Drunken PMs and other reminders of the 80s

Well it’s been a busy week or so since I last made a diary entry. FutureCat seems to have actually acquired a bit of a social life!

First awhina rang me on Friday morning to ask if I wanted to go to dinner and/or the pictures with her that night, because she was kittenless for the night and was feeling at a loose end. It sounded like a great idea, until we started looking through the film listings, and saw what a dismal selection was on offer (there were a few films that looked worth seeing, but they were all either on at stupid times, or one of us had already seen it), so we ended up revising our plans a bit, finally settling on pizza and a DVD at my place. It was a fun evening, though – we still ended up watching a rubbish film (What Women Want), but that kind of film can be fun as long as you accept from the start that it’s going to be rubbish and that the entertainment value is mainly going to come from laughing about just how rubbish it is (MrPloppy just gave up and left the room in disgust after the pizza was finished).

Then on Sunday we had a bookcrossing picnic in Deans Bush as an alternative to our usual Sunday Breakfast meetup. It was pretty well attended: me, lytteltonwitch, non-fiction, natecull, awhina and the kitten, and a friend of awhina’s and her three children. The picnic idea worked out really well, so I think we’ll be trying a few more over the summer.

Then it was off to Wellington, where in between boring work-type meetings I not only got to meet a very drunk Michael Cullen at a dinner party (and as Helen Clark is away overseas, he’s technically Prime Minister at the moment, which led to a few jokes by other party-goers about him trying to bring back the Muldoon era… hmm, I wonder if “drunk in charge of a country” is a criminal offence like “drunk in charge of a bicycle”?), but more importantly I got to meet a few of the Wellington Bookcrossers: Sherlockfan, discoverylover, edwardstreet, and Alectoness (who is one of “Manhire‘s Babies”, so I told her we’ll be expecting to see a bestselling book out of her any day now…). It’s the first time they’ve had a proper meetup in Wellington, so I’m hoping I’ve inspired them to have more. I wasn’t able to take many books up with me (lack of luggage space combined with the fact that I gave almost all my releasable books away at the Fun Day meant I only took up a book lytteltonwitch had asked me to deliver to Sherlockfan and The Wild Alien Tamer by Mike Resnick), but there was already a large pile of books on the table when I arrived at the meetup, so my lack of contribution wasn’t a problem. Of course, the luggage space shortage didn’t stop me picking up a few books to take home: The Alienist by Caleb Carr, The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, and Undressed (a history of a few recent New Zealand fashion designers which didn’t interest me at all, but I said I’d release somewhere in Christchurch just to get it travelling).

With all the excitement over, the jet-setting cat was back to Christchurch just in time for MrPloppy’s birthday. He didn’t want a party or to go out anywhere (which was a relief to me after the busyness of the previous few days!), so we just had a quiet dinner at home for the two of us and watched some of his birthday present – the DVD box-set of The Office (I think we might be watching quite a bit of that for the next few weeks).

I got a great catch notification this morning: Pay Dirt by Rita Mae Brown, a book I released two and a half years ago, has just been caught. From the sound of the journal entry it must have passed through several hands to reach the current journaller – I’d love to know the full story of where it’s been for all that time!

Currently reading: A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race by Carl Sagan and Richard Turco (I had put it aside for a few days while I was travelling, in favour of a couple of lighter books (both in terms of content and weight!) but now I’ve gone back to it again) and Cuentos en español (which it’s about time I got back into, seeing as the whole point of reading it was to keep up my Spanish skills over the summer)