Local Warming

This weekend past was a busy one indeed.

Friday night was consumed by one of those pre-event shopping trips where you just keep adding things to the trolley because they will make the event better. Finally you arrive at the checkout with a huge mound of foodstuffs most of which will still be lurking in your fridge the day after the event.

Saturday afternoon was the occasion of the main event itself - a drop by housewarming to welcome Salsa Girl into the place and celebrate this latest stage in our grand experiment.

Having not much space in our residence we invited only those that were known well to both of us (lest the legendary horde of Phill-friends cause a major sardine effect).

I think it all went off quite well with a rotating cast of about a dozen including:

• Legion2 sadly flying solo due to family illness, well other family than yours truly
• The Great Sandro who planted himself on the couch ne'er to move
• MatrixMan and Vengeful Vic with young Couch Killer in tow and solidifying his blog name with a delightful splash of red on our new couch
• The Double Jays turning up WITHOUT their trademark chocolate cake!!!!!!
• ElfBoy and Elfboylet making a big mess and being scared off by The Tiger.

After such a hectic and fun-filled afternoon Salsa Girl and I headed off to spend the evening at the birthday celebrations for BestFriendSincePrep's bester half. With a tended cocktail bar and eighties music galore it really was quite a delightful way to end the day. And there was chocolate cake!

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Educating Salsa Girl

So last night was the occasion of an event of much import. After a weekend that included the annual cake-fest for Couch Killer - wonderfully put together by Vengeful Vic and at which Salsa Girl was able to meet the heretofore elusive Fantomas - I was finally able to make good on my promise to Doom and educate Salsa Girl in the ways of Blade Runner.

When her sad lack of any viewings of said film came to light there had been much shocked gasping from the gaming crowd and many mutterings about what one was to do. My first impulse had been to end things there and then. However Doom, ever the pillar of reliability and maturity, advised that one was overreacting slightly and that, in fact, the unfortunate situation could be rectified by merely showing her the movie.

After last night I am glad to have followed Doom's sound advice as it turned out that she rather enjoyed the film and all is well between us again.
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Many Days in October

One is slack, blah blah blah, interstate conference, blah blah blah, too much work, blah blah blah, spending lots of time with Salsa Girl, blah blah blah.

Now I've gotten that is out of the way I can move on to the serious business of regaling you with tales of hilarity, caution, and just a smidgeon of what Phill has been up to these past days.

My mid October was filled with a holiday/conference in rainy Brisbane during which one found out that there are events that occur between the Teas (morning and afternoon) and the lunch, when one had to present several sessions. All went well except for the miserly afternoon teas. The post conference dinner shenanigans included the fun of having pints of beer spilled on me not once but twice, so I decided to scarper off to bed before it could happen a third time.

One has also spent these past few weeks training  The Tiger to not be in the bedroom crushing one during one's sleep. After an initial all night whinge she seems to have accepted her fate and there is barely a complaint as I disappear for my refreshing nights sleep of an evening.

My days have also been filled with exploding* wi-fi equipment hijinks including replacement equipment that failed and replacement replacement equipment that one had to rewire oneself. I did find out that a kitchen sink is apparently a great static free place to work on the innards of a computer - although I am a tad concerened that staff continued to blithly wash coffee cups whilest I had an open computer there!
* not really exploding

There was also the event of the decade(s) with the "combined to 70th" birthdays of Gavman and The J Monster. It was magnificently catered and in the words of the spawn of ArchEnemy "the best party ever!"

Coming a close second for event of the month was the annual Absent Friends Jyhad game. This year we had Doom, Legion2, Camo Spice, Amoeba, MatrixMan, Vengeful Vic, Couch Killer, Pirate Dave, Salsa Girl, and Badger in attendance. There was also rather a lot of fine whisky and port to be had and I'm sure that if I could remember what happened I would think it was a fantastic evening.

Most recently one has returned from a so called dirty weekend in rainy Lorne with Salsa Girl. As she failed to kill me after four continuous days in close proximity I am counting it as a success.
The dirtiness of the weekend is in doubt as one's automobile has been scoured to a shiny state of cleanliness by what must have been about 3 feet of rain over the four days. There were also several beautiful nature walks taken in as well as many gastronomic delights.

One is now relaxing in the days off that should always follow a holiday in order to allow one to recover from said holiday.

More soon - I promise, and I mean it this time.
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The Innocuous return of Torchwood, and Movie Night

One is at somewhat of a loss.

Friday evenings "celebratory" drinks in honour of the return visit to our shores of Torchwood went off without a single noteworthy hitch or spectacle of which to write about.
Even with Supervisor Grand Chief K at her enabling best there were no sudden spills or embarassing statements and the entire night was only fun and frivilous conversation.

Sigh. How am I supposed to satisfy my content hungry readership if things continue to go well with no unfortunate happenings?


Slightly more eventful was movie night with MatrixMan, Vengeful Vic, and Couch Killer.
We had a trio of movies that fit the "good film that at least one of us hasn't seen" criteria - Big Trouble in Little China, The Losers, Martin - thanks to Fantomas and Legion2 - although I must point out that my identical copy of Big Trouble in Little China would have been superior to Fantomas's.
As has become recent tradition Couch Killer stuck himself to me and I had to control the wriggling, squirming mass for much of the first few hours. When I taunted Vengeful Vic that I was going to steal her child she replied with glee that she had a bag packed for him in the hall and we could leave straight away, so I was forced to recant my taunt.

Since that delightful eve I have had:

• an afternoon of gaming with some D-Day reenactment games of Memoir 44. Attending at the tail end was Amoeba, getting back into my good books with a very late but quite appropriate birthday present of dice and chocolate Fudge.
• yet another skipped gaming night - this one due to Torchwood, and The Administrator and Lord of the Small Fries organising a last minute dinner
  
• several cases of mysterious chocolate overdose
• my succumbing (? succumbation) to ElfBoy's boys cold that he has been dosing me with for the past month

I shall be on my sneezing, snuffling way now.
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Yet another what's been going on post

So, sigh, it has gotten away from me again. It being: keeping a regular schedule of post with significant content - sure I could post a whole lot of twitteresque posts ala my 25 blogs of Xmas.
However, since I can link to it, you can see I've already done it before.

As to the happenings that have kept one away from The Tales, well I can count amongst them...

A relaxing old-school gaming Sunday which led into the week of the print system upgrade.

Not only did this so quoted "half-day job" turn out to be a full five day extravaganza, but I was also forced to skip gaming and assist AntagonisticAl at one of her festival events when there was trouble getting a laptop to present correctly. The difficulty of my investigation was enhanced considerably by the official photographer's extensive knowledge of everything. So amidst this flurry of superior advice I had to listen to many a repetition of basic IT procedure (i.e. turn it off and on) long after I was already onto the more advanced stuff like searching the help file. Suffice to say the hour was late and the thank-you-for-fixing-it champagne, pizza and cake so plentiful that I was forced to stay on for the duration of the event.

To make matters worse, just when the upgrade was coming to a near close - I say near as there are still some persistent niggly issues to be addressed - the Internet decided to disappear for most of Friday leaving me pretending to have work to do.


Having made it to this weekend last it was a pleasure to load Legion2 into the car and head out bush to attend a visit back to town by The Fungi Lady. Doom, The Doctor, MatrixMan, Vengeful Vic, and Couch Killer were also present.


Sunday, however, was back into the trend of horribly drawn out happenings as I attended the Carlton Weagles game with The Great Sandro after ElfBoy conveniently caught himself a Man-Cold and was unable to join us.
In true primary-school tradition though, he made a magnificent recovery in time for some post-footy card playing with Pirate Dave enticed into attendance. Said card games all being long drawn out affairs.


In a way it was a relief to return to work this week even though I was faced with the looming spectre of lingering printer problems and a return visit to our shores of the infamous Torchwood (there will undoubtedly be more on this iniquitous occurrence after a drinking session scheduled for tomorrow night).

Gaming was once again sacrificed for other pursuits - although this time not too far removed as it was another Geektogether drinks night.
Successful events from the evening include: Legion2 making it along for the first time; Pirate Dave reaching expected levels of inebriation in record time; and myself avoiding being dragooned into another game of The Viking Hat GM.

Today made the perfect antidote for lots of work with training in the city followed by an inexpensive steak lunch with CC and The Polster before returning to work for a meeting, some frivol and then home time.

Phew that was a lot to get through. Perhaps there would be some benefit to twitterising my postings after all...
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Phorgetful Phorties

While it may seem that a significant change in age has also caused a significant change in the ability of yours truly to remember to keep these humble Tales updated on something of a regular schedule I'm here to present evidence to the contrary.

Nothing has been forgotten from these weeks of silence - except possibly where I left the thingo, you know the whatsit.

Anyway here is a sampling of some of the many things that have kept me too busy to blog.

• Work of course, and far too much of it. Although I did finally receive my birthday present of my very own minion. Ms Magpie herself was lucky enough to be the recipient of the great honour.
• a lovely conference dinner with a guest appearance from Madame President over from the land of the long white sheep.
• going live with a Library Management System upgrade
• putting in a live appearance at The Viking Hat GM's latest game. Lured in by the promise of the strong leadership of Exploding Ninja Pony.
• making a brief attendance at the conference's trade show aka pen and novelty scavenger hunt. Afterwards I decided to avail myself of the shopping in the city and was then caught in the torrential downpour. There's nothing like catching the train home literally dripping water everywhere. Luckily the book I was reading was a library book so I can just say it was all wrinklified when I borrowed it.
• an expedition to the games shop to spend my librarian gifted birthday present. I now have even more of "far too many games and books", yay.
• a poker night with Dubrovnik Hater and friends in which I unfortunately cleaned up on the last hand most likely causing myself to never be invited back (since eating all the nibbles would never cause that)
• shopping in the city with The Great Sandro. Looking for my birthday present from him - Rome (the TV series, not the city) - and reminiscing about the great time he had with the librarians at my party - I did tell you he's crazy didn't I?
• last minute gaming events organised at my place by Elfboy
• a day home sick almost dying from the latest strain of man-cold - the vestiges of which are still with me to this day
• going to "our first NAB cup footy game together" with The Great Sandro and spending the whole first quarter queuing outside the, currently named, Etihad stadium to find an almost empty arena once inside - no wonder I hate that place.
• beer and board games with Badger
• Tuck's first attendance at the regular Sunday games only to have me spend several hours assuring him that, yes there are usually other people here, when everyone else decided to only make the evening.
• playing pirates with the Tuesday night gamers
• going back into the shed at work to prepare another round of new computers
• being cornered and missing out on drinks and nibbles at our new catalogue product launch
• filling my house with people for the latest of our regular card tournaments - Couch Killer was well behaved this time and no furniture was harmed
  
• a much delayed family birthday lunch at which Legion3 produced dirty rotten lying scales for our regular brothers weigh off - pffft 3 extra kilos!!!
• a training day with lots of food and me being under the weather with resurfacing man-cold and nasty headache. Honestly I was only able to eat two peoples worth of free lunch I was that bad off.
• a last minute gathering of geeks with great attendance, conversation and results. All thanks to The Viking Hat GM for going to the effort to organise lazy gamers into action.
• a day of setting up new computers with my trusty minion at my side
• a fortuitous game cancellation allowing me time to actually prepare for said games next occurrence
  
• a trip for groceries ending with my being pelted by golfball sized hailstones in the car park and once again being drenched to dripping-point - a trend I am not liking.
• and finally having to write a long and involved blog catch-up post to get you all back up to speed.

So there you have it - not a sign of any forgetfulness or mis-remembering of actual events, but then again it was only yesterday...
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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 Third

As we continue on with our investigation we find ourselves coming to one of those regular seasonal events that seem to occur naturally whenever the season is right.

The Branch Xmas drinks
This years occurrence was located at a different establishment than is the usual case for events such as this.

We gathered in a drinking house recently converted from being an automotive repair business - one presumes that easily hosed concrete floors are an exciting thing for those who earn their livelyhood from the alcohol imbibing industry.

Anyhoo, in attendance were: Mr Prada, Days of our Libraries, Kiwichick, The Pragmatist, Fifi, and even Supervisor Grand Chief K put in an appearance after fixating on my costume accessories for the next evening's party - in particular the handcuffs which just happened to be a part of the pack - and showed a shocking amount of ignorance of who the character I was going as actually was.

Much fun and frivel was had by all. The evening finished relatively early which was fine as the rest of my evening could be spent storing up energy for the next big event.


The 40th
The very next evening was the 40th birthday affair for BestFriendSincePrep. As is his want he had made the whole thing slightly more annoying as it was a costumed ball and therefore costumes had to be prepared. I do suspect though, that it was done purely so that he could wear a wig and experience a warm head all night.

Legion2 and the Brotherstealer where there as were Gavman, StumpyRudolph, MrRogers, MatrixMan, Vengeful Vic and Couch Killer.

My choice of costume - the legendary Snake Plissken - revealed some shocking statistics.
95% of women at the party had no idea who Snake was (one guessed the actor)
20% of men had no idea either - and that's allowing Gavman's guess of Jack Russell in Little China to stand as a success.
This country is obviously in need of a strong education campaign in the area of B-grade sci-fi movies from the early eighties.
I'm not even going to talk about the horrendous sub-100% recognition rate for Legion2's Han Solo costume.

But aside from all that the brilliance of BFSP in having a slushie machine was just one of the many masterstrokes in the nibbles department. All in all a good night and perfect preperation for the next days adventure.

up next: in which our hero traipses from one end of town to the other
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The Ball Boy and the Baby's Birthday

My weekend just past was highlighted by the first non-virtual catching up I've had for a very long time with FridgePower and Judge Mingus.

Much of the visit time was taken up with the nigh-unstoppable antics of Ball Boy who began my visit as a shy, retiring youngster for a good long twenty seconds or so until I made the possibly fatal mistake of inquiring about his impressive collection of balls. (note that this must be some foreshadowing of the impending maturity looming in my future as I am, for unfathomable reasons, avoiding making the obvious - and hilarious - smutty turn of phrase)
This innocent enquiry lead to a cataloguing of every ball in the collection for my edification - "this is a soccer ball, this is a football, this is a basket ball, this is a small soccer ball, this is a flat beach ball" and so on.

After my spherical knowledge had been increased tenfold we moved on to creating things with wooden blocks and running marbles through our creations once or twice until we decided to demolish our creations and start again - many times over.

Thankfully the rest of my visit time involved quite a hearty midday repast which set all things right with the world again - although it is spooky that FridgePower and Judge Mingus knew which particular foods to serve up that just happened to be several of those amongst my thousands of culinary weaknesses.


After lunch had settled somewhat I made my tactical withdrawal from overexcited toddler tantrum territory and headed to the next appointment of my busy afternoon.

I managed to arrive fashionably late for Couch Killer's 1st birthday celebration, magnificently hosted by Vengeful Vic and MatrixMan. (I am a tad dubious about the fashionability of my arrival since I did swan through the door at the same time as Pirate Dave.)

With nobody the wiser to my previous events activities I was able to claim that I was starving and commenced to bring my stuffed level right up "to the gills" as they say.
Fantomas and ElfBoy were also in attendance along with various other party goers of all ages. Much fun and possibly too much ice cream cake was had by all - and it all still managed to last longer than any 70th birthday event I've attended - thereby proving that the young do indeed have more fun.


After all the excitement I headed home to privately suffer through some mysterious stomach-bloating-without-cause and a sugar-rush crash that hit me hard and for some reason left me seeing Neapolitan rainbows
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