Weekend: Part 3: Saturday Night, Spiderman's party

Saturday night I managed to drag myself to a party at Mike the Activist's place in Coburg. Man, my people don't have enough parties, it's been aaaaaaages since I went to one.

Mike is an extremely tall guy I know from the Culture Jammers, who I discovered has a tendency to dress as Spiderman! However when I rocked up he was in full seventies gear. I'd mis-read the invitation, there was a bit of dress up theme going on. Although Mike had gone all out with an "M" cape etc.!

Chatted to a whole bunch of randoms. Met a woman who has a business selling Furniture... In second life! That was odd. Got talking about love hotels with a half-japanese couple (er, the GF was the Japanese one, that make's 'em half Japanese :-) Ended up, as usual, having several lewd conversations about nooky... Played the "who's the nerdiest here" game which I won roundly by sending an email to one of them from my phone. Not to mention showing 'em facebook on it. Note to self: these are not the kinds of contests you should be proud of winning.... :-)

Mike has a bit of a performing streak, and treated us all to a poem about spiderman, before we ate his spiderman shaped cake!

Chatted to a woman who I'd met once before, years ago. She was involved with a chap I'd been talking to earlier. I demanded they do more public displays of affection, because it wasn't obvious. Later I caught them embracing and encouraged them. Anyway, it turns out this woman had shared a place with my cousin! I knew Mike knew my cous, so I shouldn't have been too surprised. She also knew a woman called Anastasia that I sort of know, and she'd met my dad! This whole Small World thing is getting a bit too weird...

There was a great deal of TISM played later in the night, which made we weirdly nostalgic. Mike told me a story about how he and his mate used to go around pretending they were in TISM, until one day they met an actual member of the band :-)

I drank the slab that Bon Scott drank, I injected some of Hendrix's junk...

Dragged myself home at about 3AM. I gotta stop going out so late!

Weekend, Part 4: The Sunday I Tried to Go To Geelong

(Before I forget: Amusing story from our weekend house hunting. We looked at a place in Northcote which was kinda behind Northcote High. I'd been teasing Barbara about her lack of men - as usual - and made some comment about how "at least this place is near the highschool". She found this far more amusing than it should have been...)

Ok, Sunday. I finally crowbared my arse out of bed around 10AM. This was a problem, because I had to make a trip down to Geelong - my grandfather is ailing apparently. Although... it's hard to tell from the way my Mother tells it. He's not doing to badly for someone 93 years old, but then people that age can fade fast.

I managed to get out of bed and get to the station, only to find that the train was at 10.35 from Merri, and the Geelong train was at 11AM - that doesn't work. So I jogged back to my place and drove to Spencer Street station in about fifteen minutes flat. I should mention at this point that my car is old and tired and not up to long journeys like Geelong. I seriously thought about renting a car, but couldn't think of a way to make that work - the rental places are all in Preston, and I've had had to return the car before work on Monday which would have sucked. Tried to borrow my dad's car, but a cousin had beaten me to it.

Anyway, made the station, then watched the minutes till the train left counting down while I stood in the ticket queue. I was almost at the head of the queue when the departure time on the wall clicked over to "now". I put my wallet back in my pocket and stomped off... Only to see the train still standing there. Fuck fuck fuck. I could probably have made it. Fuck fuck.

Decided it was high time to get some breakfast, so I drove to the Tin Pot cafe in Fitzroy. It occurs to me that part of the reason I'm always broke is because of my instance on living in the inner city and doing the inner city thing... I was watching all the tattoo and pierced hip young things sipping their lattes, and I thought... I should disengage, stop looking for houses in Fitzroy, head out to Coburg or somewhere and cook for myself routinely. I am not a bright young 20 something any more.

Which I then proved further by going home and more or less passing out. I slept for most of the afternoon. This last week caught up with me. Then I dragged myself to the gym. Will have to make the trip to Geeeeeeeeeeeelong next weekend...

Press to Failure, Part Two

I've been working out (lifting weight, going to the Gym, whatever you want to call it) for about nine and a half years now. Which is both dedicated and getting a bit complicated.

Because I've pretty much done every exercise you can possibly imagine. Until they invent some new machine or something. Smith machine squats: check. Preacher Curls: check. Skull crushers (a tricep exercise which ends with a barbell resting on your forehead!): check.

But one thing I have never done is write a program of my own. I had a somewhat postponed reassessment today, so I thought it high time to put one together...

Only to discover I have only a partial clue about it. Each program tends to be divided into sets of muscles - back, chest, shoulders etc. I had a vague lists of exercises I wanted to do, but I couldn't for the life of me remember which part of the body the were for. Is the one arm raise a back or a chest exercise? Anyway, some areas were easy, arms (hammer curls, tricep pull down), legs (the aforementioned smith machine squats, calf raises) and abs (roman chair, superman raises, hover). But the rest I wasn't sure about, so I just wrote them all down and hoped for the best.

And I did well, I more or less wrote out my whole program. The rather fetching gym instructor lady merely wrote it up for me and gave me some suggestions for how to do the sets.

I'll be buffed in no time *tenses pecs*