Catching up

Well, that was a busy few weeks! I am so incredibly behind with writing my diary (let alone reading anyone else’s) I can’t beleive it – where on earth do I start? I think I’ll start with the easy stuff this week and work backwards to the weekends in Mt Cook and Wellington, which involved lots of releasing books and other things that take longer to write about.

So. I arrived back from Wellington late Tuesday night, and the next morning it was back to work. Luckily, a reasonably quiet week work-wise (we got the worst of our end of year rush out the way the week before), because I was totally shattered. MrPloppy‘s birthday on Thursday (I got him a couple of DVDs and a CD, plus the DVDs of the second series of Dr Who that we’d pre-ordered ages ago arrived the day before without him realising, so I wrapped them up as an extra surprise :-)). We were going to go out for dinner that night, but I was so tired we decided to postpone it until the weekend.

So last night we went out for a very nice dinner, and afterwards went to see Children of Men (a strange film – parts of it were fantastically good, other parts were a bit disappointing. Really interesting concept, though.) We realised at some point during the evening that this was the first time we’d properly gone out as a couple for a very long time (as in getting dressed up and going somewhere nice, as opposed to just grabbing dinner in town out of convenience, or going to a bookcrossing meetup) – probably a couple of years. It had just become too difficult for MrPloppy, so going out stopped being enjoyable for either of us, so we got out of the habit. It’s so nice to be able to do that sort of thing again (even if we can’t afford to make a habit of it!), and even better, to be spontaneous about it – we hadn’t actually planned to see a movie afterwards, we were just passing the theatre on the way back to the bus depot and saw from the session times board that a film we’d both been interested in seeing was about to start, so went in. That might not seem like a big deal to anyone else, but trust me, it’s huge.

December is here, so I put up the Christmas tree yesterday. The cats were all asleep, so I managed to get it up without their “assistance” this year (phew!)

Suppose I’d better think about doing some Christmas shopping soon… (the presents already under the tree are from MrPloppy’s family, who are all ultra-efficient about sending presents nice and early).

After not having any bookring books arrive for ages, I’ve had a sudden flood of them. This week Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk and Creatures of the Night by Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli arrived, and I’ve had several PMs asking for my address, so that means others will probably arrive soon. Some of them are ones I signed up for so long ago I don’t actually remember them, but that’s the beauty of bookrings – they take so long to circulate sometimes that it’s a complete surprise when this book suddenly turns up on your doorstep.

While I was in Wellington I finally succumbed and bought myself an MP3 player (no, not an iPod – from what I can tell half of what you’re paying for is the name, and I’ve never been one to follow fashion). Only a 1GB model (anything bigger than that was going to be too expensive), but that should be plenty for my needs, as I doubt it will be getting a lot of music loaded onto it – I intend mostly to use it for listening to audiobooks, and an entire book easily fits onto 1GB. The plan is to get an audiobook out from the library each week and load it onto the MP3 player so I can listen to it while walking to work (I’ve finally decided reading while walking is going to get me run over one day!). If I walk to and from work every day (which I normally do, unless it’s really raining), that’s about 6-8 hours of listening time (depends on how fast I walk, traffic, etc), and most unabridged audiobooks are of a similar length, so it should work out quite nicely (unless I do things like I did this weekend and put my MP3 player on while doing things like sitting in the garden, putting up the tree, cleaning the oven… oops, next week’s book is almost finished already!)

Of course, I’m technically breaking the law by making a copy of the audiobooks, but I’m not keeping the copies, but deleting them as soon as I’ve listened to them, so my conscience is pretty clear [FutureCat looks around furtively for the copyright police].

Currently reading: Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Currently listening to: The Cat Who Wasn’t There by Lilian Jackson Braun