I covered up until Sunday night, which is when Chantel had people over for dinner, for an Easter party. The condition was that everyone who turned up (in theory) brings something chocolate that they made themselves. Bobo made some nice looking cookies (although she ruined them by putting nuts in), Sket made some devilishly caramelised chocolate brownies, Stof lots of chocolate mousse, and so on
I had been thinking about it all week, and was actually really looking forward to it. I figured I’d have a shot at chocolate mousse, being my favourite home-made food. Sarah used to make it occasionally for me, so in a way I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t supremely lazy, and could look after myself if necessary. Well… look after myself so far as killing myself with sweet chocolatey kindness goes.. :D
Of course, some retard somewhere decided the entire country would turn off on Sunday. Knowing of course that it was Easter weekend, I had checked what times the supermarkets would be open… at least, the one’s in Preston. They were open all day, no worries. ‘course, down in Sleepville here, everything was shut. I did raid the servo (twice) and the milkbar at the top of Kunyung Road, but they’re hardly equipped for making mousse. I scrounged together a hodgepodge of basic ingredients for chocolate milkshakes, at massive expensive – 2 litres of vanilla ice cream from this milkbar was $7 or something ridiculous.
Ironically, of course, it was never used; I forgot about it. In any case, the one key ingredient I couldn’t get was chocolate sauce, so they would have been bland milkshakes.
Luckily I still had some Easter eggs left over… I went shopping on Thursday night and bought a whole bunch of stuff, figuring I’d find a home for it sooner or later. So I didn’t turn up entirely empty handed. Still, I’m annoyed. I hate shops that aren’t open. It’s entirely counter-productive, refusing customers. And I wasn’t the only one disappointed – just while I was walking through Mount Eliza I saw a dozen other people rock up at Ritchies & Safeways, trying to find anything open.
Grr.
Anyway, it was a great night nonetheless. We had sooooo much chocolate… there was actually enough for me to share a little with everyone else. ;) Stof’s mousse in particular was supérbé… yep, the extra e and all those dashes make it super fancy. :)
Chantel actually served up a dinner of lasagne and veggies, which was really good. I think it was very wise to provide a healthy meal prior to the chocolate smorgasbord. :)
While munching away at everything, we played the Big Brother board game. Despite it’s origins, it was actually pretty good. The mechanism is simple – play goes around the table, with each person picking up a card and reading a question off it. Everyone else writes down an answer privately, and these answers are then read out by one of the players. The current player then has to try to match each answer with the people playing. They move one place around the board for each match they get correct.
The questions were pretty typical things… “What year would you like to replay forever?”, “What would you do if XYZ did ABC to Bob’s Your Uncle at a party?”, kind of stuff. Answers ranged from direct and serious to “Meow meow meow, I’m a kitty cat”.
Since I only knew Bobo & Sket well, it was quite a guessing game. But most people were in the same boat, so we all did as horribly bad as each other. :) In the end we gave up half way, since it was going to take more than all night to finish the game.
After that we moved on to Pictionary, which was hilarious. There were some really brilliant drawings – such as for broccoli – as well as some really horrible ones, which occasionally produced amazing guesses. That was good, and my team won, despite having me as a handicap. :)
By the end of that, a lot of people had left… they’re getting old, you see, and can’t handle being up past 10 anymore. :P
So, it was left to Dohzer, Chantel, Bobo, Sarah, Michelle & I. Using the Pictionary cards we played charades for a while, which also was quite hilarious. Chantel did a very good portrayal of “vegetable”, although we were all too silly to pick it… I can’t even remember most of the details now, but it was all good. :)
Then, for whatever reason or from whatever prompting, Chantel or someone decided they wanted to visit Sexyland. Given the alternate was to go home, and it wasn’t even midnight yet, I went in with that. Of course, I didn’t realise that the Sexyland they were aiming for was somewhere on the way to Clayton or somesuch. D’oh. It was an easy drive, of course, with virtually no other cars around near midnight on Easter Sunday. But fruitless; we got there at literally one minute past midnight. They closed at midnight. Man, that sucks. I had no particular reason to go there, but after driving all that way, that was motivation enough! :)
So, in a desperate search for something to do, we headed off towards McDonalds. Half way there, Chantel suddenly did a U-turn (via the wrong way down a one-way street)… I couldn’t figure out what she was doing, until she drove back down the road a few hundred metres, past a giant fireball. Apparently just as we were driving past a car had exploded into flames. I didn’t see or hear it, but those in Chantel’s car did. So we pulled over and had a look at that. It was quite scary – the entire car was quite happily engulfed in fierce flames, despite the apparent absence of anything to burn; it was quickly down to the frame. Two fire engines were on the scene just before we got there – they’d been coming up the road behind us shortly before Chantel noticed the car – and they had the fire out in less than 60 seconds. There wasn’t much left of the car. There wasn’t any owner in sight, although the driver door was wide open.
Oddly, there were a couple of people standing next to us on the opposite side of the road, one of whom said “so they did hit it”. I didn’t catch any other relevant part of their conversation, but that seems like an odd and knowing thing to say. Hopefully they told the fire-fighters what they knew or had seen.
Anyway, after that we did finally make it to McDonalds, so that Bobo could have a burger and Michelle some fries or somesuch. Then we drove the 47.1km back to Chantel’s place. It would have been a shorter trip, except Chantel repeatedly went the wrong way; first all the way to the Nepean Highway, then south a little bit, but then back towards Clayton, then across to Dandenong, and only then finally back the right direction once we hit Springvale road. Bizarre.
Pretty much everyone piked then; I dropped Bobo off on the way back to Chantel’s, and Dohzer & Michelle left immediately. Sarah & I sat in my car and talked for a while. In the morning, after watching sunrise, we both headed home too.
I went straight to bed, at about 9am, and got up at 6. :D
