I'm leaving on a jet plane

don’t know when… actually, I do – I’ll be back on Tuesday night.

I’m off to Wellington for a few days, ostensibly for work, but as usual instead of flying up on Monday morning for a couple of days of exciting meetings I managed to change my flights so I get the weekend to enjoy more of the city than the inside of a hotel conference room. And of course I’ll be meeting up with the Wellington bookcrossers.

I’m all packed (I couldn’t quite fill my bag with 20kg of books because I had to leave a bit of space for some tidy clothes for work, but I got close :-)), and my taxi to the airport is booked, so I’m just filling in a few minutes here before I have to go.

I’ve had an interesting few days (for a given value of interesting). On Thursday night I went to a tupperware party. Yes, they still have them – I thought they’d gone out in the 70s. One of the women at work was hosting it, and promised I didn’t actually have to buy anything. A good thing too – their prices are astronomical! I went along thinking I could just buy something small, just to be polite, but the cheapest things started at about $30 (and that was for silly little gadgety things I’d never buy in a million years). Most of the actually useful containers were in the $50-$100 range. Sorry, but there’s no way I’m going to pay $50 for a plastic box, no matter how wonderful their lifetime guarantee is.

But other than spending the evening avoiding the saleswoman, I actually kind of enjoyed it – there were a few other people I knew from work there, who I don’t normally get the chance to just sit and chat with, and thankfully there weren’t any of those excruciating ice-breaker games so beloved by party plan salespeople.

Then last night I got a phone call from Mrs gwilk, inviting me round to their place to play Rock Band (or some variation of it) on their Playstation. She’d been telling me about it a while back, and thought I might like to see it in action. So I went round and had a go… and let me just say, I’m not destined to become a rock star! I was terrible! It was great fun though – we had me on bass, gwilk on guitar, Mrs gwilk on vocals, and gwilk jr on drums, and lots of laughs. Luckily the game can set different difficulty settings for each player, so I could struggle along on the absolute beginner level while they were all on expert.

Right, better get my shoes on and get ready to go. See you when I get back!