What I Did On My Weekend

As requested by She Who Must Be Obeyed.

This weekend I made an expedition north, no, not to find the sun, but to visit my lovely sister Catherine. Thinking back, it's been pretty full on. First off, I get to feel all smug and virtuous for being caught up on the reading for virtually all my courses and comfortably ahead of the game for two of them. (That's the good thing about train rides. The enforced inactivity encourages you to read.) I've also started work on one of the assignments - a verse satire about Auckland, written in the alliterative style. The poetry may suck, but any course work that has you giggling aloud as you write has got to be a good thing.

On arriving, I was promptly swooped on by Cat and her flatmate Michael, and taken to an evening of roleplaying in the Underdark. That was the theory, anyway. It turned into more of a social evening because we hadn't seen each other in a while and partway through the evening the GM was called by a friend in Hong Kong who wanted to rant about politics. At length. It was a damn fine evening, with some roleplaying thrown in for flavour and we were all rather surprised when Conal (that's the GM) declared that we had made very good progress and awarded us a 1/4 level in XP. It turned out that we'd taken a very eccentric route through the cave system and had managed to accidentally miss all the juicy monsters as we wandered around looking for an important NPC to talk to.

Michael dissapeared up to Auckland for the weekend. I found this out when he announced that I was driving him to the airport the next morning. Michael is a really interesting guy. Astronomer, programmer, evolutionary biologist, musician, bridge player and atheist, he lacks but an interest in writing poetry to be considered a true Renaissance Man. Alas, his trust in my driving skills is sadly misplaced. It's not that I can't drive, it's that I get distracted easily, and that isn't good when large pieces of metal are traversing at speed. Still, no crashes, which is a good sign. It also meant that we had a car available for a Grand Expedition to Spotlight, so that Cat could get material for some dresses that she's making and I could get material for a St George's banner for The Harrowing of Hell. We're both aiming for our Holy Grail in these projects - subtle and understated excellence, partly so that they'll look good but also for the sheer snob apeal of it all. You don't want to blazon to the world that you're a fantastically good dressmaker, you want to cough it discreetly.

We also had Jehovah's Witnesses turn up at the door. Contrary to the last pair of missionaries that I actually talked to instead of sending off with guilty sounding pleas of busy-ness, this pair had actually studied their subject matter and were not just repeating some set phrases that someone had passed on to them. (Digression: "It is a well known fact that Rome fell because of homosexuality." Well known to whom? Myself, I would have thought that greed, lust for power, infighting, and a horde of Vandals might have had something to do with it. But that's just me.) Anyway, to end the digression, Cat and I had a quite interesting chat with the pair and they stood up pretty well to debate. They wanted to talk about Fear, but we quickly derailed them into something more interesting. ;-)

And then there was the election. Everyone was watching, so like me they'll be aware of the absolute lack of decisiveness in the result. It's their own bloody fault for sniping at each other, says I. On the other hand, since any kind of conclusion has to wait on the counting of the thousands of special votes, I, as someone outside of their own electorate on Polling Day, can feel smug that, in my own small way, I contributed to that. We also tried watching King Arthur. Bad dialogue, bad acting, bad plot line, bad historicity, unecessarily graphic violence and boring fight scenes. We stopped watching when the Saxons were introduced. My imagination is plenty good enough to think of them as vile and despicable people without having to watch a woman being raped in quite that much detail, thank you very much. If you haven't seen it yet, don't bother.

Yea, verily, on Sunday, I slept in. Quite a lot actually, which wasn't so good as I had trouble getting to sleep last night. Also helped Cat a little on her sewing, some of which is for my benefit in her quest for the Holy Grail for understated excellence. About the point where you're being careful that the slipstitching won't show on the lining which will never be seen by anyone except the wearer, that's when you realise that you've gone beyond finicky and on to the high plateau that is our goal.

Anyway, got home around 9. Babe pleased to see me. Flatmates pleased to see me. It's all good.