Tired......so very, very tired

Well, what a palaver, how long has it been since I last wrote? I got the choccies on Thursday, I think.

So, since then I have moved house, been to the zoo, been caught in a traffic jam of death, been to a BBQ, and been to a Pink concert. Oh...and I've been to the pub at least twice.

The moving....gosh. Well, we were going to get a big van, as in, 7.5tonnes or something like that, but it fell through at the last minute, so we used my dads van instead. It's not small, but it's not a 7.5 tonner either :) Dad cleared it out entirely and we ended up with a chest of drawers, 15 boxes, 8 binliners, 2 bags, a tool box and my bedding all stuffed in the back, and my mattress and wardrobe (whole) strapped to the top, luckily it was a lovely sunny day.

After loading the van we went for a breakfast, deciding that, if we came back and someone had nicked that wardrobe off the van then they bloody well deserved to keep it..what a nightmare job that was! Drove to the Stow, which didn't take as long as I expected and unloaded it all again.

Dad insisted on helping me unpack too.......I KNOW! Seeing as he was just untaping and rooting through all my boxes I decided to warn him that there was a 'ladies box' somewhere amongst them. By 'ladies box' I meant that there were a couple of toys of the vibrating variety unceremoniously dumped into the bottom. He just looked at me and shrugged as if to say 'Do I care?'. Maybe you don't daddy, But I care! I CARE!! *sob* So we came to the last 3 boxes and he opened one, I don't know if he saw anything but he just went 'is this it?' and wandered subtly out of the room. Oh the joys. But the good thing is that I did get everything unpacked, and I think if dad hadn't forced me there would still be bags and boxes laying around all over the place.

Jo came round to see my new place and brought me a Gerbera, it's too cheerful for Grant so it's sitting in my room now, getting full sunlight and moderate (moderate to less than moderate) watering. I need my watering can! This is another thing I'll promise you a picture of when I get home :)

The Rose and Crown was the order of the night for moving in beer celebrations with Jobie. I waddled home afterwards, watching out for unfriendly Northeners with sticks.

The next day was a few hours of zoo and then the drive home....oh noes, the drive home. Jo and I were on Camden Road and she had just made a comment about how sometimes on this drive home you get held up forever. Cue the news on the radio telling us about 2 women who had been found dead in a hotel in Finsbury Park, possible chemical incident, cue...traffic jam. This hotel was right on the road that we were trying to drive home on, we were diverted for what seem like hours, around the houses. It's just as well we had popped into Tesco for nibbles for the BBQ later on, anything that didn't need to be cooked was eaten on the way back. We worked our way through 2 cheese and onion pastry roll things, and a whole tub of hummus with carrot batons....mmmm, hummus!!

The BBQ was good! The food was amazing, lovely BBQ'd fish. It was my new next door neighbours throwing it, Pete and Samira. I was quite glad Jo was there as I hardly knew anybody, in fact, I only knew Grant, and he couldn't have entertained me the whole time. A lot of the people there were speaking what seemed at first to be Italian, but Samira is apparently Palestinian, so I may have been wrong, I'm positive it wasn't Arabic though, which is the official language in Palestine. Maybe if I engage a little more heartily in my attempts to learn some Italian before I go away then I'll be able to tell next time!

Anywhoo, we had lovely cake and bubbly at the BBQ, it is Petes birthday next week so they decided to surprise him. The cake was from the Euphorium Bakery, and was delicious, a thin layer of sponge with vanilla cream on the top, and lots of berries and chocolate swirls.

I would heartily recommend a cake from this place...yurm yurm!!!

Afterwards, off to the Rose and Crown again for a couple of pints....not setting a good precedent here.

Monday I faffed around in my room and in bed on Monday morning until it came time to leave the house to meet Vicky for lunch and to go off and see Pink at the O2. As I was walking down the road, Linda was just coming out of the allotments with her mum, what a happy coincidence! So I got a lift to the station which was kewl. I finally made it to Waterloo on the replacement bus service and 2 tubes...what a faff. After lunch we took a short wander up the Embankment and watched the various street entertainers. Amongst them were a silver wizard bopping to 'It's My Life' and playing some squeaky instrument, a weird Charlie Chaplin, 2 chameleons on bicycles and a headless gold king of some description. The best was the limbo man though. He actually managed to limbo under a stick balancing on top of 2 1.5 litre bottles of water. The technique is incredible, but his ankles are going to be shot in his old age!

Because of the length of time it was taking buses due to tube maintenance, I decided I'd get some tickets for the O2 Express on the Thames Clipper, that was lovely, cruising along the Thames, chillaxing.

The concert itself was fab, once Pink came on anyway! Vicky and I sat down at about half 6 and nothing happened till 7:40. At that point an awful band called RayGun came on, the lead singer thought he was Mick Jagger or something. At about quarter to 9 Pink finally made her appearance, the first song being Bad Influence. It was a really nice mix of songs, quite a few from her most recent album, and a a similar number from past albums, Just Like a Pill and Family Portrait etc. She also did some wicked covers, Bohemian Rhapsody and Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. The best bits were when she was performing acrobatics at the same time as singing. She did an amazing trapeze-style routine whilst performing 'sober', it was great.

She's far too fit, definitely on my 'list' if you know what I mean...nudge-nudge, winky winky :D

I was slightly in panic-mode on the way home, the Victoria line wasn't working so I needed to get to Finsbury Park in time to catch a rail replacement bus. I hastily abandoned Vicky at Waterloo and made a dash for my tube, turns out catching the rail replacement bus would be the elast of my problems. All was hunky dory till I started walking home, I walked down the wrong road, I was walking forever and started to think 'I don't recognise this, I've been walking too long, where am I?' I also started to panic..just a little bit, by now it was past midnight and I was wandering around strange streets not knowing where I was. Anyway, I eventually found a bus stop and inferred from the routes that I could find my road by carrying on up this wrong road...but I'd gone a bloody long way round!

The closest I came to death was some div losing control of his car on the road and heading towards me for a moment, whereupon I hid behind a lamppost (I know...there was a brick wall behind me, it would have been my next port of call), and the dodgiest person I saw was right at the end of my road...I got my keys out and jangled them in a threatening manner, it seemed to dissuade him from whatever naughtiness he was planning...probably none.

So that was my weekend!! I need another one please..soon

img cred: Celebrity Animal House