A slight case of overblogging

Friday lunchtime I spent at the beer fest, partly with colleagues and partly with David/Peter/Karen/Sarah, which was nice. Then after a surprisingly productive afternoon I went home and lugged the futon upstairs to the spare room (study, library, music room) and reassembled it. Then Mike and I spent a very quiet evening mostly geeking. Played some Starcraft for the first time in ages! Eventually Ian arrived with a van containing a very large sofa that used to be Ernie's and helped us carry it into the living room before he headed back to his packing and Mike and I headed to bed.

On Saturday morning we got up fairly early and headed over to Relativity about 10am to help them move. Quite a lot of things were in boxes already, and the cusfs library had already been shifted over to the new house, but there was a lot still to do. I helped Sarah play tetris with boxes in the van, which Mike and Tom went to find more boxes at Tom's house. And in the meantime Clare and Ian packed more and more boxes. When the first load went Mike and I switched to packing boxes in the kitchen mostly while others were packing more books in the living room. And when the second load went Mike went with it with Peter and Tom and Ross to help unload, Clare and Naath headed off to the supermarket while Sarah and I made coffee and cleared the table and found paper plates and plastic cups so we could have a feast of bread and meat and cheese and houmous. We stayed after that to help for another hour or so and then we had to get off.

Back at our house we did a bit of tidying, had a shower and a brief nap, then spent an hour or so moving bottles and snacks into sensible places and putting cheese and pineapple and sausages and cherry tomatoes on cocktail sticks, all ready for our housewarming party (to which if you weren't invited I can only apologise: it's not a very *big* house and we didn't want to invite so many people they wouldn't fit. I have too many friends!). Steph and Dave arrived around 5:30, bearing shopping, and we immediately opened the gin. The first other guests arrived at 7, from Oxford via the beer festival, and I immediately dragged Steph and Jan out to the chippy to feed us all before we got completely plastered, leaving Mike to entertain the boys. Jack had arrived when we got back, and it was a pretty quiet party from then until we had another batch arrive at 9 and another around 10.

It was a really nice party anyway, the things on sticks amazing all vanished, as did about half of the cake and almost all the fruit, but not one bag of crisps got opened, and while we had less beer and less coke at the end than when we'd started we had loads more wine left! The last couple of stragglers left just before 3am, leaving Jan, Owen and Ian Snell to crash over.

On Sunday morning Steph and Dave headed back over from the Travelodge to join us for a breakfast of bacon and egg sandwiches and leftover cake and jelly, and we kind of all slobbed out together until the early afternoon, which was nice. We left Jan and Owen in CB2, pointed Ian at the bus station and did a bit of shopping with Steph and Dave, though we didn't find what they were looking for. Then came back for more coffee with them, and played Jungle for 2 hours on the living room floor, before going out for a lovely dinner at CB2, very kindly bought by Steph. We all crashed pretty soon after that though.

And today after a nice lie-in they popped back for breakfast again before setting off to drive back to Leeds through the rain. Mike and I are going to have a lazy day - all is tidied back up again although we still need to hoover. It's been a lovely weekend, and to be honest who cares if it's rained non-stop?

Art | rejs | MBM

If anyone else has any I'd love to see them.

Started off while we were setting up with the entirety of Blondie Atomic: the very best of Blondie, and quite a bit of Billy Bragg Back to Basics. Then when people started to arrive I briefly stuck on a Q magazine compilation "Assorted: best of 1995". From which I think only Cast Finetime and Paul Weller Stanley Road got played. I think on balance those weren't the ones I would have picked if I was choosing tracks. Janet stuck on a track in between those two I think, to have a go at switching from one deck to the other, but I don't recall what it was. The rest of the tracks I played are more or less as follows, but I've not much of an idea of order.

• Ash The Girl From Mars
• Manic Street Preachers Motorcycle Emptiness
• Green Day Welcome to Paradise (I'd intended to play Basket Case, but in skipping back to the beginning of the track accidentally selected the previous track instead)
• Eurythmics Sweet Dreams
• Pulp Common People
• The White Stripes Seven Nation Army
• Terrorvision Oblivion
• Therapy? Screamager
• Busted Year 3000
• Avril Lavigne Sk8ter Boi (these two deliberately went together for cheese overdose)
• Nick Cave Red Right Hand (Live version) - thankfully long, as I had to go answer a phonecall!
• Richard Thompson 1952 Vincent Black Lightning (didn't go down as well as I'd hoped, a bit quiet)
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Whatever Happened To My Rock and Roll
• Placebo Nancy Boy
• Supergrass Caught By The Fuzz
• The Jam Town Called Malice (this was a track request on seeing me trying to pick one from the album :-)
• Kaiser Chiefs I Predict A Riot

That's a rough idea of it anyway. Now I look at CDs I can't remember if I actually played James Laid or not. It seemed to be lumped together in the bag with the ones that did get played :-)

Anyway, it was fun, and my sisters approved of my playing popular stuff that's fun to dance to. It might have been nice to be playing later when there were people dancing, but *someone* had to get started, and it didn't matter too much if I goofed. By and large, since I was mostly making it up 2-4 tracks in advance, I had loads of time mid-track to chat to people and dance a bit, with the headphones round my neck.

Found at the end of the night on Saturday one jumper: a navy blue Reebok sweatshirt, size XL. If it's yours give us a shout and we'll get it back to you.

In other news I was asked last night if I could be referred to as "my girlfriend" and after going "eek" a bit said yes.