Grand Rehearsal

Ghent went all snowy Thursday night. A perfect setting for a night out, although a less than perfect environment in terms of navigating four tipsy individuals from one pub to the next. Two of them incidentally were rather mean boys who could think of nothing better to do than snowball their far more mature, well balanced, female counterparts. Though... they are excused, as they had to restrain themselves in wait of a Moquito which took the carribean bartender literally a half an hour to prepare. "Take eet easy, man" (TIP: if you've got hours to waste, but would like a fab coctail, head for "The Mix").

We eventually headed for "Het Dreupelkot" but mistakingly ended up in some obscure Jazz club with a very ditsy blonde Dutch (need I say more) bartender.


When I got back to my car at 4.30 a.m. I found both doors and locks entirely frozen shut. I know more exciting things to be doing at that time 'o day than trying to wriggle your doorframes open in an abandoned street at -5*Celcius. As far as a grand rehearsal for New Year's Eve goes, this night was a success though. I will simply wait to go home till the sun's come up and has started defrosting my doors. No pointing wasting precious dancing time on futile things such as vehicle entrances, I say.

HAVE A FAB ARBITRARY START TO 2006 EVERYONE! :-)

World of Opportunity

Check out this clever sod:

Million Dollar Homepage

The guy sells off the pixels on his webpage for 1$ each, so u can buy them to advertise. He's sold over 900,000 of em already. You do the maths. So simple. So clever. So very jealous.

Talk to the Hand

Christmas Jollies and the associated Tribal Family Gatherings always bring up lots of weird little anecdotes from the past. The more embarassing, the more commonplace it seems. But this year, one popped up which would appear to explain rather a lot about me...

When I was little (think 4 to 7 years old), I used to come home from school/playtime/scouts/parties/sleepovers (and whatever else a 4-7 year old gets up to) and would excitedly rush to my parents to tell them all about my latest wild adventures, only to be greeted by this:


As I started talking, the number of fingers on mum or dad's hand would gradually start counting down with the number of sentences I had already blurted out.

It seems that my 4-7 year old self had a few issues with structured, concise or even logical tale-telling. So my parents had invented the 5 finger rule: Each finger represented a sentence, and I was given 5 sentences to explain my story to them. It always panicked me greatly. Because there was soooooo much to tell and so little time to tell it in. And if I didn't blurt it all out as the memories popped into my head, I might forget about em all, and then how would anyone ever know about all the weird things I learned or just how much fun I had!?! *shock-horror-panick*

lol

I do remember mum&dad smiling at me as I got more nervous with each countdown of a finger. My face must have shown just how hard my little mind was trying to figure out how to make the whole story fit into the very last finger. On occasions, when I was *really* over-excited, they would burst out grinning and start counting down the fingers of the other hand as well, to allow me a little more time.

Tell you what though... my excited all-over-the-place approach to tale telling has since been streamlined in an uncanny ability to make VERY long sentences, indeed. Hurray to parenting! ;-)

Hungoverdly Brotherly Love

In the spirit of Yuletide festivity & all things family, my brother and I decided to go out for a few drinks together last night. We headed for the Limonada Lounge Bar in Ghent, home extroardinaire of exotic coctails and had a few. It was 3a.m. before we noticed it and we eventually called it a night when Matt practically slipped off his stool. It was a true Hallmark moment. Thanks Bruv, 'tis most definitely the season to be jolly... falala...la... and all that ;-)

Gadgets for the Needy Geek

It's an established fact that I am a geek of the 1st degree. The worst kind that is. When Star Trek Voyager ended, I went out to buy the books to find out what happened to the crew after they made it home. (Hey, I missed my Trek Family allright?!?) I've a human-sized full-length picture of Einstein attached to my wall (fair enough, it's hung right next to my picture of a Highland Cow, but that's beside the point). I'm entirely wireless. I have a backup for my backup. I ordered the latest Harry Potter book 6 months before it got published. I own a telescope (which admittedly I only use to spy on our neighbours, but still). I take a thermal blanket/survival kit with me when I ski. I get excited by thunderstorms, lunar eclipses, foraging squirrels and the very lastest digital gadgets. And this week, I've been getting *VERY* excited about the impending arrival of my latest purchase...

Tada:
The Archos AV420. I've been eyeing up this puppy for weeks now, and I finally found a place that sold it with a 30% discount! (nope, even Amazon got beaten to the price this time) How chuffed am I??

This thing beats every i-pod out there. It's a harddrive-based storage medium so there is not need for software to transfer anything. And there are no issues with music licenses. You just drag and drop everything straight onto the 20Gb device.

- It plays DVD, mpeg & DivX video files
- It supports mp3, wav & wma music files
- U can connect ur camera straight to it via USB & upload ur pictures on it (very handy when travelling!)
- U can link it to your TV/DVD player and record programs/films on it, so there's no more need for tapes.

And all this on a device the size of a PDA, for (in my case) not much more than the price of the i-Pod. It's got rave reviews, so I don't know why this thing isn't more popular. It should arrive next week. Fingers crossed I don't find out why it's not popular then. Catch me crying on this blog if I do ;-)

Too much of a good thing.

A little over two months ago, my mum brought back a Redken "protein hair-treatment". Her hairdresser had suggested she'd use it every 4 days and since I have a tendency to steal intriguing products brought home by others, I too have been "protein treating" my hair every 4 days for the past 2 months or so.

Until yesterday that is... when mum notified me of the fact that she'd misheard her hairdresser and that the treatment was only to be used every 4 WEEKS. Said hairdresser apparently panicked: "That's powerfull stuff you got there m'am, you haven't really been using it every 4 days, have you?!"

*Loud Cough* erm... I'm afraid we have.

This MITE explain why my hair grew so ridiculously fast and why I've had to fork out on another haircut today, a mere 7 weeks after my last one. Good Stuff!

Belgian Trip Hop

What better way to spend a hungoverdly Sunday evening than at Hooverphonic gig at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels?



None.


The stage was well atuned to the laid back "trip hop"-vibe so wonderfully embodied by the *very* sexy Geike Arnaert: a mere few orchestratedly-glowing industrial lightbulbs strung from the high ceiling, a string quartet & the electronics. Simple.

With no less than 4 encores, we were treated to a very chilled out night. Highlight for me was undoubtedly "Eden", though their new oeuvre most certainly risks chasing the old time favorite from its number 1 spot. The new album is available for download in January, with their European tour starting spring 2006. Recommended!

Weddings

I'm not too keen on weddings. They inevitably spell a "dressing up" disaster. As a lesbian, the problem is two-fold. Most of us are genetically predisposed to an aversion for anything remotely leg-less. Outfits of the dress/skirt variety tend to terrify us out of our wits. However, the suit/pants&shirt alternative is quite possibly even worse, for it's the stereotypical epithome of all that's butch & dyke.

So a wedding invite generally causes me personally, to convulse. I once returned an invite to a friend's wedding with an accompanying note saying: "please don't make the lesbian dress up". THAT's how big an issue it can become.

However, 5 months of therapy have enabled me to "ignore" my own genetic fashion predispositions to some extent, and when the invite to my cousin's wedding dropped through the letterbox, the convulsive symptoms were reduced to a mere nervous twitch around the mouth. I put the invite aside, and consequently conciously forgot about it.

But Saturday evening, the said date had arrived and I was forced to take stock of my wardrobe. I managed to put together a cheap mean consisting of a simple black/grey/brownish long skirt, girlie shoes and a very comforting black sweater. Had it not been for the subzero temperatures, I would have blended in VERY nicely :-)


Luckily, our family weddings tend to be fairly alcohol fueled, so by midnight everyone was shaking a leg on the dancefloor till the wee hours and I no longer felt the cold. Despite the vast sea of acquaintances, all us cousins flocked together and got collectively drunk from the word go. This process was nicely speeded up by the fact that there was no proper sit down dinner and that the table we'd chosen to gather round had a centrepiece built in, which consisted of icecubes lit from underneath, and stacked with 20-odd bottles of white wine, free for us to grab at will. Which, needless to say, we did.

I was off my face. Not surprising, seeing as I rarely drink and necked two bottles of wine on my tod that night. But I remember dancing. With just about everyone there. So when I finally reached my bed at 5.30 I fell asleep with a very twitchy leg and a rather content smile on my face. 10 more months till the next debaucherie. Can hardly wait ;)

Ridiculous

I know, I know... it's been a ridiculously long absence from the blog. Which generally means I actually HAVE something interesting to tell, but too little time to do so cuz I've been enjoying the interesting things too much ;) Isn't life great that way?
Anywho... I spent some time struggling with stats and nearly lost the will to live over it. SO I booked myself a four day trip to bonnie Glaz-goh, which turned out to last a week. I'm not sure how that happened. Glasgow kind of suckers one in that way...

It involved:
- some gorgeous Zimbabwean hospitality
- day-long grilled bacon
- tons of horlicks
- a morphine induced unscratchable itch
- an embarassing encounter with a spray-on tan
- candyfloss&christmas lights
- japanese food times two
- a wasabi snort
- a shout-out by Skin
- a silly wiggle at an artschool
- a nippy walk in foggy hills
- late night irateness
- a 3A.M. jimmy-jam fire alarm escape from the 9th floor of a cheap hostel
- an impressive guided tour in a no longer flooded Carlisle house
- a fabulous early xmas roast dinner
- a hot cup of coffee in an abandoned scottish trainstation
- annoying belgians on a £15 flight home
- a ginormous therapy session to recuperate

I thank you all!