Last Monday was Laz’s birthday (28th; he’s an old fart now :P ), for which he hosted an Event of Suitable Appreciation (a.k.a. a BBQ) last night. It was billed as a Saints & Sinners costume party… which in a nutshell means guys dress more or less normally, and girls dress like prostitutes. Actually, most costume parties seem to be that way… anyway, I should note that Rachel (Brownies’) bucked that trend somewhat, with a generic satiny fairy-tale dress thing… my vocabulary isn’t suitable stocked to describe these sort of things, as you can see. :) I think Chantel was supposed to be a nurse, or somesuch – she had a cheap stethoscope – although I can’t recall seeing her in costume.
Laz was supposedly dressed up as a seedy priest, though I didn’t see him in proper costume either… although I liked his Bible, for which he’d sacrificed an olds maths book so as to carve out the insides and insert a flask. :D
Wig also came as a priest, which was kind of scary because he looked all clean-cut and spiffy and actually quite like a real priest. A non-creepy one, too.
So it’s good that I didn’t go as a priest as well. :D I was trying to come up with ideas for much of the week, but with work I was rather busy and wasn’t willing to invest the time in a Savers trip or similar… I started getting some ideas Saturday afternoon. I thought of going as a biker, borrowing dad’s bike gear and whatnot, but he’d been out riding in the rain, so much of it was wet, plus he wanted to leave open the option of riding again today, and I wasn’t sure when I’d be home again.
Another idea was to go as a Frankstonite – I found a really old hoodie, plus some of my crappest, oldest t-shirts… but then my original plan was to catch the train in to the city, rather than drive, which might have resulted in attracting unwanted attention.
I also thought briefly about wearing an Apple staff shirt I still have from Macworld last year, and going as a Mac Genius (i.e. Saint :D ), but I figured that was a bit geeky, and no-one would get it. I was hitting myself mentally early in the night when Laz and a few others got into a rant on how bad Vista is… ah well. :)
In the end, dad found a shirt with a red demon face on the front, with the words “Devilishly handsome!” below it. Not my usual style, but I figured it was actually pretty close to the theme, and with a suitably bad hairdo I could pull it off with humour.
I then spent more time in front of the mirror, playing with my hair, than I think I have the rest of my life combined. My hair is Evil. I should have just gone to the party as my hair. Despite using five times as much hair wax/cream/whatever as I normally would, it just wasn’t feeling particularly malleable. I wanted something like a Fons hairstyle, or something from Grease, or even just a bad comb-over, but it wasn’t happening. In the end, after trying and failing repeatedly to slick it back, I left it as it was – spiked up. I reckon it just looked a bit silly – not nearly as humorous as I’d been hoping for – but dad reckon’d it was alright, and someone actually complimented me on it at the party… although presumably they were being sarcastic. :)
Laz’s was good, anyway. I drove in the end – I was already running late, what with all this hair business and all, and couldn’t really be bothered wasting half the night on trains and whatnot. Plus, it’s not much more expensive to drive than to catch the train anyway. I made it to St. Kilda (from Mt. Martha) in about 45 minutes – I was thrilled. It then took me another half an hour to go the extra five k’s to Laz’s… grrr. I hate the city. Although St. Kilda road was flooded in spots, which was awesome to drive through. :D
We spent most of the night just chatting and watching movies – The Fifth Element, Hellboy, and then a random episode of Fraiser that happened to come on, on tv. I ended up giving Wig a ride home – Chantel & Rachel – his ride up – left fairly early, so I offered the lift if he wanted to stay longer. That was good; it’s nice to have company on a long drive, of course, and the radio on Saturday’s is nearly always useless. We mostly recalled both sad and humorous tales of electronics abuse and failure – he works in a repair shop in Mornington, and thus of course has many crazy stories about bizarre faults – and nearly as bizarre customers, it seems… like one guy who brought in an 18-month old plasma tv, which needed about $400 of repairs, but got so angry about it that he said forget it, and threw it out at the tip. :!
And I fondly recalled the time Tony killed some dodgy Tandy DC power adapters… here’s a question for everyone; if several of the wires in your circuit spontaneously desolder themselves and snap apart, what do you do? Why of course, solder them back together and try again! :D
It must be noted, in fairness, that the “22 volt” adapters we were using were apparently made on a different voltage scale, where “22 volts” is equivalent to what we’d normally call 44… so it was not Tony’s fault at all that his circuit was trying to spontaneously combust.
We killed so many crap adapters that day… I love the smell of burnt electronics in the morning. ;)
Smells like burnt peanut butter, actually – well, cracked resistors do, anyway. Wig reminded me. :)
Sadly, last night, driving back along Moorooduc, I think I hit something. Hopefully it was just a stick, but it made a real thump against the front right wheel arch. I couldn’t see anything in the mirrors, and I didn’t see anything before I hit it – obviously, otherwise I might not have – so I’m hoping it wasn’t an animal. But to rub salt into the prospective injury, not far down the road I very nearly did hit a fox – it ran out across the road in front of me, but made it off the road just in time. With the wet conditions I probably couldn’t have avoided hitting anything anyway… there was a huge amount of bark and branches down all over the roads in Mt. Martha; evidently it was very windy last night here. With the drizzle and everything you couldn’t really see anything small on the road until you were on top of it anyway. :/
I ended up back at dad’s by about 1:30am, I think… not too late at all, and making pretty good time from Laz’s – if only I could get to uni that fast. :(
Which reminds me, I finally got the graduation pack from uni – which is much earlier than I’d honestly expected it, knowing what they’re like – but it’s not even personalised on any of the important documents… there’s a letter from the dean or someone saying directly and without ambiguity that I’ve finished my course, but the bloody thing’s addressed “Dear Graduand” or some such crap, making it useless as evidence that I’ve actually finished. Uni’s suck.
