tiredStill, the possibility of part-time work had me hurriedly renovating the "Corporate Website", which meant I got to practice fixing cross-browser problems caused by not wanting to steal stuff too blatantly. It's a pity the effect is spoiled by having decided that the text I'd written on web development was too much of a rant to keep it up somewhere I'm trying to persuade people to employ me. So that's going to need fixing soon.
Play-time this weekend was mostly at the Pond. Considering the amount of drinking that got done on Friday and Saturday, it's perhaps as well that I'd only stayed at K. Jackson's for a couple of drinks on the Thursday (combination of cold-induced deafness and inability to taste the beer, followed by a sudden increase in the noise level of the pub when a Burns' Supper got out).
The first visit to the Pond was on Friday evening with
feorag. Pausing only to pick some surprisingly decent canned beer from Lidl (for the ill-fated party), we wandered down to Salamander Street. The pub was fairly empty, and the first barrel of the festival (an Andechser Spezial Helle - 6% abv, and "not a beer that drinks to its strength") was still on. So we had some of that to start with, before moving onto the pub's usual wheat beer (Erdinger). Things get a little hazy from here (no pun intended), and no doubt feorag can correct me, but I think we followed this with the Erdinger dunkel, a smoked beer (the one that the nice off-licence at the bottom of Dundas Street has most of the time) and a black lager that tasted very like some of the ones I'd been drinking in Czech during the summer.Eventually we headed up the road, having bought four bottles of wheat beer (which I'd promised faithfully to return on Saturday) and detoured briefly into Homes' Bar.
Of course, as we'd been out since the middle of the afternoon, we'd not been keeping up with LiveJournal, so it was a bit of a surprise to turn up at
gothtart's flat to find no party, and no gothtart either, but a snowberries and hughe who filled us in on what had happened and let us sit and chat for a while.We taxi'd back to Trinity and filled in
tigermoth on the story so far, before calling feorag a taxi and crashing out.The next day,
tigermoth and I went to the hospital to collect gothtart (who seemed surprisingly chipper, considering) and take her for breakfast at Favorit before returning to Trinity. Email was read and LiveJournals updated before I went back to work (the above-mentioned redesign) and tigermoth went off to help gothtart with a bit of indoor archaeology.I didn't do too much work: I was getting nowhere with the wording, so I took a break to watch the previous night's documentary on Admiral Lord Cochrane (Scottish naval hero from the Napoleonic Wars on whom Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey was based) with one of the undrunk bottles of beer from the night before. Half way through both programme and bottle, I'd a phone call suggesting a return to the Pond. Stopping the tape and finishing the bottle, I set off.
There was something strsange on the bus: a group of about half a dozen or so rugby types who seemed to be celebrating Hogmanay somewhat late this year (to the extent of having their Princes Street Party wristbands on).
Slight case of deja vu on arrival at the Pond. Not only did it look nearly as empty as the night before, but they were still on the first barrel. I returned the empties from the night before, and asked what I should do about the unopened one. It seemed that the most sensible thing to do was to trade it for a colder one from the fridge and drink it there and then.
I was barely halfway down the bottle when Gary and Sara arrived. Conversation, cigarettes (bad! we're all in various stages of giving up) and more beer. After a couple of glasses, Sara had to head, so Gary and I more or less settled in for the night: more smoked beer, a couple of nice dunkel beers and another wheat beer (I've a feeling there may have been a second smoked beer, too), interleaved with nibbles in the form of bowls of olives with pickled garlic and ginger. Went back to listen to music and drink and such until suddenly it was 3am and time to head home. Half way up the hill, I found I'd a phone message from
purplerabbits about going to Conception. I knew I'd not planned to be in the Pond all weekend....Sunday was quite a productive day in terms of getting stuff done for the new site (apart from the anti-flash anti-"bells and whistles" rant), and while Messrs Bremner Bird and Fortune weren't up to the high standard they'd set themselves with Between Iraq and a Hard Place, it was a pretty good programme. Which brings me to where I came in, I think.
