Hallowe'en Weekend Roundup

So, you'll be surprised to hear that I have been terribly uninspired about my blog recently, and therefore not written anything. This is because I have been trying to sort of out my life for the last couple months, and therefore a) not done very much, and b) not been hugely interested in writing about anything I have done. Truthfully, I am not terribly up for writing now, but I think I must get myself back into the swing, or a good 10% of my entries will be at least partly about pee. That seems wrong. Plus, I have an hour until my dinner will be cooked, and I have really not worked up the energy to start the tutorial plan for tomorrow's 'Hey History Undergrads! Let's learn to write in sentences!' class, which is necessary (for my sanity when I am next called on to mark their essays), but will probably be boring, and inspire all my students to sleep through class. Whatever. That's why I give handouts.

I was going to write about the last month-ish, but I am getting bored already, so I'll just talk about the weekend, which was the first proper one I have had in ages. By proper weekend I mean one in which the evenings were spent in drink and merriment, and the days were spent without doing a lick of work (mostly napping). The occasion was, of course, Hallowe'en, which (if you have ever come within a hundred yards of me you will be able to guess this) is my very favourite holiday. The other part of the occasion was that I turned in the final corrections on my thesis last week, meaning that (except for next week's conference, my pathetic hopes to get an article published sometime early next year, and a possible exhibition opening in the spring) I don't really ever have to think about the Saundersons again. In a forced, beat me to death, acacdemic sense. Truthfully, I have grown very attached to them, so I will probably think of them often. But now no one can FORCE me to think of them. Anyway, said weekend was good: a couple of Jeff's friends were up visiting from London, which actually inspired me to clean my house (sort of-- I didn't actually wash any dishes; I just cleaned everything else and turned off the kitchen light), making for far greater pleasantness all around. Friday Jeff cooked dinner* for everybody, and then we had a few quiet drinks in the Star Bar. This was then unfortunately followed by a bit of an effort to finish off the contents of my carefully collected liquor cabinet until 4 in the morning. Luckily, Jeff was working the hardest on this, and he decided that the Chinese Mystery Booze that smells like rubbing alcohol tastes like apples, so there was very little harm done...

Because I wasn't interested in the contents of my liquor cabinet (being terribly sensible, for once in my life-- it may be the burden of my recent quarter century) I felt quite well on Saturday morning, and managed to make breakfast for everybody, and then spend a few hours sewing gold beads onto my Cleopatra wig. Nothing proves the lack of a hangover like hours of staring intently at tiny, rolly, shiny things. Later, in celebration of not doing any work, I took a nap. It was very celebratory, and enabled me to be human enough to trot over to Katie's in the early evening to play sous-chef for the preparations for a lovely dinner. Then off to the party, where Jez tried (not very hard, I must say) to kill a sleeping cat with his plastic pirate sword. The cat could not have cared less. It was an interesting party: they had carved upwards of two-dozen pumpkins, which I found shockingly impressive, and some of the costumes were great (some of them were too good, and actually passed the line into truly frightening). The bits I didn't like were when Jeff and I went upstairs to check out the dancing only to find some dude up to his ears in a girl dressed like a cop in a low-budget porno, and the weird fellow who drank an entire bottle of Whyte & MacKay and then latched on to us. I have doubts about anyone who will drink Whyte & MacKay (even a glassful), and I have doubts about someone who will drink any entire bottle of spirits in a couple hours, and the combination thereof? Well, you can draw your own conclusions. I will just say that when the mini-cops (Environmental Health Patrol?) showed up shortly thereafter and we decided to go home I was not sad.

Sunday was more napping (hooray!), and then an excellent dinner by the French girls of haggis and ketchup, which is the fabulous updated-version of corned beef hash and ketchup, the choice meal of my childhood. (Yes, we were kind of poor, and maybe we were kind of trashy. You want to brawl over it?) I don't know why I don't eat haggis more often-- it is cheap and easy and delicious, and whenever I am reminded of its goodness I think that even if everything else about Scotland sucked I might just stay for the haggis. Mmmm. Eyes taste nice.

It was good that I slept all day Sunday, because on Monday my visa ran out, so I had to reapply. This made it possibly the most annoying day of my life, which was of course compounded by the fact that it was Hallowe'en, which I would like to spend carving pumpkins and making costumes for other people's children, and whatnot, not battling Home Office bureaucracy. But, whatever. The application is done, and in the evening I made Slime Soup and we went to see Corpse Bride, which was good, but I think less than the sum of its parts, somehow: the idea was great, and the animation was awesome, and the cast was fab, and perhaps my expectations were too high, I guess.

And that is that. I have managed to boil a pretty decent weekend down into a terrifically boring blog entry. Sweet.


* What I usually mean by 'Jeff cooked dinner' is that Jeff went to Tesco to get the ingredients for dinner, and that either I cooked dinner, or that I cooked dinner with Jeff's assistance. In this case, I cooked the dinner. This has nothing to do with the reason why I won't let other people wash the dishes (namely, that I am controlling and I think they will do it wrong), because everything Jeff has cooked for me has been very tasty. It has everything to do with the fact that I love to cook and Jeff's hates it. So it works out better this way-- I cook, he entertains. It keeps him from getting stressed out over the stove and allows me enough time to suck down some booze so I don't get stressed out like I do when I have to talk to people without a social crutch.