The Cider House Rules

I'm so buoyant about life at the moment that I'm almost worried about the comedown. Actually, I started Friday rather strangely, having one of those self-esteem brownouts early in the morning. I'm a pseudo-philosopher so I'll just explain that a self-esteem brownout is when your sense of popularity temporarily dips to a state where you believe that no one likes you and everyone thinks you're annoying (or similar).

I've no idea why it happened but then Vanessa saved me from despair with one of her friendly, random emails and we spontaneously decided to go eat Hontou pancakes for lunch and then check out the lingerie department at the Myer sale. After that it just got better and better.

We went to the Chelsea for trivia, huddled in our teams exchanging tidbits of info as Penny rolled out the questions. I surprisingly knew a lot of the answers straight off (although everyone seemed to know those answers so I'm not too special) and the harder ones were answered by Naomi with timely contributions by Joey, Faun and Melissa.

One question was the name of a US state shared by a title of a Bee Gees' song which was on the tip of my tongue so I made Melissa rattle off all the states (she's USA-ian) until I convinced myself is was Massachusetts (which proved... correct). The other tipping point was about where in Italy you'd find the Ponte Vecchio and I had to fight off both Naomi and Faun, who both said "Venice", for the correct answer (Florence). I distinctly remember the Ponte Vecchio as the "bling bling" bridge in Florence, especially because the day that I crossed it I found out that the other side had more expensive shops, which was also the day when I bought my Florence deck of cards.

Anyway, we tied with Suspect Device, which was Roland's team. Our teams don't really have captains but there tends to be a captain figure in the team and Roland is the captain figure of Suspect Device. (I stole my captain kudos from forming the team spontaneously and then coming up with an agreeable name). (Funnily enough, just to note, the captain is never the smartest/most useful person on the team. Leader figures always seem to have a more knowledgeable vizier figure; Donna was Roland's, Naomi was mine).

The trivia night went to a three-question tie-breaker. I don't know where Penny got the questions from at this stage but I would like to say that vital parts of the questions were missing. Par example, 'which empire controlled the largest amount of land in history?' The question should have read 'which empire controlled the largest amount of contiguous land in history at one time?'. Our answer was the British Empire having controlled the USA, Australia, Canada and India as some of their big 'uns at various points of their reign. The winning answer was Genghis Khan, who admittedly did amass most of Indochina, though whether his empire was as big as the sum of the parts of the British Empire throughout history seems inconclusive to me.

So Roland accepted the trophy on behalf of his team. Only later, when we received our papers back, did we realise that Penny had actually miscounted our score and instead of tying on 39/45 apiece, we were outright winners on 40/45. We wuz robbed! The Cider House Rules!

By that time Faun and I had started a game of pool. I'd started off reasonably but then started to lag as she pocketed about 4 or 5 balls in a few turns. I also played one of those excellent shots where the white ball hits one ball, which hits another into the pocket. Paul called it a cannon shot when I mentioned it later, but I'm not so sure he understood (I just found out - thanks Wikipedia - that it was a 'combination' shot) The best thing about it was that it was fully intentional and never usually pays off. The worst thing was that no one saw it.

By the end I was having a brilliant round, pocketing a left-handed shot (another trick in my repertoire that never usually pays off, for although I write left-handed, I'm actually a right-handed pool player) and finally the 8-ball. Fortunately by this time a handful of people were watching, including James, Daniel, Colin and Paul. Faun was only one ball behind so it ended up being a close game, but one which we couldn't rematch because someone else had claimed the table by then.

I went back to my corner and chatted to Naomi for a while, a bit about the trivia robbery, a bit about music and travel. Colin joined in for a bit and then Naomi's fiance came by and Colin excused himself so I went over to Roland (who had joined a group containing James, Daniel, Daniel's wife, Lauren and Paul) and asked him when we were going to play 500, then got chatting about whale gestation periods (one of the trivia questions was about elephant gestation and we were comparing).

Paul said something like "imagine the maternity leave", I chided him by replying that not every woman wants a kid for the maternity leave and then Roland asked if the company provided paternity leave, turned to me and said "are you available?", then the whole table fell about laughing.

At that point Naomi had joined us but then pointed out that Colin had dozed off so we woke him up and then he and I caught the train together. The situation was a little awkward, especially because I wanted to stay a bit longer (I mean, I had commandeered the spot next to Paul and everything...) but at the same time I would have lost face if I'd stayed much longer, knowing that I was his lift home (the buses in our area stop after 9pm). So glad I'm moving out next week to stop this type of dilemma again. Hey, I may be unkind but you need to take into account that I offered the privilege of a lift.

On Saturday Sir and I went to Mosman to sign the lease, ate lots of hot chips in an Epping carpark and then went home to pack. Today we went to see the 10am session of Pirates of the Carribbean 2, which was a fun movie, then drove to Cumberland State Forest for Assumpta's surprise farewell picnic, which went well considering she had no idea. Been lazy ever since - have glanced at my junk every now and again only to read yesterday's Spectrum. Looking forward to an interesting week, and another busy one. Tune in soon!