly about the restaurant staff and how this was like a Nazi camp and hello, hadn’t they heard that the Holocaust was over. We tried to calm him down although we were all laughing too hard because he was being really funny and obnoxious at the same time. My biggest worry was he was going to jump up on the table like he has done at our neighbourhood beer garden on a previous occasion but he refrained.

Anyway, I had about four glasses of wine but it didn’t do a thing to me. I was just kinda floating along and also that chocolate silk tart messed up my drinking ability big time.

Drugs: I got home and forced S to smoke with me even though I knew it was just going to make the whole chocolate tart + white wine melting pot much much worse! I can tell you I had a time falling asleep. My stomach kept making strange noises and kept threatening to send me running to the loo and the joint ensured I couldn’t lay my head down for a while because of all the spinning that happened when I did!

This Morning: Eyes all sore, head still spinning, stomach growling, limbs extra lazy. God, I’m getting old – thank goodness its time for lunch!!

Oh excitement... I've just booked my tickets to Madras. I know its five months away but unless you get in early, its extremely hard to get flights around Christmas.

Okay, already the excitement is waning because now I just have to twiddle my thumbs for many months. Also, I have to somehow slip it to my boss that I'm planning *another* four week vacation at the end of the year. To be fair, my last one to the US was three weeks but there was also two weeks to India last October which have mysteriously not been deducted from my accumulation of annual leave. Not that I'm complaining of course... maybe they would've been deducted if I'd *officially* applied for it, but at the time I didn't and nobody else did on my behalf either so my annual leave account is still looking very healthy!

Anyway, now I must get working on this New Years trip to Goa as no one has gotten of their fat ass and done shitole thus far!! First Rat and I must decide what exactly we are going to do... I don't want to spend too many days away from home and now there are some added complications of weddings and all! So come on Rat, make up your bloody mind. Then, I must work the Madras crowd and get them organised into booking tickets, accomodation, etc. The last trip to Goa would sooo not have happened without the brilliant organisational skills of Sista T and me! It's going to be tough... especially since I'm sitting here oceans away. At least the last time I could annoy them about it everyday.

Ah well, if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't happen, all I care about is bringing in the New Years with the same people and it doesn't really matter if that happens in Disco Valley, Goa or some random beach house in Madras.

Oh my god... I'm so high! 2 glasses of wine over a 3 hour Friday lunch can do that to you. It's been so long since we've done this mid-day drinking thing. Back at work now and I feel like Chief "Broom" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest... there's a thick fog all around me.

This lunch was a celebration because a bloody system that was developed last year celebrated its first birthday this week... so lame, I know, but what fun. I didn't even know it was a company paid lunch until it was time to pay!

Anyway, everyone left and just me and two other people stayed back to continue bitching about the rest of the business for another half hour. It was theraputic!

Ok, now I must go... my friends are laughing at my highness! They were not invited to the lunch so they are stone sober right now!

I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it...

Oh my god! Tomorrow is the day! I can rush to my neighbourhood Borders store and get my hands on the new Harry Potter. For ages the stores have been encouraging people to be “organised wizards” and pre-order. So obviously I was quite easily suckered into that one! I mean, my “organised wizard” brain said, you’re going to buy the freaking book anyway… it does make sense to pre-order so if they do run out (perish the thought), you won’t be left bookless and Harry Potter less and can pass smug glances at all those non-organised ones as you walk out of the store!

Its been so long since I’ve been so excited about a series of books. When I began reading at the wee little age of 4 or 5 I was obsessed with The Famous Five and pretty much all books Enid Blyton.

Once I was finished with all the happy little Enid Blyton adventures books handed down from my Mom and aunts and had been through all the Famous Fives I could possibly find in the neighbourhood library, it was a pretty young detective named Nancy Drew who caught my eye. God, when I think of her now I realise how annoying she and her stupid friends really were but at the age of 8, she was my idol! All I wanted to be when I grew up was a cool “amateur” detective just like her (they kept emphasising the point that she was an amateur detective in all her books)! I still have a HUGE collection of her books in my room in Madras – such a pity my sister never took to reading.

The next obsession was those all-American identical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield who lived in a sweet little all-American town named Sweet Valley, California. Talk about an introduction to American pop culture! We were introduced to such foreign concepts as prom night, jocks, slam books, I even got the idea of maintaining a journal over a diary from that series. We had our own slam book fever and I know that old slam book of mine is still somewhere in my room in Madras – what a laugh that’ll be to read now! The books were really light and slightly obsessive about boys and fashion and best friends and what not and they suited me just fine my adolescent years.

Since then though, there hasn’t been too much. I really loved the Courtney and Ballantyne sagas of Wilbur Smith but they were too few and far between. Lately I’ve been reacquainting myself with those quirky little detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and Lawrence Sander’s sarcastic detective Archy McNally is always good for a laugh and a classic whodunit. But there hasn’t really been a series that I could sink my teeth into and really get lost in since Sweet Valley. Until I met Harry Potter that is.

A few years ago, I read one of the books and enjoyed it but forgot about it later. Two years ago I decided I wanted to see what all this Harry Potter fuss was about so I hinted to S that I wanted to read them all and it would make a very lovely Christmas present and he acquiesced to my wishes and bought them all for me and it took me a few months to get through them all. But I was so hooked. When I finished the last one, I was at such a loss… you know, what now? How long before I get to read the next one? Bloody long I’ve had to wait but now the day is finally here! Since the beginning of June, I read them all again of course… just to remind myself of all the important details before the new one.

Don’t ask my why I’m so addicted. I think it has something to do with how very simple and Enid-Blyton-like it is and at the same time its funny and interesting and has loads of suspense. And the magic… being an overly imaginative child, its so much fun to lose myself in this fantasy world of flying broomsticks and Bertie Botts’ Every Flavoured Beans and unforgivable curses.

The other day I was in Borders because I had run out of books to read at home and I was on my way to the checkout with $65 worth of books when I saw this sign that read “Spend $75 and get the new Harry Potter book for $15”. I immediately ran off to spend $10 more just so I could get the Harry Potter book at half price. Half an hour later I realised that the Borders people were very smart in setting up this $75 minimum… it was almost impossible for me to spend exactly $75 no matter how many combinations I tried… that $9.99 business fucks you up to begin with because it is highly likely you will end up with $74.99 and every book I wanted to buy involved me spending at least $80 which would mean I was achieving a total grand savings of $10! Well, some saving was better than nothing and the bookworm in me convinced me that if I didn’t spend that extra $15 today I’d be spending it two months later anyway (I really need to join a library)!

So I ended up with Ken Kesey’s ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, Arthur Golden’s ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’… all books I’ve been meaning to read for a while and haven’t gotten down to. I’m almost finished with 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'… it took a while to really get into the book. It was a bit like reading Trainspotting or watching A Clockwork Orange… the author has a language of his own. But I have liked it so far.

This has been a really long posts about books… I can’t help it if I’m passionate about reading! If this has been boring, TOUGH… books rule over movies and TV any day! And my sage advice for the day is become a reader if you aren’t one already!!

One day I will write a book!

"Wednesdayitis"

They have this stupid “A Current Affair” thing after the news every evening. On this show they provide us average viewers with shocking revelations about how supermarkets are ripping us off by filling 50gm tins only with 49.99gms of content and sometimes they answer the questions that keep us all lying awake at night for hours on end, such as “Is butter really better than margarine” or “Is salt a silent killer”!!

So anyway, there was once a segment on a new phenomenon being noticed in workplaces all around Australia – “Mondayitis”!! Essentially there are a lot of employees who take Mondays off as sick days when all they are really suffering from is “Mondayitis”. I can’t remember if they ever provided a solution to the deadly disease of “Mondayitis” striking down able workers left, right and centre, but I don’t take Mondays off and I don’t take Fridays off. I believe that I am afflicted by “Tuesdayitis” and “Wednesdayitis”.

I hate Mondays like every other self-respecting employed individual but somehow I drag myself in and heave a huge sigh of relief when the hands hit 6:00 pm and I can get out of here.

Tuesday mornings are do or die for me. I have a history of sleeping in on Tuesday mornings and calling in late on Tuesdays more than any other day.

So if we have somehow gotten through Tuesday, the next milestone is Wednesday morning. As I am writing this at work, I have managed to survive another Wednesday morning.

Then we are left with Thursdays. Even on a Thursday morning I begin to perk up considerably and by a Thursday evening I’m positively jumping with excitement at the prospect of the impending weekend.

On Fridays we all heave a collective sigh of relief and say Thank God its Friday and really mean it. Fridays involve long lunches, lazy afternoons and social drinking evenings. I love Fridays.

Alas, it is still only Wednesday and Friday is TWO whole days away.

I suppose another thing is that lately I’ve been feeling the whole “Different day, same shit” thing. It is important to have something to look forward to all the time (for me, at least). There has to be some kind of reward so to speak or happy/exciting event in the offing to get me through the daily drudgery.

Last September there was all the excitement of becoming a permanent resident of Australia and my birthday was a lot of fun. I could also begin planning my trip to India after 1.5 fucking years.

October passed in a flurry of shopping and wedding madness (not mine).

November and December were a blur of Christmas parties, drinking, Christmas shopping, Christmas carols and did I mention, drinking.

Then we had the New Year and I had a fun trip to the Gold Coast the end of January

The end of February saw a good friend from Brisbane visiting as well as a honeymooning couple from Madras. That was an insane 10 days!

March and April were focussed on being terribly excited about my trip to the US (to see my grandparents after 6 fucking years) and shopping and some fun birthdays as well.

May was of course my trip to the US and simply one of the best times of my life in a really long time.

After I got back, I could still bask in the glow of an awesome holiday for a while. There were pictures to look at over and over again, and all the fruits of my shopping to be worn, displayed, etc., I continued making drunk phone calls to my cousins and sister for a while even, just so they wouldn’t forget the madness of me.

But now the glow is wearing off big-time and there is nothing to look forward to in the next couple of months.

The cold doesn’t help of course. At least if it snowed, we could engage in such fun activities as building snowmen and having snowball fights. As it stands, the city taunts us with cold wind and rain and tells us to have a fucking blast with these elements alone!! Bah humbug is all I can say back!

Love is...

Love is little things

Love is saying I love you many times a day even after 5.5 years

Love is waking up and showering first just to let me sleep a little longer even though you start work later

Love is letting me snooze for an hour every morning

Love is emailing me I love you (in big bold rich text formatted 72 point font) everyday

Love is cooking two separate versions of paneer rolls because I can’t bear to eat onions with mine

Love is saying I am the most beautiful girl in the world even when I look my worst

Love is going out (after having settled down for the evening) to get me something that I need urgently and letting me stay at home so I won’t have to miss my favourite TV program

Love is bringing me breakfast in bed

Love is making me cold coffee at midnight

Love is getting me takeaway food and DVDs on a Saturday night when I am too lazy and sleepy to move

Love is taking me from one mall to another, all at different corners of the city and sometimes back again to the starting point and doing it all over again the next weekend just so I can get the best deals on my pre-holiday gifts shopping

Love is rolling me a joint even when you are too stoned and/or sleepy to smoke anymore

Love is letting me sit by the heater when we’ve both just come in from the cold

Love is getting drunk with me and letting me have the last drop of alcohol or the last sip of coke

Love is making me laugh by acting silly or making fun of yourself

Love is my picture on your phone as the wallpaper

Love is sitting through half an hour of traffic just to pick me up from work

Love is (or was, more like it because this happened at one point in our lives in Madras) driving 20 km from your house to pick me up from mine and then driving 40 km from my house to the beach house party or beach disco we were going to and then driving back 40 km to drop me home and then driving 20 km back to your house

Love is letting me have control of the remote

Love is letting me listen to the Beatles and Pink Floyd when you are not in the mood to listen to them

Love is moving the LP player to the room so I can listen to music whilst drunk when you want to sleep and just want to have me beside you

Love is reaching out to hold my hand when you are already asleep and can subconsciously feel me nudging you to stop you snoring

Love is spooning in the early hours of the morning to keep warm

Love is tucking my hair behind my ears

Love is keeping your distance after you’ve just smoked a cigarette because you know I can’t bear the smell

Love is asking me what I’m going to eat for dinner that night and take for lunch the next day

Love is taking me to Mark’s every week to eat spaghetti Bolognese

Love is buying me something every time you buy yourself something

Love is giving me spontaneous hugs

Love is putting me before you

And to borrow from the words of one of my favourite poets John Lennon:
Love is you, you and me

And I Guess Thats Why They Call It The Blues

I really should stop listening to music at work… because I waste enough time blogging and what not and it takes me some time to really get into what I need to work on and everything goes well for a while and then suddenly a song will play and it’ll just make me want to write for some reason… it’ll remind me of something or make me feel a certain way. On a different day, a different mood, if I had to listen to the same song, it might not have the same effect on me… But on some days (I blame that bloody iTunes Party Shuffle… you never know what you’re gonna get) … so here we are again!

Right now was I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues by Elton John. Now I am not a huge fan of his music… I have tremendous respect for his talent and Crocodile Rock was always a fun song and as a soppy teeny bopper I naturally listened to Sacrifice a million times over, but was never attached to his music in any way! But this song, it always does something…

I remember listening to this song on my walkman… tears streaming down my cheeks…

Never forget I’m your man

I remember a day in Madras, Sista T, J, and me and the Boat Club… a race almost won, so close… singing this the entire day… a night of dancing under the stars…

Laughing like children

iTunes has decided to throw me a trance number now from the Ministry of Sound Annual so the mood is gone! I won’t ever forget though. There were times we had the blues and there were times our days were as bright and happy as tangerine orange!

No Ordinary Day

Today has been different

Item 1:
It is such a warm winter’s day, I cannot express my joy at having had such weather… trust Melbourne to be so out of whack… there have been summer days way colder than today. It was really really pleasant drowsily waiting at the tram stop in the sun… it even became kinda hot after a while but I was too lazy to remove my scarf and winter coat… so that was a pleasant change

Item 2:
There was a very nice tram inspector on board my tram this morning. I do not evade fares (any more). I got away with fare evasion when I was a poor student but made a deal with God (kinda blasphemous but what to do) that if I didn’t get caught and fined during my struggling student days, I would definitely buy a ticket once I started working. So now I buy monthly tickets and the other day the stupid validator on the tram was all crook and completely messed up my ticket. I know that when this happens you’re expected to buy yourself a new ticket and get in touch with the authorities that be to send you a replacement ticket. But there was no way I was spending another $100 the day after I bought the fucking ticket and then mail the old ticket to the authorities, etc… it would just lie on my desk for days on end and I’d be $100 poorer… So I decided to take my chances on travelling with my screwed up ticket and today the tram inspector was very nice about it. He gave me a “permit” to travel for another month (he just took my word for when the ticket was meant to expire) and didn’t fine me or anything. Very nice… normally these fuckers are just dying to do you in!!

Item 3:
My company is introducing performance management for the first time and we had a session on what it all meant. It got me all fired up thinking about career progression and what not but having known my boss for 1.5 years, I find it very hard to imagine actually seriously sitting down with him and planning all this out. That one is going to be a real challenge.

Item 4:
There was an actuary in this session and he decided that since I was from IT (I only work in the department, I’m not actually a developer or anything) I could answer all the questions he’s always wanted to ask about IT and never could! So I patiently answered all his questions about the passwords for different systems and why we couldn’t just have the ONE password for ALL the bloody systems… This didn’t really fit under “what was so different about today” but just thought I’d add it in anyway!

Item 5:
My boyfriend S has been having debilitating back problems off late and today the chiropractor told him to just chill at home for the next few days and not damage his back further by sitting on the uncomfortable chair at work… what a lucky bastard! I mean, yeah, poor fellow, he really is in a lot of pain, but as I’m typing this he’s happily watching DVDs at home while I toil and toil to bring home the bread (hahaha… that only ;))! So anyway, he was around here at lunchtime and we had lunch together which is quite rare since our workplaces are far apart… it was also damn funny because we picked up our housemate as well because S needed something from him and our entire household had lunch together on a week day… cannot remember the last time that happened! It reminds me of the day when I took a sickie from work due to a massive hangover from too much wine the previous night and that just happened to be the hottest day of 2005 so these guys decided to come back home around noon and we then proceeded to the beach and had a very enjoyable time indeed playing hookey from our respective workplaces!

Item 6:
In the midst of all my performance management sessions, lunches with boyfriends, blogging, etc., etc., I have managed to do quite a bit of work today!!

I’m off for the day now… the rest of you’ll in different time zones, happy rest of the day!

New from iPod

A little video to provide you with some mindless distraction as you attempt to get through the working day!!

New from iPod

Random ryhmes and dirty ditties

Watching Grease this weekend reminded me of some of the stupid rhymes we used to sing in high school. The one below was what Neha used to sing because she really used to be quite lousing with virginity like Sandra Dee…

Look at me, I’m Neha C
Lousing with virginity
Won’t go to bed till I’m legally wed
I can’t, I’m Neha C

Well Neha C, I think we might have dispensed with that image a few years into college because then you became quite a skanky “ho” (say that like Gwen Stefani sings Take a chance you stupid “ho”) as I am quite fond of affectionately calling you!

Another one we used to sing was this dirty little rhyme below… it was dirty and sweet all at the same time… we’ll use Neha again as an example but we used to sing this to each other all the freakin’ time!

Neha my darling I love you
Come to me when I call you
Kiss my bum when I tell you
Ha ha ha ha ha

Oh my god, that looks so funny in print… much better when someone is actually singing it to you.

Then there was another one from Stella but I really can’t remember it. Girls, can you remember?

And wasn’t there some dirty rhyme from St. Michaels about Lou Lou and bang bang or something like that?

And that timeless classic that we used to sing when all my parents rowdy friends got together ‘She’ll be coming down the mountain when she comes, she’ll be coming down the mountain when she comes’… in later years, juvenile boys made many dirty connotations about the way she “came” down the mountain!

Its Monday morning and instead of being productive at work I’ve spent an hour or so catching up on bloggers’ weekend posts and decided to just finish with my post for the day now so I can move on and do some real work for a change!

My weekend was ok… I had the most fun ever on Friday night… at work, the company has a social club and for many months we resisted joining I’m not really sure why. I think it was mainly because our department had its own version of a “social” club with free booze every Friday night, etc. And then a few months ago everything changed… Accounts came down really hard on how much we were spending, etc. etc., (people from Accounts are not looked upon fondly around here) and our Friday night alcohol fund was axed and it was pretty rare that we did anything on a Friday night… they were some pretty dark days! So a whole bunch of us joined the official social club because once a month you can get pissed for $8 and you can buy cheap movie tickets, etc. We should have just joined ages ago… of course, there are still many among us who fancy themselves too cool for school!

So anyway, we started our drinking at 5 pm (another good thing about the Social Club is that we’re good friends with a committee member and he can get us whatever alcohol we request, so there was a brand spanking new bottle of Bacardi entirely for me to finish) and snacked on mini hot-dogs and burgers (it was a 4^th of July theme)! In the space of an hour and a half I was down three drinks and was pretty buzzed (think really big drinks in tiny paper cups) and we decided to blow the whole “social” scene and went back to our own “hood” (we have a nice whole floor to ourselves in a building next door) and continued the drinking there. Going home after that was a bit of a blur… we tried to catch a cab but it is almost impossible to find cabs on a Friday night so we waited at the tram stop and their tram came first and I didn’t want to wait by myself at the tram stop when I was feeling all drunk and social… so I jumped on their tram and they played rock, paper, scissors to see who would drop me home from where they parked their cars… so it was S who lost and she dropped me home and at home there was a party in full swing… S had some work friends of his over and they were heading out to an official work party of theirs… my housemate T had two friends of his over and they were getting very drunk! There was lots of booze and I spent a very enjoyable few hours chatting with Rat on MSN (laughing my ass off I know, as it is I laugh for everything and when drunk I can’t control it), every half hour I’d go smoke cigarettes with T and his friends, my aunt called from Chicago and I spoke to her for nearly an hour about random stuff, one of T’s friends is getting married in Nov (that’s his deadline as set by his family) and is still choosing between 3 girls… T and the other friend think it is very absurd that at 24 he has to accept this deadline of getting married so there was lots of emotional discussion that no one would remember the next day… the other friend is slightly crazy about Pink Floyd and was just going mad listening to it… since he was a guest, T had no choice but to endure it for a while… I didn’t mind one bit of course!

Many drinks and cigarettes later, S came home… he was also wasted… at some point around then I called my grandmom to wish her Happy Birthday… I don’t think she figured I was drunk… if I had spoken to the kids, they would’ve known for sure but they were in Chicago so we had a very enjoyable conversation… I think I find it much easier to talk to my grandmom than my mom! The friends finally left and S and T went to bed… T had bought me a DVD of the Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour that day which was very sweet of him so I watched that… it was quite mad… not as fun as Help! or A Hard Day’s Night but some funny bits and a couple of decent songs… I am the Walrus indeed! Earlier that afternoon, I had bought a recycled DVD of Grease from Dixons because I hadn’t watched it in a long time so I watched the entire thing (earlier that night, I kinda watched it in fast forward) and it was so good to watch it. Just a crazy movie… what fun songs! Finally I went to bed around 4:30 am!

Saturday was a very sleepy day of watching TV, DVDs and takeaway spaghetti Bolognese. We watched Hide and Seek with Robert de Niro and Dakota Fanning… it was a rather creepy movie! Also got to speak with the crazy kids who are visiting Chicago… as usual, they were full of random ramblings about deaf lesbians and alcoholic lemonade!

Yesterday I caught up on all my sleep for the week and we went to the mall because S wanted a haircut… it took extreme will power on my part not to buy anything… even if I don’t particularly like something, if its on sale, I feel the need to buy it… that’s why I stay away from malls unless I really need to shop… window shopping is not something that works out particularly well for me! S and I also played squash again yesterday… two weeks ago I decided to take a stand on my unhealthy lifestyle and growing weight problem and booked us in for squash… we’ve played thrice since then and I am very keen that we continue… I’m not very good at squash (played occasionally since last year) but I enjoy playing it and it’s a amazing that I’ve gotten off my ass to do anything so will keep at it! Oh, last night we made some killer prawn curry for the first time… I get very excited when anything I cook comes out well… also, it was an uphill battle convincing these born-vegetarians-but-now-eat-chicken people that prawns wouldn’t stink up the whole house! Also watched Live 8 on TV… that was really nice… they showed all the good bits from the London concert so watched U2, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Sting, etc. There was a really really bad duet between Craig David and Tina Arena of ‘Come Together’ in the Paris concert… they only showed it because Tina Arena is Australian… TV here is so Australia people obsessed! Watched the French Grand Prix for a bit and decided to go to sleep when it looked like Montoya was going to pack up and as I found out this morning he did pack up! Ah well, at least it wasn’t a Ferrari victory… Michael was even a lap down to Alonso at the finish which is awesome!

Oh yippee, it is lunchtime... only a few more hours of work left in the day!