Saturday night was Clare’s uncle’s 40th. It was commemerated by a major bash at his place, complete with ridiculous amounts of alcohol, service staff, very little food and a karaoke setup. Needless to say, this is an explosive combination. No-one knows how to throw a party quite like Alex.

I managed (as far as I know) to avoid completely disgracing myself in a drunken mess, which is always a plus. However at some point we decided that karaoke was a fine invention. I forget what songs I ended up belting out, but I’m sure they were forgettable.

Sunday was spent in recovery mode. Did general house crap, pruned the garden, washed the vehicles etc. I also got a bunch of my tax crap done (finally). There’s still a bit more information I need to collate before I can put it to bed, but I’m getting there.

I tried out a new dish on Sunday night. It’s something my mother used to make a lot (she may still) and that Luke’s been telling me I should do because it’s awesomely cheap. Mussels with a tomato and white wine sauce. It didn’t actually end up being all that cheap for us. Not overly expensive, but not incredibly cheap either. The mussels cost us about $10 to serve 2 people. I think they must be out of season or something. Anyway, the recipe is nothing revolutionary but I couldn’t find anything online so it’s a David Banham Original.

Ooh, and I finished Tony Hawk’s Project 8 on Friday. Definitely an enjoyable game overall. The bail physics still annoy me but it’s not enough to completely kill it. That said, now that I’ve finished it I probably won’t be revisiting it to play back through the challenges. I’m really looking forward to playing some GRAW though. Should be good.

The Winner 11 pressure washer by Kärcher. This thing is my new favourite toy.

I’ve been tossing up on getting one to wash the car for a while. With the water restrictions in Sydney at the moment you can’t use a hose to wash your car, just a bucket. Needless to say, this becomes a pain when rinsing off detergent etc. So, a rather elegant solution is to use a pressure washer instead. Even just hooked up to the mains these use a lot less water than a traditional hose. To satisfy the regulations, however, you need to hook it up to a bucket which then gravity feeds through a hose. It’s a pain, but it’s better than getting fined.

So anyway, I’d been looking at the Winner 11 in Bunnings for a while. It was only $99 which made me a bit dicey about it since I wasn’t sure if it was actually going to put out any decent pressure. I had a look around eBay and graysonline and ummed and ahhed for a while before eventually just buying one at the weekend.

It’s by no means wimpy. It’s freaking awesome. Not only did I wash the car, I also made a start on clearing the flaking paint off the wall around the pool and cleaned up some of the pavers too. It blows my mind how sophisticated and powerful this thing is for $99. I spent pretty much the whole afternoon playing with it.

In other news, I’m still sweating on finding out whether I got into uni or not. We previously thought that the results were released 9pm on Tuesday night. It’s now apparent that they’re actually available Wednesday night, prolonging the waiting a whole ‘nother 24 hours. Argh.

It’s kind of a bitch. Slept in late today and then went out and blitzed the crap out of a bunch of weeds in the back yard. I eventually had to stop since the bin got full but there’s a lot more work there. The entire thing is really badly overgrown with grass and this really agressive vine. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a bitch. It’s killed one tree out there and it’s now my aim to make sure it doesn’t kill any more.

In less boring news: Tony Hawk’s Project 8 looks really cool. It was what kept me up last night which led to my sleeping in this morning. As all the reviews say it’s much more stripped back than many of the recent titles have been. A lot of the extraneous crap of American Wasteland (which I still finished and really enjoyed) has been ditched. You can still jump off your board and go on foot but it’s not at all a focus of the game. All the funky parkour moves are gone.

The strange thing is that the physics engine seems to have taken a step backwards too. It performs fine when skating but sometimes just totally flips out when you bail. Weird screen spinning errors style flipping out. Also, when you mash keys to get up faster it now seems to sometimes forget that the bail ever happened and you’re just skating again in some arbitrarily chosen direction. I’m not sure if it’s going to annoy me long term, hope not.

Heading out to dinner tonight with Luke and Bon which will be fun. We’re hitting up a pizza resteraunt calls La Disfida which Bonny says is great. Clare has a feeling that we went there once while I was living in Five Dock, which is right near Haberfield. Unsurprisingly, I can’t remember at all. Maybe when I see the place it’ll job a memory.

Best of all, it’s BYO. BYO FTW.