I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

well, i'd actually covered pretty much the whole of the actual night in the original post (here). andy's got some relatively embarrassing (but very fuzzy) videos of me sitting/lying on the floor moaning about being fat while the others try to hoist me up... nothing new there.

i've been told that when i got out into the hall i pretended to be a pinball: seems i managed to bounce off each of the walls at least once before i went splat again... oopsy.
in the end dave managed to herd me off upstairs and andy managed to herd karen out the door. paul says he was just leaving when i came thumping back down the stairs head first giggling madly all the way... have a vague memory of it. and did manage to find one small bruise on my wrist. goodness me...

the next morning everyone expected me to be dead (karen felt very guilty). but i was fine (i did sleep till noon, but it was a saturday and i went to bed at three, why should i have got up earlier...). marion, who seemed to have had the least of anyone was most ill. all day. she was feeling better in the afternoon, so we drove up to cribbs. but then she had to get out and puke in the bushes by b&q. oops.

well, as i said, i was fine. no-one could believe i hadn't puked at all. as it turned out they were right. i was just closing the window on the sunday (christmas eve) after having aired the room a bit (just in case) cause my grandparents were sleeping in there over christmas, when i noticed something odd on the window sill. seems i'd puked out the bedroom window. good thing it's round the back of the house ;-) although i had mostly managed to miss the wall. i've got perfect aim (ok, we'll just forget about dublin for a moment), apart from the few bits that got obstructed by protruding parts of the house such as the kitchen window sill (and they've all been washed away by the rain now, i've checked) it all landed in the drain. how good is that!!! ;-)

telling karen and andy about it at their annual christmas eve gathering led to andy telling a story about how he... nah, i'm not allowed to post other people's stories sorry :-D

the funniest thing at their christmas eve thing (they invite the whole street and this year lots of people from church too) was the neighbour who complained about the 13 year old girls who'd been running up and down the street shrieking on friday night :-D no clue how this person decided on 13 year olds... and the other neighbour who'd heard the shrieking around half past twelve and actually looked out the window to see someone tottering down the street half naked... oopsy. but it was definitely karen, cause i was doing it at twenty past eleven... :-D
luckily karen can't remember anything from pretty early on in the evening. i always tell myself if i can't remember it, it never happened. good way of reducing the embarrassment. better way would be to drink less of course, but... ah well

well it was definitely a hilarious evening :-D (not that i'd necessarily want to repeat it)

oh yes, i also found one more strange photo of the polyp. such a weirdo ;-)

Labels: drinking, i'm special

merry christmas to everyone out there!!! :-D

and in case i don't post again between now and then, a happy new year to you all as well!!! :-D

marion's made mince pies. they taste really nice... but she used puff pastry so they kind of exploded in the oven... :-D


my favourite's the middle one in the rightmost (i think it's right) row: it's managed to flip its lid right off!

last night karen and andy and the polyp came round for dinner (did i mention that the polyp moved out last weekend?). dinner was fun, although once again everyone was alarmed at me drinking water. i spent the entire afternoon at the pub! i was letting them catch up ;-) of course they kind of overshot the catching up, a lot of wine was flowing.

so karen (who was quite pissed by the end of dinner) decided i needed to catch up. she and the polyp kept mixing me these harmless looking drinks (in pint glasses) which were in fact mainly vodka with a splash of orange juice and a splash of this fizzy-orange-and-vodka mix... three of them they made me, each claiming it was the other who'd tipped in all the vodka! after that the vodka was finished. i remember being given a really yummy dark coloured drink (still the pint glas) which obviously had red wine and martini in it. today i was told that they'd just gone round randomly tipping in whatever drinks were left lying around, so who knows what else was in there! i know, i know, it can't be worse than the infamous white stuff...

anyway between us we seem to have polished off quite a bit of alcohol: the vodka's gone, the martini's gone (i didn't remember starting on the martini till dave and the polyp reminded me, then i remembered the purple drink. can't remember karen spilling two glasses of martini, but you can certainly smell it in the green room. yum!), the fizzy-orange-and-vodka mix is gone, i think they drank five bottles or so of wine, there are innumerable empty beer bottles... i think that's about it, but of course my memory is quite hazy towards the end of the evening.

paul tried on karen's boots. the picture's a bit fuzzy cause karen was waving her arm about so i kept moving the camera...

very nice boots, i took a closer picture. sadly he never tried to walk in them. ok, karen would have killed him, he's a size 8, the boots are 4s...


later on marion had a go on karen's boots. they fit her so she stood up and tried to walk in them. that was scary! she swayed and wobbled all over the place, we all had to retract our feet off the floor for fear of having holes stamped in them. in the end i managed to pull marion sideways so she fell back in her chair before she hurt herself or anyone else. i was quite pleased with myself, i even managed to get the phone off the chair just before she landed :-)

karen decided (it was during my first or second yellow drink) we should play truth or dare. so they had to finish off the wine quickly, cause all the empty bottles were in the other room... drunk people's logic :-D it was hilarious! after a while i decided i'd say dare instead of truth, i wanted to be less cowardly than usual. that was a very bad idea seeing as it was karen who'd spun the bottle... so i finished off my vodka and then ran part of the way down the street without my top (did have my bra on!) doing volleyball hits and yelling 'hurrah! hurrah!'. evil karen!!! it was awful, it wasn't even half past eleven yet!

marion fell asleep and was tucked in by karen. or rather karen helped her up the stairs and dropped her on the bed which was how dave found her hours later.

it was quite a long while later when the bottle finally pointed at karen again for the first time since my dare. everyone had been doing truths (although we're not sure that andy was telling us the truth about his number one most embarassing moment ever) after they'd seen what the dares looked like. it was hilarious. but anyway, karen had promised me she'd do a dare as well when she made me run down the street in my bra. she was very lucky that dave had spun the bottle and not me. originally she was supposed to go and lie on the bonnet of paul's car (a very nifty little black sports car) in her underwear and boots and sing auld lang syne. but we had to change that to we wish you a merry christmas cause she didn't know the words. and dave relented and let her keep her top on. and then he let her wear a coat over the top. so i chose the coat: my pink one :-D it's not long at all :-D so she wore it round her arse... i shoved her out the door (like she did to me earlier) and she tottered off to the car. we were wetting ourselves :-D in the end we all forgot about the whole lying on the bonnet thing, but it was funny enough anyway :-D

not long after that karen changed the game: she asked questions and if the answer was yes you had to take a swig of your drink. more hilariousness.

[24/12/06: will publish this now, have taken notes and will finish the saga after christmas :-)]

[27/12/06: have finished posting here]

Labels: drinking, i'm special

we officially closed up shop at twelve and went off to the beaufort. hurrah! and paul's infineon credit card paid for all the drinks. even more hurrahs!!!

was fun, nothing much spectacular happened (except for one unexpected person turning up, you should have seen stuart's face! and paul was also quite stunned. i nearly wet myself laughing at them).

the only major thing i can remember was when i accidentally bit a chunk out of a pint glass... it was all paul's fault! nothing to do with me!!! paul was trying to take a picture of me so i pinched his pint. then he asked whether i could do the drinking-my-beer-without-using-my-hands trick with my jacket over my head like that (i was hiding from the camera...). so i decided to do the trick again with his pint (i'd finished mine) which was more than half full. i'd have managed it just fine, only problem was, the glass was a bit week, so i got covered in beer and ended up with a mouth full of glass... oopsy! was incredibly lucky, completely fine to everyone's astonishment. ah well, that'll teach me :-S have promised a very horrified lee never to try that again ;-)

Labels: beer, drinking, i'm special

hurray!!! somehow i've escaped the predicted agony that should have been making it impossible for me to move without like an 80 year old cripple. weird. not that i'm complaining. was just expecting not to be able to laugh at all without howling by now. the torture was two days ago so surely the aftermath should have struck by now. perhaps extreme training is the way to go to avoid sore stomach muscles and everything else. not sure whether i'd want to test that theory though cause it's never worked that way before :-S

maybe it's just a little christmas miracle. whatever it is, i'm very grateful :-D

Labels: beer, volleyball

on sunday i realised something. (hurray, enlightenment!)

in our (volleyball) league in switzerland everyone complains that at our level it's ridiculous that the refs are so strict with regard to lifting and doubles. in the referee course we are actually taught to be a whole lot stricter than anyone ever is. but we're all in agreement that it's a joke and the people in charge of the refs should be ashamed of themselves.

however, i have now seen what happens when the refs don't come down hard on that stuff. the league here has a very similar level to the one i play in in switzerland. overall it might even be slightly better. but the volleying is absolutely crap. everyone is constantly lifting the ball or doing doubles. we've got a setter who does one clean volley out of every ten... it's kind of distracting cause i wince every time and expect the ref to call it when i should be going to hit the ball... on sunday the ref called her on a couple of her sets. it was fair enough, they were absolutely horrible. but during the time-out the others told her just to carry on, her sets were fine! what planet are they living on?! it was true that the ref was a biased ****, but he was right to call them. of course he should also have called a lot of the others' ones as well. that kind of proved that he did hear chris slagging him off when we got there, chris hadn't realised that jenny had her window open... ;-)

anyway, i will never complain about the ref being too strict with regard to lifting and doubles again. it's horrible when everything counts!

the other lot that refereed were quite ridiculous, too. they insisted we go round the court on the correct side when we swapped sides. but they didn't call any lifts or doubles. and the one girl came so far over our side that she trod on my foot (!!!) and they completely missed it!!! wtf do they think the second referee is for??? oh wait, they had the second referee who thought it was her job to contradict the line judge and the first ref and insist she was right no matter what... ah well.

Labels: volleyball

it's incredible what i can do as long as it's dressed up and called volleyball. tonight we were supposed to be merging the women's and the men's training (cause we didn't expect there to be many people turning up this close to christmas) and having one three hour long session. but no men turned up... (apart from chris, but he was coaching, he can't play, his shoulder's completely screwed up, he's having an operation in january). luckily there were 6 of us, so it still worked out more or less ok, though chris wasn't too pleased, he'd planned stuff you needed more people for).

anyway, chris sent an email out on monday saying he was going to do an hour of fitness training, an hour of drills and an hour of game situations and actual playing. that's probably why no guys turned up (except the two who hadn't got the emails and turned up at eight thirty expecting the usual men's team training. the italian guy ran off the moment he realised that he was the only guy, the second one came later).

chris tried to follow through on his email, but there weren't enough of us for most of the drills he wanted to do. we started off running laps as usual. except today we didn't stop after five or six laps, we carried on. i was most alarmed. we ran for a quarter of an hour! i'm sure there's a post round here somewhere about the last time i tried running and managed a whole seven and a half minutes. that's half the time!!! and i collapsed afterwards, i didn't carry on training for two hours!!! ah, here it is and i was wrong, it was actually only seven minutes...
anyway, i managed to make myself run for 15 minutes (it boggles the mind, well my mind anyway). then we did some streches which felt lovely (except i could barely stand which wasn't so good for some which required a little bit of balancing and anybody who's ever seen me in training can attest to the fact that i'm bad at balancing at the best of times...). and then we did more laps! another 5 minutes at the beginning of which i was protesting loudly but i shut up right away as breathing required my full attention. then we did horrible stuff, i'm going to be in agony tomorrow, and then another two laps (which is probably about 200 meters or so). and then we had a break, chris gave us a quality street each for energy, i thought he was being nice. but then he tortured us more... lots of horrible running and jumping with the loosing pair having to do sit-ups. since mandy cheated and i could barely stand let alone run and jump we lost (we wouldn't have if mandy hadn't cheated and mahile hadn't got confused and not done half of the stuff (technically also cheating) so that pair shaved quite a lot off their time). had to do quite a few sit-ups. and we'd done tons of them earlier (in between the 'horrible stuff').

oop, i think the stella's just kicked in. my head feels slightly wobbly... hurray, it's worked though: my elbow just feels sore in the same way as the rest of me will tomorrow. it's stopped trying to make me howl in agony :-) turns out stella is really good for pain-killing. young's winter warmer is crap. i had a pint of the stuff (we went to the pub) and i drank it quite quickly (hoping for it to numb the pain, plus the others were in a hurry). but it had no effect whatsoever. so i had a bottle of stella when i got home. and now it's my thumb that's most painful again. that's alright, i can deal with that. but last night i only had the one small bottle of stella and the agony in my elbow went. instead my head didn't go floppy. stupid winter warmer!

it's a good thing it's christmas, gives my poor limbs a chance to recuperate. my amkle's not happy, my right elbow is agony (not right now, but that's the beer), my right thumb's agony (not compared to the elbow, but still), the middle finger of my right hand is fine unless i use it(!) (fine for playing the piano though)... i think that's it, but it's quite a list for someone who's usually not got anything specific wrong with them (apart from being fat of course). i'm beginning to sound like a right hypochondriac! ah well...

back to training. when we finally got round to playing (after a coule of torturous drills) we played two against three. jenny and i played mahile, hannah and the guy who turned up just in time to play (mandy had to go home). i prefer to play in a team of two than three. two and six are the ideal numbers. when there are six people on court you know what's your responsibility cause you've practised it over and over. when there's just two of you you know any ball is yours unless it's clearly your one team mate's. when there are 3 to 5 of you it's just confusing. nobody knows exactly which area they're supposed to be covering cause it's not something you practise and discuss... which is why any time someone asks 'who's gonna be on the two-side' i'll yell 'me me me me!!!'. it's good fun and good exercise.

chris said each member of the loosing team would have to do two push-ups for each point they lost by. i took great exception to that, in the end he relented, so anyone for whom push-ups were too much (well you try pushing almost a hundred kilos up and down in that position!!!) was allowed to do sit-ups. we won anyway though :-)

just realised: the wobbly head is probably due in part to the fact that my dinner consisted of a packet of quavers and two small cookies... now the question is: to eat or not to eat? hmm, sounds too much like a descision to me, will ignore the question and see what happens.

Labels: beer, i'm special, volleyball

given up on making it look perfect, will just have to live with the purple frames. have taken a screenshot for future reference.

now i just have to get the whole thing up and running properly. ideally this shouldn't take me more than 10 more minutes but my ftp program keeps crashing :-| slowly getting there. (VERY slowly...)

hurrah!!! it's worked! i like it, i don't care if tim (my little (but hugely tall) brother) says it's stupidly festive (or something to that effect), marion likes it too :-) i am well aware that there are way too many bright clashing colours (did a huge project on website usability in my third year at uni) it's christmas, who cares if it's usable. so far only one person has ever decided to come to training based on the website anyway (although one person is still a lot better than nobody!). so there!

went to the tuesday training for the first time tonight (alpha's finished now). it was cool. warming up i managed to get every hit down over the net even though it was men's height. didn't realised i could jump that high! of course once we started playing things went wrong... it was so cool though. there were seven of us in training, five guys, two girls. so this one guy (i should probably know his name, but i'm crap at names) says right us three (pointing at me and mahile, the other woman) against you four (points at the rest of the big scary guys). so i thought 'this is going to be a laugh!' it was!!! we wiped the floor with them in the first and the second set. it was sooo funny :-) they couldn't pick up my serves so that was cool too. the only thing was that i'd done something to my elbow warming up so serving was absolute agony. by the third set a lot of my serves were going wrong cause of it. but all three of us played complete crap anyway, so we were lucky not to have lost 25:5 or something. the fourth and fifth set went similarly badly (although i managed to serve ok again, not that it hurt less). so we lost. but i'm still utterly chuffed that we beat them so well in the first two sets. we never went behind at all in them :-D how funny

my elbow's fine now, what a wonderful painkiller beer is. one small bottle and all the owies go away :-)

btw i realise i seem to brag a lot about my serves. sorry about that. can't help it, they really are worth bragging about. oops, i did it again... ;-)

Labels: beer, volleyball

i meant to go to bed early tonight. but then three hours ago i had the wonderful idea of christmassifying the volleyball website. of course i thought thank goodness for stylesheets, i just have to change a couple of things in the one file, no problem. but of course it's all gone wrong, it always does :-( the most annoying thing is that there's a purple border around two of my links. but i've taken all the purple out of the stylesheet! there's absolutely no purple left so where the f*** is it coming from?!!!

have given up now cause the urge to throw the computer across the room has just reached critical mass. so annoying! gah!

it would be easier if i could do offline trials, but i haven't got apache on this computer. instead i can give you all the link to my feeble attempts so you can go and have a(nother) good laugh at my expense. haven't bothered with the colours yet, been focussing on getting the basic template working. so since i failed miserably at that (witness the purple box around the 'top' and 'home' links) the colour scheme is still a lickle bit weird... ah well. and of course the contents aren't working yet since i was planning (am actually still hoping) to just plug the stylesheet into the main site.

i really should try to remember in future how much i dislike the hassle of trying to make a website look good. meh.

Labels: i'm special

had another two matches today. had to get up at 7am (on sunday!!!) to drive down to yeovil. hurray, no more getting up early on sunday till after christmas :-D

warming up i thought i must be sick (i knew i wasn't hung over, no alcohol since friday night and not much then). while we were doing serves i couldn't get any across the net. that's never (ever!!!) happened to me before, my serves are much more likely to hit the wall on the other side! so i moved right up to the line (i usually stand a couple of meters behind it if there's room) and tried again. still having trouble unless i whacked it as hard as i could. obviously the court couldn't be bigger than usual, it's a fixed size: 9m x 9m either side of the net. so i was convinced i must be ill (did feel a bit tired). but then we went onto the court and i was checking i was standing in the right place when i realised i wasn't actually on the court yet, cause i'd got the lines confused. so when i'd been serving before the line i'd been standing two meters behind was already at least three meters behind the correct one... no wonder i was having trouble! of course during the first set all of my serves went way out the back. we were well into the second set before i managed to them down to a more sensible setting, except that they started going out the side then ;-) but we all served crap during the first two sets. and we played crap, too. so we lost them. managed to wake up in time for the third one, yeovil was taken completely by surprise and we won the third and fourth without too much resistance from them (although again we did try to beat ourselves by playing complete crap the moment we realised we only needed two more points to win). and then the fifth set yeovil woke up again and we went back to sleep... so we lost :-( nearly managed to catch up. we were 10:14 down when we got the serve back and it was my turn, i was so glad i didn't screw that up. didn't screw up the next serve either. instead i flunked the dig :-( could have kicked myself.

the second match was quite weird. warming up they seemed really professional, we were getting a bit worried. but as it turned out they were pretty crap and we beat them 3:0 in spite of again trying to screw it up for ourselves. whenever we go points up we seem to switch off and stop playing properly, it's just weird. but we managed to wipe the floor with them anyhow. hurrah!!!
and my serves worked properly again! i do love it when their digs bounce straight up and hit the ceiling. that's a proper serve :-D

Labels: i'm special, volleyball

christmas dos in the uk are sooooo much fun :-D can't put my finger on what's different to the ones in switzerland, but there is one. maybe it's that they're in english ;-) ah well

we went to the thai palace on park row. we'd all had to order our meals ages in advance, so everyone had forgotten what they were having. it was hilarious, the suspense was killing us all, 'what on earth could i have ordered???'. i had jungle curry in another attempt to get my ears to blow steam. but they didn't :-( the vindaloo almost managed it on wednesday. it has been an asian week, wednesday indian, thursday chinese and today (or rather friday) thai. yummy.

the entertainment was beyond hilarious. this horribly cheesy looking guy was stood a meter from our table singing all night. it was good fun, i bounced along to it all through dinner. the cheesy (or as harvey put it 'bland') songs sounded alright, but any rock or other stuff just sounded... well, cheesy/bland as well... like the killers' somebody told me or green day's american idiot. then there was magnus' backstreet kid (or something) which he did so horribly that the song was pretty much finished before i realised that i did actually know it... ah well.

around midnight we went off to morf's (not sure how it's spelt). am now quite deaf but that's fine, it was good fun. stayed there dancing until almost half past two. i was feeling slightly too casually dressed as i was the only one of us not in heels (apart from chris of course), but in the end i'm really glad i wore trainers and not my boots cause i decided to walk home. couldn't be bothered to try and fight people for a taxi as i was absolutely sure of the way home. the guys from volleyball don't know about my blog so they wouldn't know that saying to me 'go that way and you'll get to whiteladies where you can grab a taxi' is not necessarily the best idea if you really want me to turn up in one piece for the match on sunday. but i wasn't drunk and i'd really have to be pissed out of my head to get lost walking home from the triangle cause it's just 'follow the road all the way home'... it took me an hour and five minutes but i lost at least five minutes on the downs dodging drunks. so really it should have been an hour or less ;-)

was walking home past the church when a police car drove past me and stopped. how embarrassing.
'you alright?'
'yes, fine, thank you'
'have you got far to go?'
'no,no, it's just down there and then that way' not actually lying, just leaving out most of the rest of the way home. it's my 'i'm fine, i'm fine' reaction (true in this case), the one that caused the mad dashes in dublin (people trying to carry me home, me thinking i'm fine, i'me fine, but they wouldn't let me walk alone, the only way to be independent (*g*) was to collapse and then make a run for it while the others were having a rest from carrying me)
but anyway, the policeman told me to take care and drove off, much to my relief :-)

and now i'm home and blogging. there we go then, lovely evening, great fun. hurrah!!!

oh dear, in less than 8 hours i'm meeting my aunt debbie at cribb's. bed might be a good idea then. (this is me trying to convince myself). ooh, just fell asleep staring at the screen. that's quite a convincing argument...

Labels: drinking, i'm special, volleyball

i was in such a foul mood last night. not sure i've ever been in quite such a bad mood. of course usually i don't have 4 pints of beer on an empty stomach at four in the afternoon when i'm feeling murderous. that was probably what broke my 'do not swear at everyone even if it would make you feel better' filter (without the beer i'd have just been quiet apart from the occasional growl). i wasn't drunk, i was angry (and tipsy). when i'm properly drunk i'm a happy bunny. not murderous.

we went to the pub again after dinner (during which i drank water and continued to behave awfully most of the time). i decided it was time for emergency measures. either that or go home (and then administer emergency measures at home). paul thought it was quite funny that i wanted a pint of half vodka and half martini. he said 'you order it, i'll pay. in fact order two' ;-) i asked whether they'd do that but the barmaid said it was illegal. fair enough. but dia found a way around that. we got 6 shots of vodka and 2 martinis and a pint glass. it was less than a full pint but i couldn't be bothered to try and make her give me more. i wanted my drink... managed to finish it in time for them to kick us out around midnight. the bar maid was very impressed when we left and i was still alive and walking unaided ;-)

the vodka did the trick and we went to some club to go dancing. was good fun. more drinks, embarrassingly i dropped the first one on the dance floor and the glass smashed. that'll teach me to try and dance while i'm holding a slippery cocktail glass. i stuck to smirnoff ice after that, the bottle's much easier to hold...

dia vanished around quarter to two, so paul, lee and i were looking for her. i went outside to see whether i could see her and then the bouncer wouldn't let me back in. not impressed, threatening to throttle dia when i got my hands on her. in the ennd he asked me what the time was and decided it couldn't hurt too much to let me back in since they were closing in ten minutes. good thing i had my watch on ;-) wait, there's always my phone... not sure i would have thought of that :-)

lee was inviting us all (tino, pim and me, cause paul ran off after dia and everyone else had left before) back to his place (again, i was surprised he dared after richard's leaving do) but the others just wanted to go home. so that's what we did.

Labels: drinking, i'm special

we could have won both matches :-| and we definitely should have won the second one, we were better than them. but no, we lost. even though we'd won the first set in each game. blech :-(

i'm now completely battered. what an awful sport. managed to twist my ankle, gill forgot she wasn't playing middle today so when i landed from a hit her foot was where mine had been going (i.e. she was standing in my spot). my foot rolled off hers and i went splat. how lovely. (she was fine). it wasn't bad, i carried on playing and forgot about it after a while but it's not so good now and i'm a bit worried it'll get stiff in the night. not looking forward to the wonderful walk down the hill tomorrow morning :-|

it turns out those synthetic shirts slide well. i'm pretty sure that's the first time i've ever slid into the wall on my back :-) (i started on my front and rolled to get back up but it didn't work like i expected cause i was still going at such a speed...). i've run into walls before, but it was always controlled (i.e. i knew the wall was coming up and had started to slow down a bit. the way everyone always yells at me they obviously expect me to run head first into a wall without slowing down. what do they take me for?!)

the polyp couldn't see how the whole throwing yourself at the floor thing would work (it is quite hard to make yourself do it the first few times, but it kind of becomes natural, i find myself hitting the floor when there's no chance at all of ever getting the ball. and today i found myself on the floor (having reached the ball, hurray!) before i'd even consciously realised the ball was heading my way...). anyway, the polyp wanted to know how you land. so i tried to demonstrate the ideal way to do it, without actually hitting the floor. but he wanted a proper demonstration. so i threw myself at the kitchen floor. it was a good dive, completely painless (of couorse it's easier if you don't have to worry about getting the ball) but the polyp laughed himself silly. he hasn't got a clue :-D

all in all it was a good day, in spite of having to leave the house at 7.15 on a sunday morning, loosing both games, and further injuring myself. volleyball is great fun, i wouldn't miss it for anything :-D

Labels: i'm special, volleyball

everything's relative. nobody told me this 'practise league' was for practise simply cause we don't stand a chance. it's mixed, but the rules are that in a team of six players you need to have 2 'wild cards', wild cards being women, over 50s or 16 and unders. so we were playing against men's teams with a womam each. the whole 'over 50, no good' is just ridiculous in volleyball. so we lost the first three sets miserably. did manage to make it into double digits each time, i thought that was very good of us. but by the last set we'd woken up properly (seriously, who schedules volleyball matches for early saturday morning???) and quite a few of us were actually managing to jump high enough to hit the ball down over the net :-D for a while we even thought we might manage to win that set, we were a couple of points ahead for ages. but then the other team stopped getting annoyed and caught up ;-) but as we only lost that one 25-21 we were all very pleased. and the guys were quite impressed... so as i said, relatively successfull. it all depends on your point of view :-)

you wouldn't believe the top they made me wear though. there's only one spare one and it's an M!!! i would never even try to get into an M usually, i prefer XL... got into it no problem, but that thing was skin tight. the others thought it was hilarious. it wasn't tight tight, just skin tight. i was well not impressed! spent most of the first set pulling on my top. afterwards the others declared themselves jealous and tried to comfort me by pointing out that the guys probably enjoyed it. thank you so much!!!

on the way back i definitely recognised a park i wandered past two weeks ago. so the place i ended up catching a taxi was gloucester road it seems. not sure i've been there before (other than that night...)

Labels: i'm special, volleyball

well, so much for not drinking tonight. though i've only had a bit of beer. hopefully i'll still be able to jump tomorrow. ran up the hill on the way home, that's a sure sign of advanced tipsiness. ah well, i think the main games are sunday, tomorrow's some other not so important league. had a bit of a horrible moment just now when i thought we were meeting at clifton college at 7 o'clock on sunday morning. i was wrong. but 8 o'clock on sunday's just as bad come to think of it! and tomorrow it's 8.30am. why do i do this? getting up at ten on a weekend is wrong wrong wrong as far as i'm concerned.

anyway, would have been in bed by now, but what little common sense i have tends to be completely trashed after more than two pints (unless i've had a big meal). so i'm still up. haven't even packed my bag yet. was ........ (working on christmas present [i.e. knitting]), nearly went completely pearshaped but i think i managed to rescue it. will have to see tomorrow how badly i've screwed it up.

right. sleep. no, wait. ummm. forgotten. find volleyball stuff. oooh, have to make sandwiches :-/ nope, no sandwiches tonight, i'll have to try and get up in time to make them tomorrow. what else. volleyball gear. is important. right. lets go then. good night :-)

Labels: beer, drinking, i'm special, volleyball

what absolutely great fun!!!

just the highlights (or just whatever i can be bothered to write in a hurry):

i did get quite drunk, but not so drunk i did anything particularly embarrasssing (apart from when i played pool, if my dad had seen that he'd have disowned me on the spot ;-) never played pool drunk before so i didn't realise how utterly crap i'd be... but paul was drunkenly crap too, and later on in the evening pim too)

managed to refrain from arm wrestling anyone in spite of certain people being quite desperate to see whether they could beat me or not :-)

played table football though and beat everyone i played against (did loose, pim and i lost to fabio and jesus (that's his name, he's spanish) once, but we beat them twice, and at the very end when i was so drunk i could barely see the ball i played two singles against fabio. not sure whether i lost the first one or not, it was 5-4 to one of us ;-) almost lost the second one to nil, but i just managed to score the last two goals, so i finished off chuffed at not having lost to nil like i'd expected. it's all good). i don't play well, technically speaking, it's just that if you keep blasting the ball at the goal odds are it'll eventually go in (although it often ricochets off into your own goal) and the random aimless technique is really really difficult to defend against :-D

did not fall over at any point, my ankles and legs are fine in spite of the boots (lovely lovely boots). however, my feet are still absolutely killing me today and i'm sure the soles don't usually look the way they did this morning (can't be a hundred percent sure cause i don't really spend a lot of time inspecting the soles of my feet...)

dia and i gave patrice a tour of the ladies' loos :-D (look patrice, you're finally on my blog!)

that's it for the short version i think. will elaborate when (if! i still haven't finished dublin, not sure if that's ever going to happen now...) i find time/feel like it :-D

Labels: drinking, i'm special

must remember not to publish this post till after christmas, otherwise mum and marion might find out about their pressies. clever as i am, i decided last night (less than three full weeks to christmas) to knit both mum and marion scarves for christmas... oops.

so i spent last night knitting like mad. marion went out, so i was able to work on hers as well. we watched the mummy returns. such a funny film. i absolutely love the undead pygmies, they're just hilarious. especially the bit where bredan frasier throws a lit stick of dynamite at them and two of them fight over it. then the whole group of pygmies charges across the tree trunk with the one in front waving the dynamite triumphantly having just pushed the other one into the abyss, and halfway across they all go ka-boom! :-D beyond hilarious. i couldn't stop laughing (it wasn't the first time i've seen that film), dave and polyp were looking at me like i was mad. it is that funny!!! :-D

i was knitting till half past one in the morning. my right index finger is bright red from pushing the needle. i'm probably doing something wrong there ;-) ah well, as long as it looks ok ;-)

so at the moment i don't mind when the bus gets stuck in traffic. it means i've got more time to knit... we've got a match in exeter on sunday. i've been told we have to leave at 7 in the morning. eek! i'll definitely be knitting on the way there then ;-)

[02/01/07: haven't quite finished either scarf, although mum's is almost finished. it has to be done by tonight cause my brother's taking it back to switzerland tomorrow. so since mum should be getting hers tomorrow and i'm pretty sure she doesn't actually read my blog, and i gave marion hers on christmas day with the needles still in it, i'm publishing this post now]

hmm, i'm now supposed to be playing volleyball on sunday and saturday. that means i can't get too drunk friday night ;-) i've tried it before, i really can't play with a hangover. i jump as high as i can and my feet still barely leave the floor, so of course all my strikes hit the back wall, since it's hard to pull the ball down when it's lower than the top of the net (unless you pull it down on your own side of the net which isn't really the point...)

but the drinking thing isn't what's worrying me, i'm actually quite glad of the excuse ;-) it's easier to make myself drink less if i've got a specific reason other than just i'd rather not get shit-faced tonight. i hope my finger gets better by then and i really hope it can take playing two days in a row withoout trying to kill me. cause it's gone back to being quite stiff. i thought it was ok and leant on it quite hard friday night. turns out it's not completely better... and it hurts quite a bit if i get too enthusiastic when i'm playing the piano. ah well.

didn't actually want to play on saturday, it sounded like they had loads of players and they wanted to let people who wouldn't get a go in the actual league matches on sundays play, so they'd get some game practise. but in the end that all fell through and at the moment there seem to be six of us (the minimum required number for volleyball) including me available for saturday... ah well.

Labels: volleyball

as far as i can tell, some completely random guy has just left a post on my blog. unless superstar is jl. please let it not be jl!!! ;-) what a wide readership i've got :-)

since i moved the blog to beta recently (that was what caused the problems with the comments, which made me turn the layout pink for a while a couple of weeks ago) i can give the posts labels. so that's what i've been doing for the past hour. the labels won't appear until i can be bothered to change the template which i can't at the moment cause odds are i'll have to spend ages looking for something i've screwed up again... but all of my old posts are now labelled (i've managed to post about once a day on average since i started, it took me quite a while to label them all, but i'm glad i haven't been doing it for very long, it'd have taken me even longer! except i wouldn't have bothered...). the only thing is that the categories seem to be quite random and all of the posts i couldn't work out what categories they could go in are now filed under 'random' ;-)

another boring post. hurray. maybe i can bore people into not reading my blog anymore.

[edit: haha, i'm special! the labels have magically appeared all by themselves :-D and i can't find anything in the template that makes them appear. it really is magic!]

[edit2: have taken the labels away again as they were crap and looked worse. just left the ones for dublin cause that was why i wanted labels in the first place, the dublin posts are spread out all over the place...]

Labels: i'm special

what a rip off! we were supposed to be having spag bol tonight, paul cooked. but i came in as he was cooking it and he was cutting up strips of bacon!!! eeeek!!! of course i objected vociferously, but dave claimed that there is actually bacon in real spaghetti bolognese. yeah, right! but it went in against my very loudly expressed wishes :-( was hoping it's horrible taste would be diluted by the beef and the tomato but it wasn't. in fact it was the only thing i could taste 8-| not good. i love spaghetti bolognese and that wasn't even close to being spaghetti bolognese. it even had beans in it :-S they would have been ok though, it was definitely the bacon i objected to.

if you would like to complain about this being a very boring post, stuff you! i'm too ...... to write about my weekend for it to be dissected by all and sundry thank you very much. so go find something better to do with your spare time than prying into my life!

as marion put it: 'so you can choose not to drink so much then' and, in a surprised voice 'you're not trying to kill yourself' (with the 'after all' implied by the tone...)

we were at dave a's last night for the scalectrix evening. it was great fun! ok, the kids did their very best to trash the track, but we had some time before they arrived and after they went / went to bed it still more or less worked...
[edit: the track was incredible, it had loops! stuart took a picture, here]

after we gave up on the scalectrix we had a go at playing this very stange card game called munchkin. what a laugh! the rules were: if you don't agree with the rules start arguing loudly amongst yourselves, if you can't resolve it the owner of the game wins. however we were all too bemused by the whole game to do much vehement arguing... the point was to gain levels by slaying monsters. the monsters ranged from 'moon maidens' (waving their arses at you), to some kind of plutonium dragon or something. the second time we played paul had almost won (you won by reaching level 10) but we managed to throw enough stuff at him to make him loose everything ;-) after that he kept getting curses. he ended up with necrophobia (terrified of any undead monster, your only chance is to try and run away), something else i can't remember, and the best: cute dragon on head :-D no idea what that did... i'm assuming you get the picture, the game is hilarious :-D

i've got a huge bruise on my knee. for once i can remember where i got it. at lunch time we went to the pub cause it was richard p's last day (i only had a glass of coke!!!). dia gave us a ride, but i had to go in the back (boot) of the car. so i dived in over the top, banging my head and my knee on the way through. the others were stunned at the stunt ;-)

got told off by serrie for making lee drink loads of vodka wednesday night (yes, i've taken thursday morning's post offline, it's a bit much. i'll surreptitiously put it back online in a month or so. must try to remember not to post that i've put it back ;-)) [edit (22Dec): it's back now, putting this edit in to satisfy my urge to post about it...]. anyway. i didn't make lee drink anything, in fact he was the one who claimed the bar didn't do vodka-redbulls, i'd have to have a tvr instead. this was around one o'clock in the morning (thursday morning) so it made sense to me that they wouldn's serve vodka-redbulls but tequila-vodka-redbulls were ok... and when renato's closed around half one i was expecting to go home (ok, so i moaned, but i did think we'd be heading home at that point), but lee insisted he had booze at his place, we should go there. only it was all wine, so i wasn't impressed. we stopped off for a bottle of vodka for me, richard decided to go for it and get some orange juice to go with it (lee said he had redbull at home from when some friend had come round) and lee at the last minute decided he wanted kalua... i never made him drink vodka, he could have stuck to wine, and the kalua was definitely not my idea!!! anyway, lee barely had any vodka, richard and i polished that off. turns out we were at lee's place for about two hours, what a laugh ;-)

anyway, the fact that lee didn't turn up at all on thursday and was still in an awful state on friday was certainly not my fault. i went to bed at 6.30pm on thursday, i didn't make him go out boozing again ;-)

but serrie says she blames herself for telling the guys to look after me but not warning them to beware of me :-p

Labels: drinking