Turned up at Chessington World of Adventures about 11ish, and had a reasonable time there. I am not a big fan of really intense rides (and
flick and I evidently have differing interpretations of that word ;)) so skipped out on a couple of them; I was eventually persuaded onto the Vampire ride at the end of the day and quite enjoyed it. And the meerkats and otters were cute, anyhow. I also acquired a purple glittery cowboy hat; I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with it now, especially since it's several sizes too small, but every woman should have one, don't you think?
Then we got back and started preparing for Saturday evening. This basically meant opening up the pack of vaguely-Aussie-themed stuff and spreading it liberally around the house. (My birthday happens to coincide with Anzac Day and hence the party theme had been chosen with this in mind. Alternatively you could theorise that I was running out of ideas and needed to choose something before sending out the terribly late party invites. I couldn't possibly comment.) So there were the inflatable kangaroos previously mentioned - one of which was indeed tied down. Actually it was tied up and suspended from the bedroom window. There were flags, and posters of surfers, and so on and so on. And Rolf Harris on autorepeat on the stereo for the first hour or two.
It seemed to go well, it certainly looked like people were enjoying themselves, and the neighbours haven't turned up on my doorstep with pitchforks and flaming torches just yet, not even when several of those present started seeing just how far you could kick an inflatable kangaroo down the road. One of the sharks wound up in the pond. There was too much food, but then there usually is when I do the catering.
caffeine_fairy, chomper99, vicarage, wimble, flick and the entity behind 
linktoian were all there; sadly zandev couldn't make it. (Any others with journals? 'Fess up now.)Staggered off to bed (fairly literally in my case) about three.
In the next exciting episode... Sunday!
