The First Present

During the week past I received the first of what will probably be many presents in recognition of my somehow, inexplicably, making it through this roller-coaster life of mine all the way to a ripe old age.

Thankfully, as my last blog post should have proven, ones physical and mental age are usually quite far from being aligned in a meaningful manner that would allow others to use date of birth as any kind of significant measure of expected behaviour.

In any case, this first gift came from, of course, Svetlana herself.
It was, unfortunately, not Svetlana herself couriered here in an oversized crate lined with newspaper and comfortable pillows.
It was also, again unfortunately, not something one could eat.

The first gift of this ageing season of mine was a sizeable container of aftershave balm - enough to have one thrown in detention should one attempt to board an air-o-plane (for bringing a balm onto the plane - get it?).
It is a product of cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys - which should make Legion3 happy in his Francophile way - but was delivered from Hong Kong in a plain and battered off-white box with a purple ribbon daintily tied about it to make it look oh so presenty.

I can come to only one or two conclusions:

• Svetlana's habit of referring to me as her "smelly English piggy" is not as cutesy and tongue in cheek as I had believed up until now...
• or there is some sort of perception that I am one to butcher himself horribly while shaving and would therefore welcome the chance to sooth those savaged cheeks and chiselled jaw of mine with a balm such as this
  

Either way it is a saddening line of thought, particularly when one has a weekend at home alone cleaning and tidying in preparation for the inevitable post-party inspection of one's living space by the hordes of Librarians attending one's celebration event next weekend.
It is a lot of hard work concealing decades of geekery in the meagre allotment of cupboards with which my humble abode is equipped. I hope nobody glances underneath the couch.

Sigh.

Hmm, on second thoughts the balm bottle doesn't say that it is poisonous, so it must be edible after all - and it does smell delicious...
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The Longevity of Immaturity

I just finished reading Radio Free Albemuth by Phillip K ... (tee hee)... Dick!


Now if you'd been sitting beside me then you would have witnessed a reversion to my teenage self and subsequent sniggering about the Author's name, as always happens amongst Legion when we discuss this author's works of literature.

Obviously this juvenile amusement at how easily anything can become a smutty turn of phrase has stuck with me for a long time and is firmly embedded as a Pavlovian behaviour of mine that would take an almighty effort of willpower to dislodge from those habitual centres of my brain.


Thankfully I am not alone in my juvenile depravity.
Many's the time at work when Days of our Libraries, Mr Prada, and Ms Magpie will let loose with hugely snigger-worthy comments on simple innocent things uttered by other staff.

For example recently Country Girl purchased a set of blinds from The Pragmatist, and enquired of her, "How do I mount them?"
Naturally my eyebrows shot up and I raised my head to see Mr Prada eyes wide and eyebrows heading roof-wards. Of course this duplicated smuttiness multiplied upon itself and we were both in hysterics for many minutes afterwards - in fact it still brings a sniggery smirk to my face just thinking about it now.

Anyway I digress.

The Dick book itself was a reasonable read, although rather low on the weirdness one expects from a Dick. Apparently it is a first draft published posthumously but does fit in with several of other Dicks in that way that many Dicks are about the same thing.

Tackle it if you are a Dick fan, however others - such as Ubik -are better if it's going to be your first time with a Dick.
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The Bastard's Birthday Dinner

It is only now after an early, nay, normal finishing time to my working day that I can once again find the free hours it takes for me to hand carve yet another missive to you my anxiously awaiting readership.

And what pray-tell I hear you ask could have changed so dramatically in the scheme of constant overwork that is my salaried life to allow such an unprecedented finishing time to the day of one Freeloading Phill?

Well 'twas none other than a day of training for yet another in the seemingly unending string of upgrades to stuff. My partner in training crime this time was none other than Supervisor S resuming her duties as my sidekick. For this educational outing we were under the esteemed tutelage of The Puppies and unhindered by any library staff with their insistence that the system they use every day should make sense to them.

The morning's downpour could not dissuade me from my attendance as I trudged knee-deep through the swirling maelstroms of overflowing city gutters to reach my destination.

My reward was an informative session with a minimal morning tea and a choose your own lunch. Luckily our early finish did still make it to the point where venue staff laid out the meagre afternoon tea which one was able to raid on the way out into city shopping and thence home early enough to have the time to compose some bloggage.


Hmmm, I seem to have not even broached the subject of my post yet so I had better get on with it henceforth.


I spent my evening last Saturday at a dinner in celebration of The Bastard's imminent ageing event. I was privileged to be there amongst his inner cabal as they whiled away the evening with intricate world-domination planning cunningly conducted in the form of frivolous conversation. Fantomas was there of course, and I was able to catch up with Unity and Krazy K for the first time in ages.

The venue chosen for this event was an Hellenic restaurant and as the platters of meat were placed before us we all had to face the very real threat of dealing with a serious case of meat poisoning. My particular indulgence was to be shared with The Bastard himself and Fantomas. Of course the lithe Fanty did not pull his weight and I was forced to consume the remainder of his share so that our Hellenic hosts would not scorn us for leaving much of our repast on the platter.

As there were several there in the family way the event finished at a reasonable hour and I was able to waddle home contented to spend the remainder of my weekend sleeping off my bloat and preparing for the hard week of work ahead of me.
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Movie Night

Last weekend I continued on with the tradition that heralded in the new year by holding a movie night at my humble abode.

Legion's 2 and 4 were in attendance, as was Elfboy who made a last minute dash to make it for most of the evening.

Our features for the evening were the new Family Guy take on The Empire Strikes Back - Something, Something, Something Darkside, and the fourth Terminator film Terminator Salvation.

The Family Guy film was as good as expected, not any better, but with plenty of group laughs and observations on the original film.

Terminator was good fun in a group but did have the feel of being made by people who didn't quite care about continuity with the other films - although time travel, as always, can excuse these with the ol' "changed timeline" explanation.

All in all a good night and I think this movie night thing just may become a regular occurance as we head further into the depths of twennyten.
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Ringworld by Larry Niven

Finished this as part of a lazy New Years Day plus one morning.

It is a classic sci-fi and I think because I'm reading it some 3 decades after it's release it loses a little because I've read other, more recent takes on it's themes.

I've also played in a role-playing game set on the Ringworld and had my moments of Sense-of-Wonder back then so it did seem a bit old hat by the time I got around to reading it.

Still it's quite a good read and is basically a Big Dumb Object story with some "meet the regressed natives".
There's some interesting stuff about luck in there as well.
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The Missing Weeks. Part the Fifth

Contrary to unpopular belief I am not instituting a new regimen of daily posting.
The recent frequency is merely a part of the effort to catch up to the present day - a form of time travel, if you will, where the events fly past much faster than normal as we spirit forwards into the future (well, the now actually).

So let's set the controls for the new year and see how far we get...


A Lazy Xmas Day
After a nice little sleep in I collected Legion's 2 & 3 and we made our way to Legion headquarters.

With Freeloading Mum working until the late afternoon lunch was only attended by Handy Dad and the Legion. We partook in a relaxed BBQ lunch with the sun shining down upon us.

Later, when Freeloading Mum arrived, we commenced our giving of token presents and some catch up chat.
Legion followed this with a game of Shadows over Camelot which took us right up until BrotherStealer and the cousins arrived (separately).
Only one branch of cousinage was attending the evening this year on account of holidays I believe. We did see the ever reliable to be in attendance at family gatherings first-name-stealing-cos-he's-a-few-months-older-than-me Cousin Andrew, as well as Cousin Dave and wife and nearly newborn.
An evening feast was had and then the baby-burdened had to leave because of upsetness.
The rest of the 'kids' retired to the garage and thus ensued many hours of Kelly pool playing on the wonky family table.

Thankfully the behaviour of Legion4 was in stark contrast to the previous Xmas day as he had only a moderate number of drinks and was quite the enjoyable company for the whole day.


An Average Boxing Day Board Games
Upon consultation with Pirate Dave it was decided to hold the nigh-traditional board game playing day on the Sunday between the actual day and the public holiday - sort of an average of the two.
ElfBoy, however, had other ideas. Having only cleared his schedule for the actual day - and inexplicably not checking his email on Xmas - he twisted my arm and enforced card playing for the evening of the actual Boxing Day. Of course Pirate Dave and Legion2 were also dragooned into the event.

The next day we gathered for the actual boardgames, swapping Badger in for the unavailable ElfBoy. We managed to knock out a whole mini campaign of my go-to wargame - Memoir'44. However without the assistance of The Viking Hat GM we Belgians could not even muster up a single win and had to give over France to the Germans.



There was not much else happening in the week leading up to years end, a few days off, a few work days that felt like days off and otherwise life as usual.


The New Years Eve Movie Night
Our plan for this New Years was to gather at MatrixMan's to participate in what I like to call "Educating Vengeful Vic". You see MM and I decided it was the perfect opportunity to rectify that terrible Escape from New York shaped gap in Vengeful Vic's cult filmic experience.
We gathered that evening with Legion2, BrotherStealer and Pirate Dave. Of course Couch Killer was also there, hogging all the attention as usual.

We opened the evening with pizza and wine - always the best way to start a movie night - and then commenced our support feature The Ninth Gate up until that point unseen by yours truly.
It was a good supernatural thriller reminiscent of your Damiens and Rosemary's Babies, requiring some thinking to figure it out but between the roomful of us we managed to reach the level of intellect needed.

After that it was onto our main feature which still stood the test of time despite being set in the Now of 1997, and having ginormous mobile phones as state of the art tech.



And so, this brings us to the end of our little series of catch up postings. You should all be well versed in what exactly occurred to this auteur in those many weeks of blogging silence.
A new year would be the time to make all sorts of resolutions about more regular updates but, sadly, the time has passed as I write this and I shall have to wait for New Years next before the opportunity for the declaring of such a resolution arises once more.


up next: a return to the irregular scheduling you must surely have become used to over the last year.
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The Missing Weeks. Part the Fourth

Blithely ignoring the new year I shall continue on with retelling the myriad of events from those missing weeks.


The Viking Hatted Wedding
My next morning began with my awakening thankfully without any after-effects from the night before.
I spruced myself up and headed out for the ceremony section of The Viking Hat GM's day of nuptials. Exploding Ninja Pony was also there and The Mad Magyar was also present in his capacity as one of the best men - although sadly, for his manliness, he was beaten out of the prime spot by a girl.
After the ceremony I was lucky enough to once more be a passenger in Exploding Ninja Pony's car as we headed out to the most important part of the day - the lunch. I must say that Pony seemed a much more relaxed driver without the constant threat of Viking stomach emptying that accompanied our last sojourn together.

Lunch was a lovely Afghan affair with many courses and good company.
Afterwards I was unable to resist the allure of cake back at Viking HQ so once more was spirited to a new location on the Pony express.
Once there we partook in teo of my favourite things - cake and conversation until the early evening when I decided to make swift my exit as I detected the cleaning up had began to get underway.

In the spirit of being true to TVHGM's greenwards leanings I made the long trip back home on the various train lines - horrifyingly without a skerrick of reading matter - finally making it back to my bed a shade before midnight and collapsing exhausted into bed.


The Xmas Work Week
The workdays leading up to Xmas are a blur of activity including: several last minute IT issues; ElfBoy plying the weekly gaming table with wine; staffroom tables brimming over with enough borrower-gifted chocolate to give an elephant type 7 diabetes; a sedate lunch with the IT crowd; a rather more boisterous council Xmas lunch greatly attended by library staff; and finally an Xmas Eve gaming night transformed into Chinese restaurant feast with Pirate Dave and Fantomas. - but we did fit in a game of Piratalismanopoly so all was not un-gamey.

up next: Xmas and the New Year
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