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.

It’s been a while since I had a chance to post, things have just been crazy lately.

So, when I left off I’d just gotten into uni. I found out about it on the 17th and then had to go enrol on the 22nd, pretty damned fast. The UTS enrolment process is excellent, however, and was nothing like the crap I’ve heard you have to go through at Sydney. All told I was in and out within about 45 minutes.

The subjects are basically set for the first year of my degree. There was only one elective and it was a no-brainer. A Business Strategy subject against some accounting/banking/finance crap. What did annoy me a bit is that while most spots on the timetable were open, there were a couple of good times that I missed out on. This is because even though I attended the first available enrolment session for non school leavers, all the school leavers had already been through and chosen their subjects. To me, it seems obvious that non school leavers are going to have more commitments around work, kids, etc than people just out of year 12. Anyway, not a big deal. There’s only one class that’s a real problem and I’ll have a crack at talking to the tutor to get into the better timeslot. Overall my first semester timetable is pretty good, 2 full days off. The only problem is that Monday is a pretty full day, meaning no time for work.

Which brings me to work. Unfortunately there’s really no other part time work within the business so at this point it looks like I’m sticking with my current role on a part time basis. I feel like I’ve wussed out a bit, but there are very few jobs out there that offer the level of flexibility that mine does while paying this kind of money. So for the time being it’s the lesser of two evils. Hopefully the fact that I’m in the office 50% less often will mean I hate it 50% less, which will mean it’s bearable. I hope.

Enrolment on Monday began a week of craziness. Clare and I had social crap on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. We’re normally not nearly that cool so it was kind of a shock to the system.

Monday night was Raw Comedy at the Comedy Club with Luke and Bonny. Was a great night overall but some of the comics were just goddamned woeful. Anyway, at $10 for a concession I highly recommend it as a night out.

Tuesday was pub trivia, nothing exciting. Wednesday we caught up with Maccy and his new girlfriend, Bec. (I tried Beck but it just looked like the musician. I’m sticking with Bec. Hopefully I don’t offend anyone) We hadn’t met Bec before so luckily she was lovely and a great night was had by all. Tapas, paella and sangria for the win.

Friday was, naturally, Australia day which entailed the now-traditional Cove Australia Day barbie which was bloody fantastic. Good times, good beers, good sausages, good friends and a swimming pool = excellent. Alex Z came along which was great since it was his birthday and we see each other entirely too infrequently. We had a great drunken chat in the swimming pool and made plans to go bushwalking on Sunday which unfortunately never eventuated, but have been rescheduled to this weekend.

The only downside of the evening was that Luke completely and utterly defiled my kitchen while trying to make cocktails. At one point he was using a coffee plunger as a strainer which entailed sticky cocktail juice being projected into every nook and cranny of the kitchen. Needless to say a couple hours of Saturday was spent cleaning up.

Saturday night was Michael Joseph’s farewell dinner at Genghis Khan in the city. I’m normally a big fan of The Khan, however I’ve never been to the city branch of it. Unfortunately it falls prey to the one thing that aggravates me most about restaurants. Too many tables and not enough staff. At one point we waited 45 minutes in the queue to get our food cooked because there was a packed restaurant at peak time with only one freaking chef actually cooking. There were two others working that night. One of them was ferrying bowls out to the buffet station and the other one appeared to be off having a smoke for most of the time. Note to all chefs working in busy restaurants. You have more important things to be doing than carting crockery around the place. That is what waiters are for. Consider yourselves notified.

We then moved on to James Squire bar which is an undiscovered gem for me. Not overcrowded, fairly laid back atmosphere and excellent, excellent beers. Obviously a bit pricier than your run-of-the-mill local pub, but not at all unreasonable for the quality of beer on offer and lower than the average in that neck of the woods.

Sunday I did very little since plans fell through. I did, however spend almost 4 fucking hours cooking bolognaise sauce. Our neighbours had a surplus of tomatoes during the week and were kind enough to bring us a bag. Lovely plump organically grown sauce tomatoes that smelled lush. Little did I know that it was actually a sentence to 4 hours of kitchen drudgery. 2 kilos of mince, 2 bulbs of garlic and a bunch of onions later, I have realised two things. 1) The PSP is an excellent thing to kill time in between stirring sauces. 2) I need a bigger saucepan for this kind of crap. I’m not writing up a recipe since it’s just bolognaise. Meat, garlic, onions, tomatoes, herbs, seasoning. Job done.

The upshot is that the sauce tasted great and I didn’t have to clean up any of the mess I made. That’s what Clares are for. Bonus.

Flogged the crap out of myself at the gym on Monday night as a punishment for being such a lazy prick lately. I’m still feeling the effects now.

And that brings us up to the present day. I’m looking up and there’s a whole hunka’ words. If you’ve read all this way you deserve a lollipop.

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.