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

i can't sleep :-( it's this stupid master thesis, my brain can't turn off (i know it's stopped working properly, but it's still on...)

anyway, i've been thinking some more about these weird near-irrisistible urges. remembering more occasions where i've beaten the urge or given in to it *eeek*

• when i work the late shift at mcdonald's, at some point this plastic cup full of bright blue liquid appears on top of one of the grills. it looks like some delicious cocktail. or poison. whatever it is, i'm hugely tempted to try and drink it... so far i've managed to refrain, but it's always close.
  
  i'm tempted to drink the extra-specially strong grill cleaning fluid even though i am aware it would probably do it's very best to kill me. how special is that?
  
  
• another drinking temptation: remember the white stuff? ;-) it's quite a scary memory. it was saturday night, the first week of my work placement in the UK, and my first night out with the guys from infineon. we were drinking outside the llandogger trow (a pub in bristol).
  
  towards midnight, someone discovered an almost empty wine glass containing some unknown milky white fluid. i know, it sounds bad! but i'm sure it wasn't. the glass was otherwise clean, how could it possibly have got in there?! there was much speculation as to what it might be, accompanied by sniffing to see if it smelt familiar. it didn't.
  
  eventually james and stuart (i think it was them anyway) got bored of that game and started emptying all the almost-empties on the table into the wine glass with the white stuff. once it was all in the one wine glass, they found that the mixture of various beers, wines and white stuff actually smelt pretty good.
  
  so i smelled it too. and lo and behold, was tempted to drink it, knowing that there was some undefinable scary white substance in it! d'you know what? i drank it! the whole glass! i did offer the others some (it tasted good too) but they were perfectly happy to let me have it all to myself...
  
  and i can't even claim i was already drunk, because i'd only had two or three beers... can you imagine?!
  
  
• the emergency brakes in trains. now they're just begging for someone to pull them! surely i'm not the only one who feels that way! thank goodness i've managed to control myself so far, but i do have to take a step back sometimes, just to make sure it's out of arms' reach...
  
  
• and those little hammers to smash the window with in case of an emergency. i'd love to find out how hard you have to hit, and how the window shatters... i'm a very curious person.
  

i'm plagued by almost irresistible urges that are liable to get me locked up or even killed. help!

;-)

Labels: drinking, i'm special, weird urges

i know it's late. or rather, early. it's tim's brother... oops, maybe the vodka has affected me a little bit ;-) it's tim, my brother's birthday today. z came round and we got a load of vodka (only the premixed sweet not-so-strong stuff) from the petrol garage (yes, i feel guilty drinking with a 16 year old. crap. but who died and made me the responsible adult? i'm not, i don't want to be, it's not my fault i'm suddenly 24... bah!) and played settlers (the board game).

fun evening, and we've ended up with an impressive amount of booze. we were a bit greedy when we bought it, but luckily we were not actually stupid enough to try to make a dent in it ;-)

when tim went to take z home, i continued in my ally mcbeal reruns. oops, come to think of it, i just watched the whole second half of the first series! no wonder i'm still up at this time!

anyway, i just discovered the most hilarious moment ever! i cried laughing! then i rewound it and got the hiccups from laughing so hard :-)

it's almost at the end of the last episode of season one. build-up: john cage defends his cousin (willie garson, i know him best from his role as carrie's gay friend stanford in sex and the city) who goes round whacking people on the head with a paddle (for kayaking or something) and claims to be a kind of cupid: crisis brings people closer, by whacking one half of a coupld he speeds up the courtship process... he's found guilty, the sentence will be jail time upwards of six months (but isn't set yet)

ally is standing in the hall in the courthouse with (really hot) bobby donnell (played by dylan mcdermott, yumm *g*), who is trying to tell her that he'd like to go out with her, but he can't, too much baggage and other stuff going on. suddenly you see this huge paddle looming behind him and he gets whacked on the head with it!
next thing you see john cage dragging away his cousin who's yelling 'he was neutral!'

you probably have to see it to get it. tears of laughter... :-D

Labels: chuckles, drinking, tv

what an analogy :-D

Labels: chuckles, drinking, YouTube

last night i went out with stuart and his friends for his 21st birthday. was very good fun. we were meant to be doing a pub crawl of gloucester road, but we got stuck in the first pub until about quarter to twelve, so there was just time for one quick drink in the second pub before they closed and we had to go back to the house.

we managed to get stuart totally wankered :D he stuck to guinness all night, but they were all a little bit dirty... ;-) he seems to have survived it quite well, but then maybe he was still drunk when i left around one o'clock (this afternoon) or so ;-)

the left side of my jaw hurts something awful when i open my mouth properly: stuart was telling me this very entertaining story (i'm gutted i'm to nice to publish it here...) when i laughed so hard i seem to have pulled something... but you know what? it was funny enough to be worth it :-D

stu's friend andrew got some great photos :-) i'll have to add him as a friend on facebook so that i can see them :-D

Labels: drinking, i'm special

my official leaving present from infineon (which i got on my last day, on friday) was this great effects pedal for my guitar (and i will post about all my leaving dos and everything, but right now i'm just doing tonight).

however the informal one i got today at lunchtime at the beaufort was a blow-up female sheep (with appropriate hole at the back) with a vibrator sellotaped to its belly (obviously, cause what on earth would i do with a female sheep...)

i was horrified (couldn't believe they'd actually do it). but it did provide superb entertainment for the whole evening. started out just the thought of it was providing huge hilarity for the whole group (marion, dave, julia (another aunt of mine), the polyp, karen, andy, laura, craig (an uncle, not julia's husband) and myself). but now everyone's come home for a look at it :-D they were quite disappointed at the size of it (the sheep), it's smaller than they expected. and the vibrator (which stuart untaped before we left the pub at lunchtime) doesn't go in the hole (too much information? sorry...). we put some batteries in and it turns in circles :-) marion tried to clean her ears and paul added some oranges for authenticity (it's bright blue, orange balls aren't going to make a difference). gotta go, the polyp and karen and andy are still here :-D

Labels: drinking

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

you'd think i'd learn my lesson. but no, obviously i am less intelligent than a rat!

chris booked the old park hill tavern for jenny's birthday and we played skittles. it was lots of fun. i'd never played it before so my aim was, not to miss the alley and hurt someone with the wooden ball (repeat: i was hoping no one would get hurt). so i was quite surprised when i was suddenly one of the last three left. so i exceeded expectations: no one got hurt (hurray!) and i came third! but then we played it again and i missed completely both times. beginner's luck... (the first time round, of course)

at twelve that place closed so we went to morph's again, which was also good fun. for some reason, around 2am one guy decided he wanted to have a barbeque at his place. so we all went there and he started barbequeing a load of beef in the rain. very random. i did ask why, but i think the answer was something like 'because we can'... odd french person ;-)

i'm not sure what time it was when the others decided it was time to go home. i'd guess somewhere between four and five in the morning. they said one of the guys lived near me, so i went with him. problem: he wanted to walk. so we walked for quite a while, with me assuming he knew where he was going. i didn't have a clue of course. i think they said we started off on gloucester road, but i wouldn't recognize that, i've only ever caught a taxi from there when i accidentally ended up there after wandering around drunk for an hour or two.

eventually our ways parted with alex wandering off one way and me staring blankly the other way. it wasn't his fault, i absolutely insisted i'd find home no problem, not to worry, and 'don't you dare walk me home, i'll be fine!' cause i didn't want him to have to go out of his way (and i did think i would be fine...)

i got sooooo lost! and this time i couldn't find a taxi and i didn't have a phone number for a taxi service. i wandered past the golden hill tesco's (twice, i think), all round horfield, past the memorial stadium, up and down wellington hill, up and down kellaway avenue and loads more...

i tried to get into a house that i thought was ours, it just looked slightly different. thank goodness the key didn't work and i didn't wake anyone!!! i've got a big scratch on my leg from where i took a shortcut across a football field and had to climb through a rather large patch of brambles to get onto it. they tried to stop me but i won! there was a really high fence the other side which i was very tempted to (try to) climb, but luckily there was i tiny bit of common sense that hadn't been drowned by the beer, so i walked along to the gate which was much lower and i was able to vault that. i did fall over trying to get to the gate and got completely covered in mud. my jeans had were covered in a layer of mud almost an inch thick...

at one point i got so tired that i decided i must be home by now and that if i just waited a bit i'd wake up and i'd be home... but again the (admittedly minute amount of) common sense vetoed that and made me carry on walking.

at 7am the alarm on my phone went off while i was wandering through horfield. i think i broke into a run at that point... of course it didn't last. if i wasn't supposed to be somewhere i'd probably have carried on wandering all day, or randomly caught a bus somewhere (at about half past 7 a bus went past me, but there wasn't really time to wait for the next one and hope it went towards westbury). so around 7.45 i gave in and phoned jill, a) to tell her that i probably wouldn't make it to her house by 8.30 and b) to get her to work out where i was and how to get home from there... imagine her surprise 'i don't know where i am, there's this big round thing.' she thought it was a water tower, so i was on the downs 'i'm not on the downs. at least i don't think so. there are houses.' :-S gill looked the place up in the a-z (the thing turned out to be a gas container or something) and told me to walk towards gloucester road (just up the road from where i was) and she'd pick me up as soon as shed' sorted her kids out, tidied the house for the people coming to view it, got dressed... obviously it wasn't a good time for her. luckily her husband had a very clever idea so she phoned me up and gave me the number of a taxi company on gloucester road. i'd meant to ask her for a phone number for a taxi when i phoned, but i completely forgot (was still quite drunk).

so i made it home, came in the door to find tom standing there glaring at me 'where on earth have you been?!' i'd told the kids to come and wake me when they got up so that i wouldn't be late for volleyball, but of course i wasn't there...

i was soooo glad i'd packed my bag before i went out. i was able to just change out of the muddy stuff and scoff some cereal before gill picked me up. we weren't even late: we got there at nine o'clock exactly, and we were the first of our team to turn up!

i was very surprised, i actually played quite well, given that i was drunk and i'd been wandering around bristol for the previous three hours. cause there were only six of us i had to play the whole time. thank goodness the b&d league only plays best of 3 not 5 sets. but we actually managed to win one set and only just lost the third set, i think it was 13-15... so that was really good. it was probably because niall was playing for us. katrin'd twisted her ankle in training on wednesday and on friday night she managed to convince niall to stand in for her. he went home after the skittles though, so he was in a slightly better state than me or hannah who went home after morph's. i should have done that too, i've managed to find my way home from morph's before ;-)

driving back from the match was quite funny cause i kept saying 'ooh, i wandered along this road.' and 'i remember that petrol station/fish'n'chip shop/xxx' and gill and hannah would say 'oh no, what were you doing here, you must have walked along this road'. yep i walked up and down this road, that road and the other road...

the worst thing was walking to the church from gill's house afterwards (i couldn't find my key and marion and dave were there having joshy's birthday party). on the road that church is on, so five minutes from church, 20 minutes from home, i came across a bus stop that looked scarily familiar: i was there! i'd looked at the timetable on the other side of the road and not been able to make sense of it and wandered off in the wrong direction!!! noooooooooo!!!

so quite clearly i must in future remember the one big important rule for vicky's survival: never ever walk home!!! if i add any qualifications to the rule (such as 'alone' or 'when drunk') it won't work, cause i'll just go 'i'm not drunk, it's fine!' or 'i'm only alone for the last bit, i'll manage that'. so from now on it's no more wandering the streets of bristol for me!

dave says from the sounds of it i was never more than half 3 miles or so from home. i just kept going the wrong way... how awful :-\

oh no, i've just remembered: my brand new shoes are covered in mud!!! wahhhh!!!

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

tonight's jenny's (volleyball captain) birthday party. we'll be out until goodness knows when having lots and lots of fun (i hope).

this is a good thing (duh!). however, we happen to have two matches tomorrow. warm up starts at 9am... uh-oh...
well i guess since it's only the b&d league it doesn't really matter. it's not like we'd win if we didn't get plastered tonight ;-) it'll be funny to see how the others play with hangovers. or if the party's really good they'll still be drunk :-D

Labels: drinking, volleyball

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

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

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

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

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

oops. didn't get home till round 4 this morning. then i tried to post. luckily i was too drunk to type my password properly ;-) opened my inbox this morning to find three different mails about changing passwords... luckily i seem to have ignored them so the password's fine. bit of a shock though ;-)

my brother's sent me a link to the volleyball comics he's done for me. they're so great!!!. wish i could draw like that... :-D only thing is, i sent back this very drunk reply, and he's quite judgemental when it comes to alcohol ;-) ooopsy...
[edit: seems he's not so bad nowadays. was very amused (and a bit alarmed) by the two drunken emails i sent him. also turns out i sent myself one: 'subject: weird; text: sending to myself...' i vaguely remember sniggering to myself while writing that ;-)]

hope i progress to the hung over stage soon, cause i just keep sniggering at everything. completely random sniggering. :-S hope s leaves me alone, there's no way i'll be able to not snigger at him! managed to appear reasonably sober (i think) when i met angus in the kitchen. he says he'll have some data ready for me in 45 minutes. oh no! i'll have to do proper work! yesterday or tomorrow would have been better... [10:40h: angus just sent the data, and i can't remember what i'm meant to do with it. more sniggering. oh dear....]

will post about last night when i'm babysitting tonight. will pretend to work now. byebye

Labels: drinking, i'm special

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

it's gone pink, i know... have been trying to fix the problem of the missing comment links, a friend complained (i'm telling myself that's why i haven't been getting any comments...) so the comment link thingy seems to be back, although not for all of the recent posts. will have to have a look when i've had less vodka. hmm, forgot what i wanted to say...

have obviously violated my rule of not blogging while drunk. hope it's not too embarassing, or i'lll delete it tomorrow morning. there was definitely something i still wanted to say about the whole comments and pinkness thing... :-S will fix this, i do like pink but my blog is green!!!

borat is very funny btw. good good. very painful in places though. didn't like the american christians. painfully awful. i was going 'make them stop make them stop' but the film was hilarious. watching green wing now. also good. last episode of season 2 now, i think.

what was it i meant to say??? annoying. how can i remember if i've already forgotten??? stupid beta blogger...

[ooh, look this post has got a commenty link, it's just a rubbish one :-( wil definintely have to fix it tomorrow. where's my drink gone???]

Labels: drinking, i'm special

just lost my whole post :( now im back to being grumpy! was grumpy because practically no-one came to the pub so no going out tonight. so i got myself a bottle of smirnoff and one of martini to make the evening less boring. but polyp's going to see borat and he's looking for people to come along, so i'm just having the one relatively small glass (it's less than a pint).

there, recovered from the post disappearing (if it does it again i'm downing my vodka-martini).

wore my boots all day today. they really are killer boots: they practically killed my feet! but i managed to make it all the way down the hill to the bus stop (they were killing me by the time i got to the top of the hill...), running to the pub behind stuart, up the hill again with the alcohol... i can take any physical pain ;-) (will complain a lot though)

so cinema! hurray!! i bought crisps (quavers), chocolate (cadbury's of course!!!) and alcohol, but no ice cream :-( but i just realised: there's ice cream at the cinema! :-D so my night's saved. unless borat's crap... then i'll just have to drink more vodka-martini

Labels: drinking, i'm special