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

got home at midnight (couldn't face walking home and haven't got the money for a taxi so i had to get the train). dad was just going to bed, so i asked him whether he'd remembered nanny's birthday. surprise, surprise... ah well

yang's party was good. the ice cream cake was hilarious. it was packed in dry ice and frozen completely solid. now yang's part of the microbiology (or some such) lab. so this bunch of scientists was trying to ... (what's the word? cut doesn't quite fit) the cake. the bread knife was rejected when it barely scratched the cake, rejected in favour of the saw... a big, scary looking, slightly rusty saw... but that failed too :-) the cake was stronger! even when the saw was used as a pick and hammered down into (or not) the cake (although they couldn't find the hammer, can't remember what was used). finally the cake was defeated by this oddly shaped implement someone fetched from the lab. turned out afterwards it was a gel knife (or gel something anyway) which is used to pry slides apart, not really something you want anywhere near your food... luckily we didn't know that before we ate the cake ;-) and the guy it belonged to said 'i washed it! i even used soap!'

two of yang's friends from the states came over and the one of them got tipsy on one sip of champagne. asians... ;-) the swiss girl who got very tipsy (not quite drunk) after a small bottle of beer was also very entertaining :-)

one of the girls videoed the attack on the cake and she's going to put it on youtube when she gets back to the states. she'll have to edit it first though since no-one'll going to sit through the whole thing, half the people had left by the time the first piece was cut even when there was a chance of ice cream... :-)

good evening that :-D

Labels: beer

went out for a curry with a group from infineon on thursday night. somehow we ended up going to three different pubs before we even got to the restaurant :-S once again my coke kept getting spiked with vodka. it's quite scary, i don't want the vodka, but once it's sitting in front of me it's mine, and beware anybody who wants to take it away from me... ah well.

paul has now renamed stuart to studart (from student-stuart to student-art to studart). of course then we wondered about a certain stupart... i wonder how we can shorten security-guard-stuart

in the third pub the guys found an interesting dispenser in the loos. of course i didn't notice whether there was one in the ladies'. i was too busy trying to work the cubicle door: it opened both ways so you had to aim it very carefully to get the bolt to slide home. managed it eventually and then the toilet seat kept trying to throw me off! no i wasn't pissed!!! i really wasn't!!! bah! anyway, the guys decided that's what they're going to do as a leaving present for me: a blow-up male sheep. i.e. a female sheep with a £5 vibrator attached... and then the question was who'd present it... i think i might just not appear on my last day ;-) or i'll do a richard p but just stay in the loo :-D

the curry was very nice, although i wish it had been either a tiny bit less hot or a tiny bit hotter: i spent the whole time feeling like i was about to sneeze but never actually sneezing...

after dinner dia and paul were quite tipsy. when paul put his coat on he knocked a pepper shaker onto the floor. it was quite funny to see him try to work out where it had come from. dia declared loudly 'don't sneeze, it's the pepper!' :-D

we did mean to go clubbing after dinner, but first we went to zero degrees. yuck, mango beer is not nice! (ok, not really surprising...) dia and paul danced, not paul's usual dance, more of a ballet kind of dance. very entertaining, i filmed it :-D lee wants me to put it on youTube (don't worry i wouldn't). leaving zero degrees we couldn't agree on where to go next and split up. we were supposed to be heading for oceana (not a clue how it's spelt), but it was taking us such a long time and then suddenly we were taking a detour to another pub that i gave up hope and went home (dave made sure i got into a taxi, very kind of him (although i wasn't actually drunk at all...)). as it turned out stuart and james did eventually make it to a club. ah well...

friday night was the (volleyball) team night in at claire's. cause she lives in bradley stoke, just round the corner from work i walked. was originally a bit worried about trying to find it after a couple of pints at the beaufort but as it turned out no-one went to the pub (a lot of hangovers from thursday...). so i went straight from work and i found it fine thanks to all the lunchtime wanders. was a bit worried for a while that i was the only one, but eventually anna and then mahile turned up.

it was a really good evening, we just chatted until midnight :-) nothing more to say about it really since i don't want to post any of the conversation online...

so, saturday. we went out for another curry. this one was for paul's (the polyp paul) birthday. he invited a group of people from church, good fun. one guy (won't mention names ;-)) was still quite giggly from friday night. he'd been on a two-for-one-cocktail crawl of whiteladies road trying to use up all the vouchers in this stack of voucher booklets. sounds like it was good fun :-D

i was tempted to go for the vindaloo but i was too cowardly. so i had some dish that was marked as 'quite hot' (rather than 'very hot'). when i got it i was surprised to see that it was full of green beans. i decided to eat them first, so i speared two of them and started chewing... another example of my utter morondom... the moment i swallowed them the hiccups started. the others nearly wet themselves laughing at me. on closer inspection the beans looked nothing like beans of course. how could i have confused chilis for beans? the curry was called chili garlic something come to think of it... oopsy!

afterwards the polyp came back with us and we watched the first episode of the sopranos. we couldn't watch battlestar galactica or smallville cause marion's in london on some doctory course. it was quite funny. but i'd still rather have seen battlestar galactica. i hope marion gets home at a sensible time tonight and i hope she'll have recovered from last night (don't ask) so we can watch an episode or two :-)

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

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

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

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

got lost again. blame the pints. but to start from somewhere closer to the beginning...

we just went to the beaufort last night but it was good fun :-D can't be bothered to recount the whole conversation, not even all the funny bits. was very tempted to get out a notepad and start taking notes just to see how much people would freak out about it. but i'm lazy so i couldn't be bothered...

ended up just serrie, alistair and me. talking to serrie and alistair's fun :-) we had this long (i think it was long) discussion about faith and religion and stuff. i'm far from eloquent at the best of times, but after all those pints (i lost track exactly how many it was), forgetting not just what i was trying to say half way through a sentence but actually forgetting what the whole conversation was about, that is not really the ideal moment to try and explain to people why i believe in jesus... i just hope i didn't say anything really bad to make them more against it. i don't think i did... ;-)

in the end we decided to get a taxi back together. i think the taxi driver was a rubbish moron, cause he couldn't find it. it might have been my fault, but as far as i could tell he couldn't even find westbury (and i couldn't direct anyone to westbury unless it's from the downs or somewhere easy). i think he said he'd found falcondale road at some point and then he stopped and got out a map. at which point i said 'right, i'll find my way from here, it'll be fine'. serrie and alistair tried to stop me (clever people) but i insisted (moron me). i didn't even think to ask which way along the road to westbury...

i thought the place i got out of the taxi looked quite like where church is. for some reason my beer soaked brain seized on that and decided to use it as my stategy for finding home. thank you, i do realise that it was one of my most ridiculous plans ever! so i went left down some street, cause if i had been at church i'd have gone left at that point, and then right, cause if i'd been in westbury... you get the picture. have i mentioned that it was absolutely pouring with rain? and i cleverly thought i'd be home soon, and it wasn't that cold, so i didn't put my hood up... so i was completely drenched and freezing. turns out my new coat is waterproof though. hurray!!! but my jacket's sleeves were longer than the coat's sleeves and they were hanging out so my arms were sodden, too, right up to my elbows... :-(

i wandered for ages and ages. ended up on some road with clubs, where people were getting taxis. very strange, we can't work out where that was :-S there were bus stops, so i had a look to see if there'd be one i could catch. i didn't have a clue what time it was, never occured to me that it might be too late for busses. but cause my brain had latched onto another idea, that i was now on whiteladies road (not a clue why, cause i never saw the downs, so it couldn't have been), i wanted the bus number 1. i couldn't find a timetable for the number 1, and didn't bother even looking at the others. won't take second best ;-) (moron me). carried on for a little bit, but in the end i gave up and decided to take another taxi. there was one just standing there at the side of the road, so i opened the door to get in, but the girls already inside weren't too impressed ;-) oops... in the end i found one just for me though :-) the driver said i had to pay up front. good idea, it took me ages to find my wallet and then i found i'd spent all my money 8-| managed to scrape together the 10 pounds he wanted and we set off. in the opposite direction to where i'd been going of course... so i was freaking a bit, convinced i knew best (well the last taxi driver had been rubbish) and going 'why are you going this way, why are you going this way?'. it took ages to get home, i was somewhere completely wrong (as usual). but this guy did actually find it ;-) hurray!

i got to the door (took a while, cause the taxi just dumped me at the end of the road, yes, i know it's not a long road, i was a bit drunk and very wet and very miserable and rather tired...) and couldn't find my keys. still didn't have a clue what time it was, thought it was probably around ten or eleven or so. but i though the kids would be in bed so i didn't want to ring the door bell. did the usual knocking on the door, knocking on the window of the green room, tried the back door, nothing. still looking for my keys, but i was shivering so much i nearly dropped everything. gave up and got out my phone and found marion had texted me. still didn't look at the time. so i texted her back. but since i could hardly hold the phone, let alone hit the right keys, the text was slightly weird: 'an home now, act'v edu' meant to say can't find my keys, but the can't went wrong and the find seemed to be going wrong, so i gave up and sent it like that. after a while marion came down and let me in. this morning she told me i'd phoned her and my phone agrees. once she said that, i vaguely remembered it.

i'd said i'd text serrie and alistair when i got home. but i haven't got either of their numbers... so i texted stuart to ask him. good thing my phone knows the 'word' serrie, cause i was still shivering, dropped the phone twice in fact. couldn't face trying to spell alistair... 'have you got serrie or cliqucip's number?' but stuart didn't have the numbers either. ah well.

what an adventure... :-D (glad it's over though)

[edit: just realised i never mentioned what time it was when i got home. thought it was ten or eleven o'clock. it was half past one... oops. i wonder what time it was when i got out of the first taxi. will have to ask serrie on monday. and i really didn't have my keys, i'd forgotten to transfer them when i changed my jeans...]

[monday: now i know why i thought it was still quite early: it was only 10.30 when we got the first taxi, so i would have been around 11.30 that i left them... oops, quite a wander then, no wonder i got drenched]

Labels: beer, drinking, getting lost, i'm special

this time i managed not to tell anyone stuff about myself i'd rather not have, inspite of the (for me) quite large quantities of drink. i also managed not to puke on anybody (no puking at all in fact), or fall flat on my face (again, no falling over at all).

somehow i managed to end up being the first person to get to the pub, which i found a bit worrying. but the others easily caught up with me, i've learnt to drink slowly (the first few pints anyway). dave a came round saying pub time in 25 minutes at ten past four. but when i saw him leaving (i can see everyone coming and going, got a good window) i assumed he was going to the pub. so i shut everything down and headed off glad to get away (i love the job, this is not me sucking up for any infineon readers, i do love it! it was just a rather frustrating afternoon yesterday). but i got to the pub and no-one was there yet. of course dave was going home first which was why he'd said 25 minutes in the first place...

once everyone had arrived i was told off for drinking lager. i'd just randomly picked a beer (although they don't count lager as beer) that i hadn't had before (that was how i accidentally ended up with a beer that tasted of apples on the sunday night in dublin (oops, i still haven't finished blogging that). of course it was cider), so i had a kronenbourg. these guys really take their beer seriously. so i then had to have a young's winter warmer, after that a cumberland something or other, and then i wanted something else again, preferably something new, but they said the pub only did the three 'real ales' or whatever they are. so i asked for a butcombe (cause as richard s said, i hadn't had that one yet that day). but i ended up with another cumberland. at least it wasn't a winter warmer, i didn't like that, it tasted of puke (i didn't puke in it!! the first sip already tasted pukey). i don't think i had another beer after that, but suddenly i'm not so sure... was there a fifth one? nah... ?

dave a is having a scalectrix evening (if anyone who hasn't been invited has been given the link to my blog, that's not my fault, there's a limit to what i'll censor just cause serrie likes telling people things...). a couple of weeks ago he was saying about it, saying he was having this evening for 'the guys'. so i thought to myself 'that's not fair, why do the guys always get to have all the fun!'. they were talking about it tonight and i asked who was invited. turns out i'm one of 'the guys', it's not gender specific :-D hurray!!! although they did threaten to take my guy status away if i didn't stop showing off my lovely girly pink and white trainers ;-) good thing i didn't wear my boots...

richard p asked whether anyone wanted to go clubbing later. since i've been here i haven't been clubbing at all (execpt for the sunday night in dublin, i really have to get round to finishing that)., so i was really pleased. no-one else was interested :-( ah well

so i went home to dump my bag. first i got on the wrong bus (the number was blurry), good thing i asked the driver where he was going ;-) oh dear, i'll probably see him again monday morning... and then when the right bus came along i couldn't get the words out properly and it took me ages to get the money. don't remember it clearly, just remember apologising to the driver a lot (it seems i apologise when i'm drunk, it's better than getting belligerent). he's another one i see a lot...

when i got home marion was just finishing cooking dinner for herself and lucy. she made me shovel a rather large plate of curry down (thank goodness for that, it's probably the only reason i didn't fall on my face).

when i got to the fine line i felt a bit underdressed in my jeans and trainers, the others were all in skirts/dresses (not richard and his friend ben of course) and heels. but my trainers are lovely, so that's ok :-) and the bouncer at the door gave me a 2-4-1 thingy, the others were quite jealous, they didn't get one :-D

richard was there with his friend ben from uni, ben's sister amy and four girls from amy's work. can't remember all their names. there was melissa, she was lots of fun, and i think one was called claire? or maybe not... ah well.

after the fine line we went to the lizard lounge (i really am getting better at this, i didn't fall over and i remember the name of both places we went. once again the beaufort doens't count...). it was great fun, lots of dancing. i love dancing!!! so what if i look ridiculous, practically everyone does, the point is to have fun not look good... only thing is, i'm now half deaf.

was actually surprised when the kids managed to make enough noise to wake me at eight this morning. at least it was very muffled though (there are advantages to being partially deaf) and i managed to get straight back to sleep. they woke me again at ten and eleven, but ah well ;-)

i must say, i do love the way i don't get hung over :-) i'm sure i deserved quite a hangover after all that, but i was absolutely fine. marion was quite surprised. and i don't think i even told her all the stuff i had. i'd list it but i think my mum's got the link ;-) (and it'd probably seem like nothing to a lot of you anyway)

Labels: beer, drinking

didn't actually feel like going out cause i had the worst back ache and a stomach ache and my head hurt... (just to clarify things: i was not hung over, no clue why everything hurt) but went down the pub anyway, just for a beer or two.

after the first beer (which i drank incredibly slowly, i am capable of learning from my mistakes) dia asked how all my aches were and i found they'd gone! hurray! had another pint and a half before we left. paul had had 4 by then. he kept urging me to get on with it, wasn't pleased when he finished his third pint to find i was only just half way though my second (yay! well done me!!)

took a taxi to town. paul told me neil said i was bright. he said neil said you could give me a problem and i'd go away and solve it! yay!!! so i was ecstatic (oop, took me a while to get that word right, but got there in the end, no x's after all...) needed to do the happy dance, but not the sitting down one (that's just for blocks that synopsys made fast enough and generally code that works). couldn't stand up to do it in the taxi (it was high enough but i refused to take my seatbelt off), so when we stopped at a red light the taxi driver did one for me... it wasn't very good he completely neglectd the arm movements :(

but when we got to town i danced down the street. would have done cartwheels but it was on a hill and might have hurt myself so didn't. (did do them later on the way to the third pub. wow we went to three pubs... but the beaufort doesn't really count so it was only two really)

serrie and alistair met us in the second pub (not a clue what it was called). was good fun. just before we left they played bat ot of hell. i just love meatloaf's music. it's so great. dave'll groan if he reads this. he doesn't like meatlof, he doesn't like springsteen... but he does like some very good stuff, just not all the good stuff ;-)

paul tried on serrie's hat (at least i think it was serrie's not alistair's, bit who knows...):

then serrie wore it


cause of the whole dublin pictures thing i went round asking everyone's permission, whether it was ok to put the pictures on my blog. serrie said the hat one was blurry enough so ok. but i've got another one of her without the hat that's not blurry and i can't remember asking permission for that one. think it was before i realised that might be a good idea. so can't put it on :(

the third pub was fun. had long chat with serrie and alistair. turns out serrie's really nice ;-) she just comes across as scary cause she's assertive (and she like to pretend to be nasty). told alistair about jonesy dying. poor cat. i had my phone out and jonesy's my background and alistair saw it so he got the tale...

serrie also said neil was impressed with me. she's quite surprised at how impressed neil and paul n are. i'm so chuffed. i think they're wrong, somehow i haven't been really thick yet (or rather they never noticed when i was) but i'm still very very pleased. serrie says if i want to be able to come back i need to make sure neil and paul n stay impressed, they're the important ones. oh, and paul h (not sure about how impressed with my cleverness he is. probably shouldn't have beaten him 3 times at arm wrestling. didn't realise :-) ah well) and glenn (to whom i sent a mail saying what an idiot i am, cause i thought i heard the sandwich van, went and stood outside and found nope, i'm hearing things... obviously, the mail wasn't meant for him ;-) meant to send it to stuart)

dia and paul suddenly decided to go get a kebab just after i'd got another round :( i downed my beer (ok, so i am not capable of remembering lessons learnt after i've had five or six beers...) and rushed after them. paul kept saying i'm gonna be sick. i felt it would only be fair punishment if he puked on me, so i carted him to wherever we went.

propped him up against the wall for this picture. it's a bit blurry but we did i fact meet chewy's little brother :-D he was very nice


found some place, dia went in to get the food, paul sat down at the curb and i rushed of to find a loo. failed miserably, rushed into this supermarket...? there was asolutely nowhere and i was desperate...

so i went and sat down with paul till dia got back. she was more sccessful at getting a taxi than in dublin, although the first driver took one look at us and sped off. i think paul and i were wobbling a bit too much for his liking...

got back to dia's and had the food. paul's stuff was so hot it burnt layers of skin off your tongue. i tried some and got hiccups. remember telling some long story with hiccups, don't remember what it was though. probably woudn't have been that long if i hadn't had to stop every couple of words to hiccup.

dia's got really lovely cats. they say one of them is nasty, and it did swipe at me once (mostly missed) but in the morning it was really nice and it purred :-) i love cats. the poor other cat that doesn't swipe got cuddled till it ran off in horror :-)

seems dia cannot deal with slugs. she can do spiders and other horrible things, but slugs make her freak out completely. there was a slug on the ceiling in the wash room and dia screamed. paul had already gone off upstairs to get ready for bed and dia was showing me some work that security guard stuart had done for her (he's only a part time security guard, has his own company i think).

anyway, we found the slug and dia ran off yelling for paul. i was going 'no, no, we can deal with this, leave paul alone, it's fine' and she was going 'we can't we can't! it's a slug! paul, PAUL! he-e-elp!!!' was quite funny. i was going 'what am i allowed to use can i use this?' and dia was moaning noooooo :-) it was so funny.

i was going 'i'll use this, i'll use this, i promise i'll wash it really well' but she wouldn't have it. she was so scared i was going to contaminate something that she forgot about getting paul to come save her and found me some paper to use. then she went back to yelling for paul. once i'd got the slug down she couldn't open the back door.

so we went to the front door which she'd locked and it took her ages to get the key off the ring (don't ask me why it was necessary to take it off the ring to open the door, it just was) all the time yelling for paul... finally got the door open so i went out and took the slug to visit the neighbours :-)

then dia couldn't get the key back onto the ring (surprise surprise) and she wouldn't let me put it on, she squealed. by this time paul had come down and was just laughing at us. in the end i stuck the key back in the door so that it wouldn't get lost. it had taken me about five minuted (ok not quite) to get the key out of the lock, it was really stuck and i didn't want to break the key...

in the morning i'm going downstairs and dia's there going 'oh nooo, i've lost the key, i can't find it'. it was still in the door... *pats self on back*

we got out the door to go get dia's car with my bag in it which we'd left at work and i think dia's phone beeped or something. so i realised i didn't have my phone in my pocket... rushed back inside, looked everywhere i'd been, not there! i remembered getting it out at the last pub and leaving it on the table for a while. must have left it there then... so dia says we'll ring it. but she couldn't get her phone to work properly.

got to paul's car just as i'm ringing my phone from paul's phone and i start ringing... ummm, i had put it in a very safe place... do not remember that at all. and i slept on it and didn't even feel it. glad no-one phoned me...

ah well, very fun night out :-D

got to go do some washing now and have a bath. i smell...

Labels: beer, drinking, happy dance, shopping