The weekend

In a calmer voice now… 😉

We had a very busy day on Saturday. First up was a breakfast meetup (hmm, I haven’t heard yet what the new official name for meetups is going to be – they were supposed to be voting on it at Charleston) at Trattorie, attended by me, MrPloppy, lytteltonwitch, and the awhina clan. I haven’t been into Trattorie for ages, so didn’t realise just how bare the bookshelf was getting. I’ll have to remember to pop in and restock it more often. I did add a couple of books this time though, that I’d brought along for the meetup but nobody wanted: The Book of Colour by Julia Blackburn and All My Patients are Under the Bed by Louis J. Camuti. Lytteltonwitch took home the other two books I’d brought, Thieves Dozen by Donald E. Westlake and The Cat Who Smelled a Rat by Lilian Jackson Braun.

After the meetup we headed over to Burnside High, where the Rotary Club were having a booksale. The prices were a bit too high for my liking (most books were $2, even for paperbacks), so I didn’t buy much. At those prices I wasn’t going to buy books just for releasing, and I didn’t see much I wanted to read (anyway, Mt TBR is so high I don’t really need anything else to read!). However, it was worth going to the booksale, because while there we ran into the gwilks. Awhina had already invited herself back to my place for lunch, because she wanted to see the powerpoint presentation, so I ended up inviting everyone back (after a quick dash to the supermarket to get some food, as our fridge had been looking a bit bare). I think we did a pretty good job of creating lunch for 10 people on about 20 minute’s notice!

After lunch the kids were having fun playing in the jungle of our back yard (we really must get out there and do some gardening one day…), so gwilk suggested some board games for the adults. Awhina and MrAwhina had some shopping to do, so they left the girls with us (and from the speed with which they agreed when I suggested the girls could stay, we decided it wasn’t shopping on their minds!), and the afternoon was spent very pleasantly with gwilk jr. watching MrPloppy’s Pingu videos while the rest of us played “Apples to Apples” and “Flea Circus”.

The girls were getting a bit hyper over the games (especially “Flea Circus”, with a few fights erupting over the little cats that are used as counters), so after the gwilks left we sat them in front of a DVD (the Johnny Depp remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) to calm down a bit, and ended up getting ensconced in it ourselves – I was disappointed when MrAwhina turned up to take the girls home so we had to stop watching! 🙂

It was a good thing he did turn up when he did, though, because I then realised I had about half an hour to get ready before I had to go out again. Norm and Brenda had invited us out to their farm for dinner and a games evening, and Norm was picking us up at 5 o’clock. So it was a quick race around getting presentable and sorting out wine etc to take with us.

Tam and Ian were there too, so we had a really fun evening, playing “Rummikub” and a word game which I can’t remember the name of. I was seriously tired by the end of the night, though – having the girls for the afternoon had exhausted me enough, without having to go out afterwards! Oh well, it was a good day though, even if I was shattered at the end of it.

Sunday, needless to say, was spent very lazily, mostly checking LJ and the forums for reports from Charleston.