Splurge

There are a few pleasant side effects to MrPloppy being out of work. One I particularly enjoy is the fact that he does all the housework, so that I come home from work to a clean house and dinner prepared – I can suddenly see why men have always been so keen on women being housewives… 🙂 Another benefit is that our parents have all got it into their heads that we’re starving and on the verge of bankruptcy (which we’re not – we’ve had to cut back on a few luxuries, but otherwise we’re surviving quite comfortably on my salary), so we keep getting given money for Christmas and birthday presents. Add that to the fact that MrPloppy’s parents still haven’t quite got their heads round the exchange rate (no matter how often we tell them that £20 goes a long way in NZ money, and is a lot more than is necessary for “a birthday drink” as they always say in their cards), and between MrPloppy’s birthday and Christmas it’s added up to quite a bit.

We both believe that present money shouldn’t be used for boring things like paying bills, so we decided yesterday to go into town and blow it all on fun stuff while there are sales on, which we succeeded in doing quite nicely, coming home with a new game for the PS2 (Lego Star Wars, which is brilliantly silly – we had a demo for the PC version, which my nephews love (as soon as they came in the door the other day, the first thing Nephew#1 said was “I really love that Star Wars game” (which is his new “polite” way of hinting that he’d like to play it)) – the demo’s enough to keep them entertained for ages (they’re only 4 and 2, after all!), but the full game is a bit more entertaining for us over-5s!); several DVDs (The Phantom Menace (just to complete the set – we’ve got it on video, but that’s not the same); Fight Club; Edward Scissorhands; and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban); and a few music CDs (which MrPloppy picked, so are all by totally obscure artists I don’t remember the names of and who nobody else would have heard of anyway).

When we got back from town, I went round to gwilk‘s place – his wife used to be in a book discussion group, which eventually folded through lack of interest, and a few of the ex-members had discussed replacing it with a film club that would go a see a movie together once a month. Mrs Gwilk had mentioned this when they were at our place the other night, and I’d said I might be interested, so she emailed me yesterday morning to say they were getting together that afternoon to set up the group and invited me along. I did feel a little bit out of place at first, being the only woman there who didn’t have a string of kids in tow, but they do seem like a friendly group, and the plan for seeing a film each month sounds like fun (and might inspire me to actually go to the pictures more often, instead of my normal thing of saying “that sounds like a good film, we must go and see it” and then by the time I think of it again it’s gone and we just wait and see it on DVD), so I joined up. They’re also planning on organising a few board game evenings, which might be fun to go along to too. So I might end up having quite a social year at this rate!