Happy Birthday timeplease

I had a nice time at August's party last night, though there were some rather stressful moments and not everyone seemed ot be having the best of times, not least the host, which was sad. I discovered that I can't play the mandolin or the bass, and still can't play the guitar, but did briefly get something sounding like music out of Dom's sax. (fnar!). Lots of nice food and drink (oops). In fact so much lots of the latter that I really must apologise to Rachel for apparently telling her my entire life history, not sure quite how I got into that!

Hopefully will be celebrating with the karate graders this afternoon, once I hear how they've done. I might stay off the booze though.

Feel like I ought to stay off the food too after this week :-/ Nice dinner out with Mike Monday, nice dinner in on Thursday which was nearly as disastrously calorific, and then a slightly over quota dinner on Friday, but I dread to think how much I consumed yesterday, and I just don't seem to have much motivation to eat sensibly today, though I guess I'll just have to try. Oh well, even if I gain weight this week (weigh in tomorrow morning since I wasn't at home today) I'm still well down on the start of the year, and I still know I can keep going, so it's not the end of the world. It's just painfully slow going sometimes, and I just feel so *fat* sometimes.

And I wish I could make people happier. Andrew, August, Jan: they're all fed up in various ways and I can't seem to help and with Andrew at least I only seem to make things worse. I just don't know what to do.

Pub

Nice quiet pub afternoon, all of us apparently feeling tired after karate or last night's drinking and lack of sleep. Excellent roast dinner anyway and some nice coffee too. And a couple of games of snakes and ladders with Benedict. There are three different boards in the pub and I'd not realised before that the little moral tales which go with each snake or ladder are the same on every board. Things like if you catch a lady up to give her the handbag she's forgotten and she hands you some money to say thankyou on one of the ladders. And the lad/lass stealing eggs/apples from a tree and falling out and hurting themselves on one of the snakes. They all have slight variations (like being bitten by the dog you're chasing, rather than spanked for chasing a pig) but they're all the same and even in the same places, and apparently (according to pseudomonas who knows some surprising things) they've been traditionally the same for 170 years. You learn something new everyday.

I also learned the damage from last night's eating and drinking. Overall for the week it's enough that I definitely deserve a slight gain (the quota is 3500 cals under what I would need to stay the same, and this amount is supposed to be about equivalent to a lb gain/loss - I'm more than 3500 over the quota, but not by much). Anyway the damage per day is as follows:

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