Sunday, July 24, 2005
Yuletide Merriment - Another Weekend Update
[Life] Soccer returns to Barton, the crew gets frocked up for the social event of the winter and the chronicles of a rock star conclude, sort of.
(Continues, now with photos...)
Friday Night
Finished Nick Earls' Making Laws For Clouds that I picked up cheap at the second-hand bookshop last weekend. Discovered that 48 Shades of Brown is being turned into a movie. Cool.
Put in a few more hours on Battlefield 2 and continued the quest for new & interesting mashups. Still think Rapture Riders is the best I've come across so far, but there's some other good stuff over at Go Home Productions.
Saturday
Despite the alcohol free Friday night, I still found it hard to get out of bed & get my Saturday morning going. Turns out the hardest part was putting my feet on the floor; things happened pretty quickly after that.
Midmorning I rode over to the Telopea Park school oval, where the Happy Christmas Professor Ovington 1970 Cup Plate Shield soccer comp was revived. The O League is still in its infancy, but word has spread and interest has been shown, so future games should prove interesting.
With the knowledge that I have a ways to go in the fitness quest, I spent the afternoon getting ready for the evening. Shirt to be ironed, gift to be wrapped, playlists to be finalised. With several hours of yuletide melodies and days of everything else loaded into the laptop, I made a quick visit to party HQ to get the music box set up and running before getting ready properly. Come party time I grabbed my gift, checked the tux in the mirror one last time and headed down to Christmas in July at the burrow.
Christmas in July has become a tradition that only very serious events can interrupt. There were some pretty serious things happening in July last year, so we had to make up for lost merriment and make up for it we did. The crack organising team did a sterling job procuring cases of wine and champagne, and producing a banquet - featuring the biggest turkey I've ever seen - fit for royalty.
This year's theme was french; all of the secret santa presents had to be at least tenuously french and I was very much looking forward to seeing how everyone would interpret the guidance. I wasn't let down; amongst the gifts exchanged were french cookbooks, a french bread stick & jam, a WWII photo, a french maid's outfit, a photo of me in a beret, a ceramic frog piggy-bank (froggy-bank?), a La Bouche single (they were German? who knew?), an Edith Piaf disc and a french tickler. I think the details of who gave what to whom is best left to our collective memory.
We might've been having too good a time. After several singalongs and a bit of table-dancing, we were visited by some of the local constabulary. Twice. And it was the same guys who visited us during T-bone's birthday in December. So sometime between midnight & 1.30 the music was turned off. And Twister came out.
I retired around 2.30 when the boys decided that it was spa time. I hope that when the house of Bone & Cheese relocates, they find somewhere with room for a decent size outdoor spa so that the spa tradition can continue as long as Christmas in July parties do.
UPDATE 31 Jul 05: Christmas in July photos now available in this Flickr photoset.
Sunday
Slept in and woke sore all over, but not hungover despite the drink mixing. The food must've had a big mitigating influence. Must've been the soccer or the riding.
Needless to say I didn't do much with what looked to be a bright sunny day in July. The only noteworthy thing I did today was catch up with a series of pieces that'd I'd been reading regularly but had kind of let slide. The Letters of Gary Benchley, Rock Star were good while they lasted and I don't particularly care if they were fiction. I suspected as much for a while (with that many direct quotes Benchley would have had to been endowed with a fantastic memory or have lived with a tape recorder running), but only had it confirmed with a little googling and this Glorious Noise piece. I liked how the author signed off with the reference to the yet to be published book. I wonder how it'll sell now that the game's up.
Hope your weekend was somewhere near as good as mine. Select pictures will be up in due course.
[Tags: Life, Canberra, Australia]
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