Long weekend
January 28th 2003 -
Saturday
I was feeling a bit under the weather (which was hot) on Saturday so skipped out on John D.’s wine-tasting dinner, stayed at home and played Final Fantasy X, on which I have now clocked up just over 24 hours of gameplay, which I can’t quite believe. Perhaps it counts time that I’ve had the game on pause – I tend to pause, turn off the TV, and go and do something else, fairly often. One of the big problems with the game is that you can’t just save anywhere. You can only save at the dedicated save-points, an innovation that serves only to annoy.
Sunday
On Sunday we went to a BBQ hosted by Anna’s best friend. Unfortunately, I had neglected to inform this fact to Chris, Amanda and Andrea, so when they arrived at our place at 3:15pm or so, we were still desparately trying to extract ourselves from the BBQ, thus simultaneously making two groups of people rather cranky. Buggah. Anyway, the rest of the evening was good. We’ve been roleplaying the “Bright and De’Ath” ’70′s-TV-detective-show game again – this time a movie-length episode – and it has been going quite well indeed. This time around Bright and De’Ath are summoned to Egypt, where there have been mysterious deaths in the road-crew of the band “Crystal Gravity”. Last weekend we played it for almost three hours, a lot longer than I can usually sustain the energy, but it worked well. This time, I lasted about two hours, so we rounded out the night by playing “Lord of the Rings”, which we very frustratingly almost won, only failing at the last dice roll. Amanda played us some of the songs that she and Chris had composed, and very grand they were too – I’m kinda hoping we’ll get them onto the upcoming Spit album.
Monday
On Monday, we drove to the Blue Mountains and did some bush walking there, along with Chris & Amanda and Andrea and Jon & Kate. It were good. I’m not usually mad-keen on bush-walking, but it has been long enough that I quite enjoyed it, particularly as the pace was fairly slow. Chris & Amanda and (to a lesser extent) Andrea and Anna kept bounding ahead while the rest of us ambled along and tried to come up with ideas for short films that we could make using the marvellous scenery.
The one big annoyance – or rather, lots of small annoyances – was the flies. We had a big picnic lunch, and the flies were everywhere. I’m *still* feeling a little twitchy. Then home again; Kate cooked us dinner and we played scrabble until the wee hours.
Anyway, it was pretty great. Anna wants to go bushwalking once a month now.