Leave the house at 2pm... get home sometime after 9pm...Lordy, lordy, lordy...
Actually, as far as timing went, everything pretty much came off without a hitch... I went into town, diverted briefly into EzyDVD (damn, damn damn them and their diabolically cheap Angel DVDs... now I own all of Season 2 and almost all of Season 1, and probably for less than it would have cost me at full price for even a single disc), then realised that it was pretty much time for my haircut... hauled ass over there... then by the time that was over, what with the cutting and the colouring and the chatting and whatnot, it was time to meet the nice former work folks for drinkies... and instead of leaving earlier as was my original plan, I hung around til some time around 8:45...
But I get a little ahead of myself...
Haircut went well... Tink and I were pretty much on the same page with the colour idea... I'd been thinking about going a whole warm chocolate brown colour, and she'd been considering the idea of using these new "mocha" colours... see, a whole chocolate theme. Anyway, we went back and forth on the colour idea... "maybe a little of this and a little of that"... "maybe that one instead of this one", stuff like that... but because the upper level was full we'd gone downstairs, which was good because a) warmer, and b) we pretty much had the whole lower level to ourselves so we could have our usual rambly, random conversation about stuff without eavesdroppers. And because we always end up talking about movies (oh, and we both had a big, huge, enormous geekout conversation about Transformers... since we both loved both it and the original cartoon series... I knew there was a reason I loved having Tink as my hairdresser), I told her a little about Shortbus and recommended it... so that could be a whole other interesting conversation during my next haircut...
I'm not 110% convinced about the colour I have to say... I mean it's a great colour, but I'm not sure if it's actually a great colour on ME. Granted, what with all the bright, bright, bright and unflattering lighting in the salon it actually looked lighter and duller than I'd hoped, but when I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror earlier, it's actually a nice deep chocolate cake brown... course that means that I kind of have invisible eyebrows again (and they didn't look invisible in the salon, due to the aforementioned lighter appearance of the haircolour so we didn't bother doing anything about tinting them or anything)... but I guess I can live with that. We'll see...
Weird happenstance at the salon actually... Tink brought me upstairs part way through the colour so she could stick me under the rotating heater lamp thing and there was this guy up there getting some blonde tips put in who had the most EDIBLE Scottish accent ever... like "here's the phonebook, start reading" edible... and I couldn't really get a proper look at him, but I was getting this whole "homosexualist" vibe from him... and once he got up out of the chair, he pretty much confirmed it... although he was very last season... wearing one of those skintight, high necked "surf/sun" suit tops... a little bit wetsuit, but not really... very gay, but SO 1995! And then I realised that he actually used to go to my gym at the dawn of time... I couldn't tell you what his name was to save my life... but it was him. Adelaide, two horse town...
Oh, and Ma called me while I had a head full of hair dye, to let me know that she'd forgotten that she also had a haircut scheduled for tomorrow morning and would be coming down later than normal... which is just a whole world of BUGGER because I could have put my haircut off until tomorrow too, saved us both some time...
Anyway, like I said, my haircut pretty much wrapped up exactly at 4:30, which was the time drinks was due to start... which was great, very helpful and groovy and whatever... except for one thing. I'd eaten almost nothing all day... I'd had breakfast as usual... I had a couple of English muffins around 11:30... and then nothing. I'd kind of planned on grabbing something before my haircut, but when I rushed through the foodcourt without any time to spare there wasn't anything appealing or appropriate that I could really grab and take with me... and afterwards there wasn't time to grab anything (and ditto on the appealing)... so essentially I started drinking on an empty stomach.
And I'm a Cadbury at the best of times...
Fortunately though I also know when to call it a day... and after a big ass pint of Coopers Pale (and $7 too... RUDE) I switched first to a smaller glass, and then orange juice... otherwise I would probably have ended up making my first ever drunk post this evening.
The whole influx on alcohol on an empty stomach did mean that that part of my brain that only works half of the time anyway, the part that stops me from saying the things I shouldn't say... that's the first part of my brain to stop working after I've been drinking. So yeah, while I don't think I actually offended anybody, I think there were moments when I probably should have said less than I did. But what the hell, I don't work with any of these people anymore.
It was also helped because somebody bought random nibbly pub food, which pretty much ended up being wedges and little spring rolls and dim sims and stuff... tasty, filling, helpful with soaking up some of the booze, but with no redeeming features whatsoever...
Sadly, two of the people I really wanted to see weren't there... but it was nice to see a bunch of the others anyway. Actually I overly bonded with the girl who's taken over from the previous girl that I overly bonded with (it's both bad and wrong and should stop), and I think I might have accidentally acquired myself a new faghag... not quite sure how that happened... or quite how I'm going to extricate myself from that... maybe we'll wait until everybody metabolises the alcohol and let more sober heads prevail...
I did extricate myself from the wider group when they decided that they were all going off to get something to eat (a good plan I think, since more than a couple of them really, really, really needed to soak up the booze with something more substantial than wedges)... but I wasn't so fussed about hanging out with about 80% of them (since I didn't really know them), so instead I made my excuses and I stayed behind with Sugarmonkey for a bit while we waited for his other half to come and pick him up. I've always had a kind of love/hate thing going on with Sugarmonkey (okay, not so much actually love, but it's better than saying "like/hate")... but he's actually an okay guy... we spark funny likes off each other all the time, and we definitely love to score points at the expense of each other, and he does frustrate the crap out of me ongoingly (not to mention that he's the one who took of my job with that unit when I left)... but we ended up having possibly the best conversation the two of us have ever had. Nothing deep or insightful or meaningful or anything... but an enjoyable little chat. There's nothing quite like sitting around in a pub with a fairly metrosexual straightboy checking out the talent of both genders while you wait for his wife to come and collect him.
I do like that whole group of people actually... well, the ones that I've worked with... I'm just comfortable with them, they're good people mostly and I've never really had to censor myself around them (part of the upside of being recruited into the unit by a fellow homosexualist), and even if they don't always get me (but then, who the hell does), they like me anyway.
I did find out once rather bleak bit of news though... because one of the women who now works in and around the department knows people who I've known in various other facets of my life (actually she used to work for the guy who used to run the firm that did all the outside technical stuff for the department, and who I almost was involved in started a business alongside... long story, less confusing than it sounds), I happened to mention Raury... and my theory was confirmed, he did actually die a while back (around the beginning of either this year or maybe last year I think), quite suddenly as it happens. On the one hand it's not good news (obviously), but on the other it's actually good to know... I now know that he hasn't just wandered away from my life again, and I can take the bookmark out of that particular book, because that was really the last chapter. Which sounds kind of cold when I say it that way, but I know what I mean.
And I don't really want to end on that kind of a downer, so, to finish off the story, after all that I decided to walk home. Actually that's not completely true, it's all Sugarmonkey's fault... I was going to grab a bus, but I mentioned it, and he said something about "why don't you just walk"... so I did... quite pleasant actually, and being evening as opposed to very early morning, it made for a different walking experience (not that I walked my usual path, but still).
And now I think maybe it's time for bed...
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