My actual birthday was on the 21st of August, but as it's impossible to get a venue during the Edinburgh Fringe for anything less than stupid amounts of money, and I really wanted to do something sizeable, I held off for a month until yesterday, and then got around 60 awesome people together in GHQ and inflicted my musical taste on them.
The day of fun started slightly earlier than that though - with some people travelling long distances to be here, I met up in The Regent with some old university friends,
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autopope, and
cairmen, and Keith from work. Conversation ranged from the somewhat geeky to the incredibly geeky, and then I dragged a bunch of them back to my place for Chinese food while I got ready for the evening.
In my usual manner I was stressed that nobody would turn up, the sound system wouldn't work, the laptops[1] would implode, and the whole night would be a disaster. As it happened, all of this was unfounded. I'd booked the back area of the club from 7-11, which included a large area with several circular beds in it, a reasonable sized bar and dance floor, and the VIP room[2]. So we had the VIP area for "quiet" (I got the speakers turned off in there), the dance floor for "loud" and the bed area for "medium". Which worked pretty well, I think. Except for the VIP room having the oddest blue lighting that I would love to know the explanation for.
Due to a variety of the usual excuses I arrived fifteen minutes later than I intended to, and then discovered that they were messing around with the DJ booth, so I couldn't plug in the laptop until about quarter past - at which point I discovered that my laptop had a godawful bass hum when connected up. Thankfully, I'd thought ahead for the "Aargh, what if my laptop implodes!" situation, and Julie had kindly lent me hers, which sounded just fine. So I quickly knocked six tracks off of the playlist, and got us going.
And then the rest of the night was a blur of greeting people, chatting very briefly to lots of them[3], and dancing lots. For those that are interested in such things, and have Spotify,
you can see it here. I tried to include a bunch of music that other people would love, rather than it just being all my favourite music. Which seemed to work out ok.
Julie was collapsing from a mixture of her ongoing health issues and a cold, so at 11:00 I propped her up long enough to dance with her to
Poison[4] and then took her home, where we jittered for half an hour until the adrenaline had worn off, her anti-nausea medication had kicked in, and we could sleep like the dead[5].
[1]The whole evening was run off of a four-hour Spotify playlist I set up over the last few days.
[2]At 11 we could keep the VIP room, but the rest of it reverted back into being a night-club.
[3]I reckon about sixty people in total made it along. Which does make it tricky to spend much time with people. Especially when there's a playlist of all your favourite music on the dancefloor.
[4]Which I had skipped earlier, due to lack of time, but am glad I got to dance to with her later on, as it was our stand-in first dance for ages, and we both love it to bits.
[5]A mixture of things has me sleeping badly recently. For example, I woke up at 6:30 on Friday morning thinking "What if the club doesn't have a standard 1.5mm headphone plug that pretty much every sound system in the world is capable of plugging into? What _then_???" Oddly, my stress levels now seem to have dropped back to almost normal levels :->![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
