That's Right, You're Watching Me...

Jeez Louise, I have been too slack.

I would like to apologise for the usage of the expression 'Jeez Louise', but sadly I can't. It would be more accurate to simply state that I feel slightly bad for using such a cheesy phrase, but at the same time am unrepentant.

It was an amusing week last week.

The amusement started on Monday with the arrival of a parcel. The letter that came with said parcel stated:

Further to our telephone conversation with you concerning the return of your [SECP] decoder, we enclose a prepaid jiffy bag.

I guess it's not necessarily going to be immediately clear to all why this is so funny. The decoder of which the letter from the Supposedly Ex-Comms Provider speaks was collected by SECP four months ago. The jiffy bag enclosed with the letter, franked for almost seven pounds of prepaid postage, was originally requested five months ago. I was told at the time that it could be four or five weeks before it was received.

The SECP, it would appear, could not organise a piss-up at a brewery even if all the hard work had already been done for them by a collection of University Rugby Clubs and a squadron of non-reformed alcoholics.

Now can you see why I was so amused? Given the amount of time it took for said Jiffy bag to turn up, I figure there must be quite a high demand for them. With this in mind I am considering auctioning it on eBay.

Tuesday was less amusing overall, for reasons which I will come to in a moment. But let's focus on the amusing bits. Well, the main amusing bit.

Given the general completedness of the likes of Wallace and Gromit: Project Zoo and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, I started working my way through Buffy: Chaos Bleeds again. The game requires you to play as different characters as you work your way through it. The amusing bit came when doing a bit that had me as Willow. Now, when you pick stuff up, each character has stuff that they say - it picks from a set of random phrases for each character. A cool one Buffy occasionally says when she picks up a stake is something like "What every girl needs. A good hard shaft. . . . That so didn't come out right." I discovered that one of the things Willow says when she picks up a medipack (first aid kit type health replenishment thing) is "Cool! Now I can be Nurse Willow. Tara is gonna lurrrrve this!" The amusement at hearing this the first time more than made up for the annoyance at Willow not being voiced by Alyson Hannigan in the game (all the characters except Buffy, Willow and Anya, however, are voiced by the original actors).

Then that night, with Alison being away, I ended up staying up later than I would normally. At midnight I figured I needed to get to bed, all the same. Being nearly 32, I have to get plenty of beauty sleep. However, at midnight I also got caught up in something of a debate about ethics over IM with spiralled. For some reason, I couldn't walk away from it. It kinda petered out around 1.30am when I found myself having immense difficulty in thinking straight due to tiredness. The two of us have now made a pact not to start any such discussions in future after 9pm. I'm not going to say what the debate was about, or link to any diary entries that relate to it, because I'm really not inviting anyone else to get involved. The issue is over. Done. Given the sleep it deprived me of, I'm not particularly friends with it right now, and I'm doing my best to stop picking at it like a scab. Yes, I know this will leave you all intrigued. Tough shit.

Wednesday wasn't much fun, mostly on the grounds of not having had enough sleep. However, my eBay 'winnings' arrived, and so I am now the proud owner of three transformers.

Rodimus Prime

What I haven't said much about yet, if anything, is 24. Last year one of the DVD boxed sets I bought with my bonus was Season 1 of 24, and we've only recently gotten round to starting to watch it. We're both really caught up in it. It's just so intense. And tense. Some of the endings leave you torn between screaming "MUST HAVE MORE! MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!" and whimpering in the corner going "I can't take any more of this..." The basic premise is great, and it's amazingly well executed. I don't know whether to expect that the later seasons can deliver in the same way, it's going to get more and more difficult for them to deliver realistic storylines that fit the template. And Season One does seem pretty realistic. Obviously I can't speak for two or three yet.

So that brings us to Thursday, right? Thursday was... well, mostly spent playing Chaos Bleeds. The plot thickened considerably. The main gripe I have about Chaos Bleeds is the plot, in fact. The game's Big Bad(TM) is The First. Given that the entirety of Season Seven is about tackling The First, it's hard to see how a game set two years beforehand can involve a convincing battle/confrontation/shindig/prayer-meeting. That being said, appreciable time and effort seems to have gone into getting Faith's breasts right. Gotta love that from games developers.

Thursday night involved muchos tidying-upos, mainly on the grounds that Friday would not contain any opportunities to do so, and that the house had to be ready for a special visitor on Saturday. I'll get to that.

So, Friday. Friday was Dunk's birthday. Actually, I don't know why I bothered linking his diary as he never updates any more. I had arranged to meet recsat in Reading for the afternoon before the two of us went on to Dunk's for an evening meal. Along with many other people. Whilst wandering round the wonders of The Oracle (Reading's shopping 'tour de force') with recsat, she received a text from Dunk asking us to buy some pants for one of the other attendees (and since I'm British, any Americans reading need to substitute the word 'pants' for the word 'briefs' or whatever) - a last minute attendee who did not have a change of clothing to allow her to stay over. Since we didn't actually know who the pants were for, we had to resist temptation to buy anything skanky/trampy/preppy/etc, though we did find a pair that said 'pants' along the waistband, thus helping the process of garment identification along.

Whilst following recsat to Dunk's (since she knew the way and I didn't), a poor choice of time to overtake lead to me cutting up a Police van, which is always to be recommended. Luckily it wasn't a traffic car, so I didn't find myself up to my neck in shit. I did get flashed by him though.

Considering it was his birthday, Dunk was pretty stressed. This was largely due to the number of people he had been trying to coordinate towards arriving on time to get to the restaurant. Naturally, in the spirit of being awkward, Alison and I had done our bit to complicate matters. Alison had meetings in London during the day, see? She had then arranged for her colleagues to drop her at Reading Services on the M4. This, it turned out, was on the wrong side of Reading from Dunk. Still, we picked her up in good time and then everyone converged on the local Indian restaurant. Dunk had a vindaloo he couldn't finish. He also had very dodgy looking kebabs as his starter, so everyone took photos of him looking like he was eating poo. Very very funny, if a little puerile.

We drove back to Warwick that night, in order to be around when our visitors arrived. We were being graced with a visit from a guy I'll call SR on the grounds that he was my Senior Resident for two years at University, his wife, and their 16 month old daughter, who I will refer to as Little Miss.

Little Miss is just adorable. She was at times quite loud and obnoxious, but she had a wildly fluctuating attention span that kept us all nicely confused. Some things would hold her attention for all of π seconds, other things would keep her occupied for whole minutes at a time.

We went for a wander around Warwick to show SR and co. the town, and I ended up being the one to push the pushchair. And every time I tipped it up and said hello to Little Miss, I got a big grin from her. She also chatted away to herself at length while being chauffeured. It was a cold day, but as we found out when we stopped at Warwick Castle tea rooms for a drink, and then again when we got back to the car, Little Miss was way warmer than the rest of us, tucked up in a number of blankets and protected from the wind by a clear plastic rain cover over her pushchair.

Of course, no baby blog entry would be complete without an amusingly icky bit. SR and I were playing Burnout 2 on the XBox, and Little Miss was standing around in front of us, innocently playing with the coasters on the coffee table. Mere minutes before, she'd had her nappy changed. As her father and I attempted to drive imaginary cars at ridiculous speeds, there were three rather loud squelches as she filled her nappy again and then looked around at her Mum and Dad and me and wondered what the three of us were laughing so hard for.

I'd managed to get through most of the day without getting the slightest bit broody by the presence of a little kid, but then after dinner I was holding her to give her parents a few minutes peace to let their food settle. She looked a bit unsure about this to begin with, then yawned, screwed her face up, and went to sleep. That left me at Brood-Con-One, and also quite tempted to join her in the land of Nod, while her parents quickly packed up the car ready to leave. They weren't trying to leave her behind, they just much preferred the idea of travelling with a sound asleep babbie in the car to travelling with a wide awake babbie in the car. Awww.

Oh, and last week I bought The Soul Sessions by Joss Stone. It's fucking cool. Very bluesy, mostly in a quite traditional way. Need I say more, or are you already getting that it rocks?

And I'm all diaried out now. So I'm afraid you don't get to hear about yesterday, with its shopping trips and canal walks and woodwork and shaking of booty in front of Depeche Mode concert DVDs. Such a hard life, eh?