Just because I haven't mentioned the building work lately doesn't mean it isn't still continuing -- we are now into month 3 of, hopefully, five. We now have most of a roof over the new-built area -- and some of the more knackered bits of the old roof have also been fixed in the meantime. The photos are, as ever, still here, though I have some more roof-related ones from this past weekend that I still need to put up there. Other than the roof, we have now ordered the garage door, got a quote for air-conditioning (must place that order sometime soon), and are still in deep discussions over the kitchen units, though I have decided on all the appliances I want. Needless to say, my natural talent for choosing the most expensive option in any given case is still in operation.
Last Saturday was
waistcoatmark's stag do -- one of those thoroughly modern ones which involve members of both genders. First stop was the Science Museum, where I proved I was still crap at Space Invaders, and then 
angrymarmot and I braved the Singstar machine. I am deeply worried that the song on which we did best was Avril Lavigne's _Sk8ter Boy_ -- and I hate to think what the remainder of the exhibition made of our versions of _It's Not Unusual_ and _Bohemian Like You_. After that we headed over to Southbury ("where?" I hear you ask. North London) to go and play Laserquest. I think the last time I played that was on my hen night! Our second game proved that youth and vigour are no match for age and cunning -- we kicked the collective arses of the group of 10 - 14 year olds who had been so determined they wanted to play kids against adults (they called us "over 20s" which I thought was very generous of them). I also proved that when the staff say "don't run," they mean it -- one of my knees is still recovering from its close encounter with the floor as I fell on my face while Dinner was at Belgos in central London, which was pleasant enough if a bit slow on the service front (well, Saturday night near Christmas, party of 17, I wasn't entirely surprised). The staff were willing to provide me with several large chunks of Stilton as dessert, which was appreciated since all of the set-menu dessert options were Right Out (much too sweet). We staggered onto the Tube and managed to get a cab at Morden without too much hanging around... phew.
vicarage swung past Ewell during the previous week on his whistle-stop tour of On the Saturday before that, we first visited the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at the V&A, and then stopped into various museum shops in search of Christmas presents, before making a fairly brief visit to Dragonmeet. The exhibition had lots of very interesting pages from da Vinci's notebooks, although those pages are quite small and thus one has to get close to them to examine them properly -- this means that you wind up shuffling along at a snail's pace behind the people who are determined to listen to everything on their audioguides relating to that page. Ah well, I have the exhibition book and will peruse it at my leisure.
Dragonmeet was OK; we managed to get some (more) Dwarven Forge stuff for
rotwang's Christmas present, and played a demo of Esoterrorists run by gbsteve. After that we were, basically, knackered, so we staggered back home with bags full of Stuff...Um, what else.
rotwang and I formed the balcony-level mosh pit at one of the recent Status Quo concerts at Fairfield Halls. This may sound a bit unlikely but we stood up when Quo came on, only to have the guy behind us ask us to sit down as he couldn't see... ah, Croydon, hotbed of rock fanaticism. Luckily we were in the second row of the balcony anyhow (I booked too late to get us downstairs seats) so we just moved to the bottom of the stairs at the front of the balcony and bopped along there instead.L's birthday party was good fun as always, unless you were
jadeent. Well, it looked painful at the time, anyhow. I danced to the musical stylings provided by DJ Furry Codpiece (in the shape of chomper99; loads of good stuff in there.Maximum number of Amazon parcels delivered in a single day so far this Christmas ordering season: five.
