I just had a surprisingly active weekend considering I only left the house once. Lots of cleaning, preparing for and then DMing my first session of 4E D&D (more on which in another post), lots more cleaning, and a dinner party on Sunday night. Oh, and just for something different, more cleaning before coming to work this morning.
I should say that the house wasn’t *that* untidy, but on top of the usual Saturday morning ritual of vacuuming, washing and generally getting the place shipshape before going out to do the shopping, there was some emergency cleanup action needed on Sunday morning after a very comprehensive Coke spill all over the dining room table, chairs and floor. That stuff gets quite sticky if you decide you’re too tired to bother with it until the following morning.
The dinner party was for Chris’ 40th birthday, a follw up to last weekend’s more raucous and popular get together. It was the usual easy-going triumph of good food, good wine, good conversation and the good dinnerware, marred slightly this time around by the absence of Miz L and Jimbo (both sick) and the fact that Simon and Gavin were both still recovering from serious colds. Still, I think we all had a good time, and the bison pies (field mushroom pies for the vegetarians) were every bit as good as we hoped they would be. Why bison? When interrogated for birthday preferences, Chris decided he would quite like some game, but since I couldn’t get any venison, I proposed radical experimentation. Turns out that bison tastes a fair bit like slightly game beef, and is delicious when slow cooked and baked in pie. Now you know.
Sleep-wise, the weekend was a gradual improvement on the horrors of late last week. It no longer looks like Joey is teething – or at least, that’s not what’s bothering him. He has the snuffles and at least a touch of cold, and is obviously not quite sure how to deal with it yet. At best, he wakes up needing reassurance and a pat at least once an hour. At worst – and for the most part it has been at worst – he wakes up screaming (probably because he’s missed a breath or swallowed phlegm or something) every fifteen or twenty minutes. Hard to get a good night’s sleep under the circumstances. Hopefully it will pass in the next few days.
Interesting event coming up this week – now that the mortgage restructure has settled and our new financial arrangements are in place, we’re gearing up for the ‘learning from the experts’ phase of our property investing plan. That will mean actual workshops and semi-formal training sessions in September, but before that starts we have a chance to go to a meet-and-greet seminar with Margaret Lomas (one of those self-made investment gurus you read about, albeit one who can actually write comprehensibly about arcana like quantity surveying and property market analysis). Should be an interesting experience – I’ve always had kind of an instinctive aversion to self-help spruikers who make a living out of encouraging others to achieve great things like they did (Anthony Robbins creeps the absolute shit out of me, for example). From how she writes, I’m pretty sure that Lomas’ approach is a bit more pragmatic and tangible than just superficial “Golly gee, I know you can do it! Anyone can!” inspirational crap, but if there’s a hint of the latter about it, it may be difficult to overcome my automatic cynical response. It will be interesting to challenge my natual skepticism and see whether I can get anything valuable out of the experience beyond what I imagine will be a temporary and artificial sense of enthusiasm and self-confidence. At the very least there will be finger food.