Three's a crowd

It's been a big few weeks for me. My third set of social adventures. I can't really be relied on to get the specifics right, but it's pretty widely accepted that it had been three years since I had any sort of socialising with friends, and now I've had my third lot in a row! Also, I umm... bought three games at the weekend? OK no, I've stretched it too far.

I'm absolutely knackered now, but definitely worth it. It's so hard to express just how much things like today mean to me, for something that would normally be the absolute highlight of an entire year to just take up a single blog entry just doesn't seem to do it justice. I'm just very grateful that I have friends able and prepared to help me escape into some semblance of what the real world might be like, even just for a day.

So for today's adventures, it had been decided long in advance that today's OT session would be an outing out to a (very) local tea room for some drinks and shortbread, I just decided in my infinite wisdom that it might be nice to bring my lovely friend along to share in and make the most of what would be a pretty historic outing for me. Of course, it wasn't until the last minute that it dawned on me that the bigger the scale I'd made it, the bigger the potential fall, but it all worked out more or less for the best. The snacks and company were all good, and when I inevitably get grumpy and tired over the next few weeks I can have another wonderful achievement and step forward waved in my general direction as an example of the good kind of progress I'm making.

Plus, the outing wasn't all there was to today! Seeing as its become something of a meme unto itself that I always watch Eurotrip with friends, it seemed fitting to break it out, even if there were minor concerns over whether we'd be able to find a suitable scene to pause on should parents, OT or brothers walk in. Mieke is still ludicrously hot, Michelle Trachtenberg still can't act, and Scotty still doesn't know. It really is surprisingly good considering the entire premise for the movie (and, admittedly, the only reason I bought it in the first place) is apparently “holy crap Dawn from Buffy's got hot!”.

And we had one of my home-grown leeks from the garden in our tea. I'm struggling somewhat to weave it nicely into the narrative following the previous revelation (and since for some reason my mind's lingering on the image) so I'll just chuck it out there. Leeks are tasty.

Two's Company

I've said it before, that when things go well and are nice (and normal!) for me, it's a lot harder to write a blog entry about it. It feels a bit like I'm degenerating into a “wot I did on my summur holidayz” style entry to just list a bunch of nice things and to say that all of them made me feel nice and happy. But the fact of the matter is... it did. I had a lovely week where I could just be myself and have some very basic fun and company with the things I do, complete with lots of laughs and hugs and pokes.

I'm always overly focused on being able to cross things that I feel I've missed off of some imaginary life list, so I'm happy to be able to have a couple of them as well as my nice memories. In my ongoing task to actually see all the films whose cultural impact I'm aware of, I can put a tick beside Alien, and it was a lot of fun to put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after midnight, with all the lights out in the dark. And I'm probably a little late on this bandwagon, but man... back in the day, Jennifer Love Hewitt was HOT.

Its always hard though afterwards to get back into the regular boring old pattern of resting and boredom, so I've been amusing myself by combing the depths of the internet (alright, I've clicked links off of maybe 5 sites, but still) to try and find bonus digital deals and pre-order in-game content for my current and upcoming games. It makes for quite an eclectic list, across 4 games of varying genres:

• three sets of armour

• two stealth black cars

• a 10mm pistol

• a water flask

• an ipod dock

• a psychic fire-mouse

• 10 doses of poison

• a horse (neigh)

• a decorative rock

• an XL broad machete

• a set of golden guns

• and a map of Central and South America.

I've not even played The Sims 3 for about 3 months, but it at least keeps me amused surfing around trying to find free stuff for it. I'll no doubt go back to it in a couple of months when the next expansion comes out, so I'll appreciate all the more then that I used 10 minutes of my boredom in July to get that limited time offer in-game Ford Fiesta. Plus, one of the games (that I got most of the militaristic bonuses for) was rated today – Fallout: New Vegas. As per usual, I've preordered my brother and my copies from different sites so that we could collect all the different bonuses between us, it just worked out quite well that I was into shooting and he was keener on stabbing. Next we just have to work on making sure that he doesn't play it in front of my parents, considering the aforementioned classification granted it an 18 rating, for strong violence, gore, drug use, language, and the best of the lot... implied sexual conduct between the human player character and robots.

Hopefully being the best big brother ever grants more perks than will be taken away, (along with the right to judge suitability) by angry parents.

The night before the morning after

Apparently I'm 5 years old. I couldn't sleep last night because I was excited about santa my friend coming, so at 3:30am instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling I decided I was going to do something productive. Thus, I wrote my to do list:

TO DO LIST: ₢ 3.30am ^{note: (that's a clock. Its even pointing to the right time! I don't know where I'm going to be able to find something to represent a bee later on though.)}

1. Jet (will solve self)

2. Paypal! Tshirts.

3. NOT THE BEES

4. ARGH MY EYES

5. Seek filter for letter idea. See if crazy.

6. Comes after 5.

7. Solve World Hunger. (potential avenue of investigation: crops that grow horizontally. Plant up side of buildings to save space.)

Then I got hundreds of post it notes and wrote NOT THE BEES, ARGH MY EYES, AAAARGH on them, along with pictures of angry bees, and stuck them all over my flat for my mum to find in the morning. Then I went back to bed.

King of Flipping Everything

- Look here she comes I'd better bring out the big guns / Hello Lnsy you're looking a little thin hun (Eminem, Same Song and Dance)

“I've come around to the 15 year old 'quoting lyrics out of context' deal, in an ironic way of course. Stylistically, cutting and pasting chunks of feeling out of songs devoid of their original context appeals to me in the sort of sense of a ransom note, cut and pasted out of magazine and newspaper headlines and all the more threatening for it. Picking a single line from a song charges it with all that intent, all the weight of the emotional investment that its original context provided it with, but leaving the littlest remnants of doubt over the reasons and motivations of what parts exactly were snipped out with the line itself, and what parts were intended to hang unsaid in the air along with it.”

***

Ah, creating some beautiful chaos out of nothing never fails to brighten my day. As I mentioned before, my mum's got a lovely friendly visitor arriving later today, so before she left this morning she left strict instructions that we've to clean up after ourselves, and not undo all the hard work she spent scrubbing down the kitchen. However, there was a minor flaw with this plan! A metaphorical... flea in the ointment, perhaps? You see, she had carelessly left out a novelty gift she appears particularly attached to, which, shockingly, contains a naughty swear word in its caption! Now perhaps she felt, rather immaturely I think, that this may be a humorous conversation starter, but she did ask us to clean up the kitchen, so I think she'll just be extra pleased with me for going above and beyond, and perhaps even buy me things.

You see, this little novelty tin for storing buttons and suchlike, was emblazoned with an 'ironic' picture of an old-tymey housewife with the caption “Queen of Fucking Everything”, obscene I'm sure you'll agree! So I used my initiative, and cut out an appropriate shape of a post-it note to censor it, with the far more suitable F-”lipping” written on top. I'm sure she'll be very pleasantly surprised and reward my thoroughness upon her return. With cake.

This is how a post-it note and playing with scissors has made my day. In fairness, playing with scissors would make most days, but I'm pleased with my creative application of them today.

Calm before the storm?

Ah, football, how I've missed you. It could have gone a little better, to be fair, but still blissful to spend a night sprawled out on the couch struggling to keep my eyes open and missing most of the goals in regular time. That's what replays are for!

Drama of the week is that, for the first time in almost 15 years of owning dogs, we found a single, solitary flea on one of them, therefore the house has gone into full lockdown crisis management mode. To top it off, the blame has utterly unfairly been placed on me! Just because I jokingly suggested a few weeks back that it would be karma to get fleas from cuddling cute kittens, this has (totally unjustly) been accepted as the official explanation, and I am to suffer the consequences for bringing this plague upon the household. It also doesn't help my mum's stress levels that this has appeared right on the eve of her visitor arriving. I've paid as much attention as I usually do to the arrangements so all I really know is that for somewhere between the next 1 and 30 days there may occasionally be an extra person in the house for me to either avoid or fight for the remote over.

There are, surprisingly, dangers to taking phone calls while half asleep. At some point last week, I'm relatively sure I didn't just dream my OT calling to set up a special joint session... at 11am. I thought she said the 14^th, but that's a Saturday, so that makes no sense at all. It's entirely likely really from about now on that one morning I'm just going to be woken from a deep sleep to be dragged out of the house to some sort of special meeting that's been talked about for months now. Maybe that will end up better for me, so long as I can find the motor function to throw some clothes on then I can cut most of the journey stress by staying almost completely asleep through it. Plus, what a great first impression I'll make on this new person when I show up with my absolutely EPIC bed hair.

I'll be there for you

I'm on my own with my thoughts today – the rest of the family are off to a wedding, leaving me with an empty house to throw one of my legendary wild parties in. It might have been interesting to go, but I figured that seeing as it was a family wedding, the bridesmaids would be too much of a minefield. Plus, to make myself look presentable enough to be seen in public I'd have had to do something with my ever expanding beard, and that would have disturbed the family of sparrows currently nesting in it.

Do you ever think that Lily Allen comes home from a really nice date where nothing went wrong and thinks, damn, now I've got nothing to write a complaining song about? That's about how I feel just now. Yesterday I had a lovely friend over, for the first time in 3 years, and it was great. Where's the comedy to be gleaned from that?! We watched a film, wandered around the garden and played some Wii games, and it was great to just have some very nice company. I even cooked the tea for us all (even if it was only pasta and chicken), how domesticated am I? Such a grown-up, sane, normal human being thing to do, even if we did arrange beforehand to have a dedicated moment put aside for trading some Pokémon.

I feel a bit like the writers of the IT Crowd now – I've run out of amusing ideas. Oh snap, I went there! Etc. After my last epic monstrosipost took a lot out of me, I'm not really sure how to go on. Whining about my going out fears was supposed to be the nuclear option, and I wasted it the second I saw a particularly frightening looking gerbil. Metaphorically speaking. Maybe this is a post-apocalyptic blog now, to stretch that analogy well beyond any reasonable sort of breaking point?