This is not 'Nam - there are rules!

Damn you theferrett!!!

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Busy Weekend - Busy Week

The weekend started when I abandoned work at 4:30 on Friday.  I knew tisme was in town so I gave her a call to ask for advice on a present for marrog/adrenalineanima.  Having discovered she was in the GrassMarket I agreed to meet her there, and was then delayed by 20 minutes when I popped into the bank, which had 4 counters open, 3 of which were dealing with complicated people, leaving one person to handle about 15 of us.  I got out and jogged all the way to the GrassMarket, so as not to delay tisme's shopping too much (she was on a tight schedule, with 5 presents to sort in 2 hours, and what seemed to be a military-style planned route-march across the city to get to all the places in time).

I went into Demijohn for the first time, where I wondered at numerous large glass vessels filled with everything from lime vodka to virgin olive oil - you could try a few things, work out what you wanted and they'd decant it into the vessel of your choice.  tisme ummed and aahed over various choices and suggested I take a look at the spices they also had.  On discovering one melange called "Egyptian Dukkah" I really couldn't resist picking some up for adrenalineanima.

In fact, as we were walking along Princes Street towards Waterstones, where my intention had been to pick up Sir Thursday for marrog.  we bumped into adrenalineanima wandering pubwards with coffee_lifeform.  I was able to ask if marrog already had said book, and discovered that she's bought it the day before.  When I rule the world buying things the day before people are giving you presents will be punishable by forced entry into a reality TV show.

So, giving up on that idea I headed home, where I watched TV and fell asleep at my usual late hour.

Which was silly, as I had to wake up early on Saturday morning and head to Glasgow to see Wolves in the Walls with surliminal.  It looked amazing, was well performed, the wolves were fantastic and should you have children then this would be a fun thing to take them to.  The songs were a bit iffy in places, but then some of that worked fantastically well as well.  So long as you remember that you're watching a kid's play based on a kid's book then you should be ok.  We then wandered around Borders in Glasgow centre, which was the fourth place to not have the first book of either Lucifer or Promethea, at which point I gave in and picked up book one of Kabuki instead, which (a) is gorgeous and (b) has a kick-ass female protagonist and was therefore suitable for being morrag's present.

I then leapt back onto a train to Edinburgh, staggered off, bumped into tisme (on her way home from rab_the_ex_chef's place, and wandered with her to Lupe Pinto's, where she was picking up her present for adrenalineanima.  Having detoured thusly for half an hour I then wandered back up to the Filmhouse where HAL {WINOLJ} was having his birthday celebration.  I hung about and chatted there for a few hours (6pm - 9:45pm) and then walked over the road to the party of adrenalineanima/marrog, where various and diverse people turned up over the next few hours (including 0olong, diotina, eduard_green) and undoubtably many others whose LJ ids I don't know), and then left just after the lap-dancing, making it home by about 2:30am.

When, again, I failed to get enough sleep, as I got up to wander over to Hugh's place and help him dismantle his bed.  He's moving flat on Friday and really didn't want his 7-month-pregnant wife helping him with the bed.  Luckily the bed didn't take that long to take apart, so I hung about and chatted for half an hour, then came back home again, where I've watched two episodes of Aaron Sorkin's Sport's Night (I could tell I was watching an Aaron Sorkin show, but it was clearly a warm-up for The West Wing, lacking most of the depth of both plot and character that has.  Still good fun though, on about the same level as Frasier.  Also - Nate from Six Feet Under!).

The late afternoon has been spent working on a bit of C# - I now have a TCPListener working reasonably well.  While the MSDN documentation could best be described as Fucking Awful (slightly more user-friendly than the Unix "Man" command, but that's about it) Google Groups has been far more helpful.  And now I have a grasp of the basics of C# and its approach to things like Threading, Delegates, Events, etc. I managed to figure things out in an hour or so.  Still can't make the listener Thread Abort properly, but such is life.  I feel pretty good just for finally getting to this stuff.

Next up - dinner.  I picked up some brocolli and peppers on the way back from Hugh's earlier, so I'll see what I have in the freezer to add to that.

The rest of the week will also be busy.  Tomorrow I have a counselling appointment, followed by possibly seeing surliminal (last chance before she heads off to Malta for a week), Tuesday is a dentist appointment _and_ the last gaming session before the GM (Hugh) moves flat (so I'll be roleplaying with a numb mouth) , Wednesday is eduard_green's birthday and Friday is flat-moving work (and my Mum is arriving for the weekend to also lend a hand).  Thursday evening is "off" and I suspect I'll need it.