Saturday, February 23, 2002

Right, where to start...

Friday

Work went in the blink of an eye; I got a whole bunch of database work done & had a meeting with an information provider & that went well, even if he was a bit too eager.

We all held off lunch until 1.30 as we were all to head over to Nelsons (part of The Durham) in Kingston for Simons farewell; he's leaving our department to go to the oversight section of one of the central agencies, so he'll be back, but as 'the enemy'. Lunch went really well, but the Barramundi evidently didnt agree with me cos I started feeling a bit queezy later in the night.

(Bargain Alert: I normally take my camera to farewell lunches & the sort, but as the camera was in the bag that was stolen I've had to resort to using those one-use cameras at $25 a pop plus development. On Friday I went into the local photo place with the intention of getting another one-use camera, but instead found the KB18, which is a really basic 35mm camera but takes normal 35mm film & is reusable, and is only $10 more than the flash-enabled one-use camera.)

The K-bunny & I then headed into town for the In Blue office party. We sat around for an hour & a half or so while people came, chatted & went, then went ourselves down to Cafe Macchi's & had a birthday drink with Crazy Fi, then around to the Thai place around the corner for dinner. During dinner, I talked Olivia into camping out overnight for tickets (here's why: Matt / SMH) to the "Treasures of the World's Great Libraries" exhibit with me.

After dinner Olivia & I went up to Belco to pick up Tyson, then down to Garran for her stuff, then to my place to prepare and stage our camp-out for tickets. Our plan for hot chocolate supplies came a little unstuck when we realised that none of us had thermos', but this was taken care of with a quick visit to the all-hours Coles at Manuka.

With all that in order, we arrived at the National Library and set up camp in the line (we were about opposite the door, so things weren't too bad) at 1.10am. We had camping rolls, sleeping bags, hot mocha in our newly acquired thermos', a radio, books, trivia, pillows and lots of snack food. While Olivia dashed home to get her Lilo, Tyson got abused by someone who'd been reading but had a go at Tyson talking on the phone because "people wanted to get some sleep". We eventually fell asleep after deleriously laughing over our new 'special' character Daryl.

Woke up the first time, only one hour had passed.

Woke up the second time another hour later, official-looking people were coming along the line talking to people. This roused my interest...

3.10am "We have some space, do you want to go in?" Me: "Hell yeah, wake up you two, we're going in".

So only two hours after we'd initially lined up we were going in! We packed up all our stuff really quickly and raced down to the car, dumped it all & go inside quick smart. Despite our tiredness we were clear-headed enough to realise that once we were in we weren't coming out for a couple of hours, so decided on the preemptive bathroom stop before going in.

(Open Question: Why is there a condom vending machine in the bathroom at the National Library? I heard about people gettin' it on on the roof of my library back at uni, but never expected it at the National Library.)

So we waited for about five minutes in the entrance foyer to the exhibit waiting for some audio tour headsets to come back and then we were in.

Hmm, how to describe it. Awe-inspiring and breathtaking are the words that come to mind first (they were the words I wrote in the guestbook upon departing). I was struck speechless standing there reading the Ten Commandments on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and then looking at the Ancient Egyptian Prayer Picture at the beginning of the exhibit. To contrast, I laughed out loud at Groucho Marx's letter to The New Yorker (his reply to the editors offer of a regular column) at the end.

I feel very privileged to have seen all of these things, and I'm very sorry if you missed it 'cos you probably will never have the opportunity to see them all in the one place ever again.

We came home just after 5am and crashed.

Saturday

Got up just before lunch, sat around watching old SNL episodes on tape with coffee then decided to make some use of what we had left of the day, so showered, dressed and headed back to Olivias place so she could shower & change & headed down to Woden for a clothes rack and duster (for me), a rake (for Olivia) and a t-shirt (for Tyson). We hooked up with K-bunny & Cinthia over a late lunch, then Tyson & I sat & tried to not use funny accents while waiting for the three girls to finish clothes shopping.

I'm quite tired now. I've put together the clothes rack (granted, not very taxing) and done a few loads of washing. I was invited to three parties today/night, but I think I might just go down to the pub later after a nap to meet Lou's new man Richard then come home. I know it's being rude, but right now I'm in a sleep-deprived place & can only see myself seeing people & regurgitating the same conversations I've been having for the last two weeks ("Hi", "Yeah I'm fine", "Yeah the hand's feeling much better thanks", "Oh you wanna see the scar, ok", "Yeah movement's coming back but there're still wierd nerve sensations", "No, haven't started counselling or legal action yet", "No thanks I'm fine; not drinking at the moment") and frankly sleep is the better option. I like all of the hosts & the people likely to be there, I just dont want to bring the mood down by being a bad guest as I probably would be.

Posted by Dean @ 2/23/2002 07:11:00 pm

...Survey says...

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