oops

Oh my. It's Friday again and I haven't blogged in over a week! oops. Here's as brief an update as possible...

Last Friday I went out with the usual suspects, and a few new faces. As always I can only speak for myself but I had the best evening, still not found a real cave replacement (food by Native State which was fine but a tad overpriced and the place itself was far too noisy)... anyway from there we went to Greyfriars and met up with a bunch more people including one old friend of mine who I haven't seen in ages and won't see again for at least a year I expect. We were thirteen strong by the time Liz and I went to queue for Improverts tickets, and consequently took about half their remaining seats at a stroke! *evil laugh*

The show was OK, not as good as last week but still mightily funny. Afterward our numbers shrank to a mere crowd of eight or nine (I'm not sure exactly) and we made our way over to the Traverse for more drinks and chatting until closing time at about 1am.

Saturday morning (well "morning" relatively speaking) Hamish, Anita and I headed over the hills to my house, ostensibly to prepare for the feast we all had planned for Sunday, but actually all we did was mooch about recovering from the night before... well OK that's all I did, the others might have been more productive while I was dozing.

On Sunday I foolishly left Hamish in charge of peeling potatoes, and went away to fetch Liz, Fi (friend of Liz's who I like but who always forgets me,) Justin (the aforementioned 'old friend' from Friday,) and Karen (his other Edinburgh based old friend and hopefully my new friend) from the city out to the sticks. On our return we dug Hamish out from underneath the mountain of peeled potatoes and together we made a rough approximation of a Burns Supper. The cooking and eating was all good, and very much a group effort... mostly co-ordinated by Liz and myself and therefore heavily dependent on the use of large quantities of butter. I think we managed to eat about half of the vat of mashed potato between us (which was the best I have ever eaten thanks to Liz's secret tricks.) Few of the Burns Night traditions were honoured and not one of us was actually Scottish, but a good time was (I gather) had by all, especially me since I love having people over and this was the first time I'd really managed to have a crowd over all at once.

Everyone stayed over and I ferried people back into town with me in the morning, except for Justin and Karen who stayed behind to wash up most of the mess we'd all made (earning my eternal gratitude!) before getting a train back to civilisation at a more civilised hour.

On Monday Night Hamish and I met up to 'plan' our travelling for the year - we each want to do a lot of it this year and have fun going places together so we look set to do a lot of that, with some of the rest of the gang coming along too some of the time... on Tuesday after a tricky drive home from work over ice-rink roads I slept and awoke on Wednesday to find that the snow had contuinued falling and there were extreme weather warnings about driving on the hills so I called in to work and went back to bed for a couple of hours expecting to head in later on. Waking again mid-morning I found the situation hadn't changed, called in again and then (after brunch) decided to spend my unexpected free-day playing Lego which I haven't done in about a decade. Anita played too for a while, building a very fine house before deciding to be a bit more grown-up. I spent all day building most of a very large and complex spaceship (it's about a meter long, and looks really smart but I didn't quite finish the middle part) and was amazed when we came to clear up at night how much of the stuff there still was to scoop back into the bags. I was a really lucky kid.

Yesterday it was back to work, and I was narked to find that in my absence those kids who'd made it in had mucked about with my desk and nicked most of the useful stuff (like pens and glue and such) - little f*ckers. Actually after my second cup of coffee I realised that I was more narked at still not having found a new job, and that the evil worm-baby pranks were just a reminder that I needed to do more about that, so I spent some of my afternoon and evening (I finish early on Thursdays at the moment) compiling a list of Edinburgh based marketing companies to research with a view to making some well thought out on-spec applications by the first weekend in February. Having a plan makes me happier. I also scoured the internet for any good job adverts but found none, so fingers crossed for something in the papers this weekend.

and that brings us up to date I think. This weekend is looking set to be a similarly exciting and friend-filled one... but that's another entry.