Roxanne was off in New Zealand for a couple of weeks recently, returning home Friday last week. To catch up with people, she organised a get-together in the city last Friday, at “time out”, a restaurant/cafe in Federation Square. Prior to that I wandered over to Mt. Eliza for the fair they had on, where I eventually met up with Sket & Sean. That was interesting – surprisingly big, which makes me wonder why I’ve never heard of it before.
Anyway, that was good, but I had to leave that fairly early to get to Roxanne’s thing in the city. I figured the most sensible thing to do would be to catch the train in, as opposed to driving… gah, what a bad decision.
I’m not sure what the deal with the buses from Mt. Eliza were, but they seemed all out of whack, so I had to wait half an hour for one. When I got to Frankston I realised I was trying to travel in the dead hour (7-8), where there’s just one train on the Frankston line – the 7:40. So I got to wait half an hour for that, too. That train was meant to run express. It didn’t. It also left ten minutes late. It then ran another ten minutes or so late. So I finally arrived at Flinders Street at about 9, an hour late for Roxanne’s. Luckily her’s was only across the street. :/
And everyone had waited, rather than ordering and whatnot, which was a nice gesture but silly of them; I’d told Roxanne I’d be close to an hour late, and assumed they wouldn’t wait.
Part of the reason the train was late was that they wanted to divide it at Frankston. The previous train arrived with about two minutes to spare. Five employees then wandered around for a while, doing nothing in particular, until eventually they decoupled the trains. Then put them back together. Then decoupled them again. And so forth, about four or five times. Finally they appeared satisfied, and we were allowed onto the train.
While sitting there for a while waiting for the damn train to actually get moving, two Goth girls hoped on, closely followed by some other girl who was going off at them over something. At first it was just the usual yelling and screaming you get around Frankston, which I didn’t pay much attention to. Then this girl started throwing punches and really getting into one of the Goth girls. I got up to separate them, but by the time I had walked up to them the crazy girl’s friends had pulled her away and off the train.
Pretty typical for Frankston, really.
So yeah, Roxanne’s was good nonetheless. I’d already caught up with Roxanne [briefly] the day before when I’d been up at uni. But I also got to catch up with Bobo and Ebony. Sarah, Terrance & Katherine Moon were also there, but [as I think I’ve noted] Sarah’s not talking to me this week, Terrance hasn’t talked to me in years, and Katherine I think I’ve only seen once since high school, where I knew her but wasn’t friends with her. She seems nice, though; always did, as far as I can recall. A little kooky at times, which is interesting. :)
Given the late start, we didn’t finish up there until 11 or something… Roxanne had been hinting during the week at going to a bar or something afterwards, but then that fizzled as we stood outside the restaurant, and people piked left right and centre. Typical. :( So that was that for the night, or so I thought. But Bobo wanted to give me a lift home – she drove into the city from work, where she’d luckily finished early – mainly, I think, for the company. But first she had two parties to go to, Lochie’s birthday and Bondie’s going-away shindig (he’s moving to London, I’m told). First up was Lochie’s, which is on Lygon street all of about four houses up from Laz’s (which in city terms is of course about six metres ;) ).
I wasn’t keen on shuffling around from party to party of Bobo’s friends; I was a bit miffed that Roxanne’s thing had ended so early, and in any case don’t usually get along with Bobo’s city friends. I couldn’t recall who Lochie was, but then once we got to his place and saw him I remembered. I like him, although I’ve only met him in passing a few times.
There we were also introduced to Lisa, Lochie’s girlfriend, as well as his friends Thomas and Alex. There were others there, but they weren’t introduced and didn’t introduce themselves; for whatever reason they mainly huddled together in a dark corner under the grape vine (Lochie’s tiny little backyard has a grape vine or vines growing everywhere).
I quite liked everyone there, and became particularly agreeable after being forced to eat some of the birthday cake, which was a rather delicious chocolate mudcake. :D But ironically Bobo wasn’t enjoying the festivities at all; we’d argued all the way there that it would suck, and I wouldn’t like it, yadda yadda. And it was a long way there, because from the Arts’ Centre carpark Bobo turned onto King St, which meant we had to go all the way over to Punt Road / Hoddle Street and back around to get to Lygon. So we had lots of time for Bobo to blame me for bad navigating, despite her being the one that turned onto King St to start with. :P
Anyway, yeah, Bobo wasn’t having much fun at all, so we left after only an hour or so, by which time some others had left and it was down to only half a dozen people. :/ Poor Lochie; he was afflicted by the terrible condition known as Lazybiasitis, the disease whereby Mt. Eliza people are incredibly lazy and won’t bother travelling anywhere to go to anything, even if it’s someone’s birthday party or a big event. Bec[k] also had a party on that night, I’m told, which is where the Lazybiasitis really kicks in; people would much rather go to Bec[k]’s in Mt. Martha, even if they wouldn’t otherwise, than Lochie’s in the city.
Mt. Eliza people are evil. :P
Annnnnnywho, off Bobo and I went back down to Mt. Eliza. She dropped me off at nana & pop’s, where I’d left my car, although we ended up talking for a while before finally saying adieu, so all in end it was about 5am by the time I actually started off to my dad’s. I got there when it was quite light, not long before sunrise, and went to bed. :D
