This week has been, on reflection... odd.“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
The above image, I'll get to. But lets roll the tape back.
Last Saturday night I ended up putting the new table and chairs together. Well. The table, and most of the chairs, but it turned out that I needed an adjustable wrench to tighten up the nuts holding all the bits together. So I put together as much as I could, and then first thing Sunday morning I wandered down the road to Mitre 10 and bought a cheap wrench. Then I reorganised some of the layout of my apartment (it doesn't feel like a massive change, which is good) to give everything a new home.
Now I have a dining table and three out of four chairs.
Well, technically I have the dining table and the "bar table" and high stools I had previously, so it kind of looks like I have two many tables. But fuck it.
Sunday night I made chilli. Good chilli. And I think the appropriate unit of measurement for the amount of chilli I made is "a metric fuckton". And it was made even better by having it with rice and adding a blob of sour cream. Niiiiiice.
But while I was making chilli, one of my Monday DnD players, Canadia, messaged me to see if I wanted to come and hang out one night during the week. Normally I might have just said "thanks, but no", but instead I thought "fuck it" and arranged to go see him Tuesday night.
Monday was still DnD-less. And once again, I sat down and watched a movie (and again, one with subtitles, so I had to pay attention).
Tuesday night, I went and hung out with Canadia and Canadia's big dumb adorable dog. It was a pleasant evening. We got pizza, we talked crap, I got much big dumb dog love.
Wednesday was Double DnD Day. The day campaign was... I want to say "giant clusterfuck"... but I don't think it was that exactly. But when you decide to battle the pirate captain when your whole party is close to single digit health... and then you as the druid turn into a giant crab, grapple the captain and start to drag him to the bottom of the ocean, accompanied by the only other character in the party who has a swim speed. And you go unconscious but you're not dying, so you actually don't know what happened to that other character when you wake up an hour later and she's gone, the pirate captain is gone, the guy from the crows nest is gone and the rest of your party has been hiding/locked themselves in the captain's cabin for an hour. And then you run into an NPC with exactly the same (thematically appropriate but uncommon) name, being temporarily played by the player whose character is currently missing, assumed dead.
And as a player, you're 100% convinced the DM didn't kill off the other character, and you have a very strong idea of where in the world you could find them again, but as a character you're 100% sure they're dead, so why would you continue looking. Yeah.
Wednesday night's game was likewise interesting. Less easily defined. That adventure is so much more "interpersonal drama during the potential end of the world". We, as a party, are suffering from "too many options overload" at present I think. We don't have a specific plan for how we want to approach fighting the Big Bad(s), and the characters aren't agreeing on a course of action. Plus the DM is basically letting us have more than enough rope to get all tangled into knots.
Sadly, no game next week, but the week after we either have to kill a vaguely unkillable floating magic eyeball with a deathray or investigate a machine that sounds essentially like a TARDIS without a box that could also kill us all or make us all babies or old people or never have existed.
Good times.
Thursday and Friday were fairly quiet... although I got a message at some point this week saying that the week after next is my rental inspection. Yay. And by yay I mean urgh. On the up side, it's actually on a Wednesday this time, so I'll already be out of the house.
Today was Ma's haircut day... so I got up, did a super, bumper, "I need stuff in my house because reasons" supermarket shop this morning, then came back here, unpacked, did some shuffling around of things in containers and suchlike, then hung out and watched stuff on YouTube until Ma arrived.
We had a further conversation about what is rapidly becoming The Scarf Project. Which is what happens when you're making shit up as you go and not working from a pattern. And by "you" I mean Ma, because as I said last week (possibly) knitting is basically magic/alchemy to me. But we have a plan. Well, we had A Plan last week, but Ma didn't necessarily pay attention to the plan, and then the plan became Not A Plan. But hopefully it'll work this time. Fingers crossed.
We're deep in the "fucked if I know what we're doing" woods at present... there are basically no interesting movies on at present or at any time soon. It's so weird, we managed to go to the movies pretty much every week (or at least three out of four weeks in a month) for what feels like years and years... and now, there's just not a damn thing for large stretches of time.
But I digress.
We decided just to go into the city and do a wander. Because why the fuck not.
So we essentially hit all the same spots we almost always hit when doing the wander up and down the Mall. We weren't really looking for anything, but sometimes not looking at things you don't want is an okay way to spend an hour or so.
Afterwards we were going to grab some food... but honestly, food courts on a Saturday, one of the sadder things. So Ma suggested Burger Theory, which indeed sounded like a plan to me.
Which brings us back around to the start of the post and today's image.
I had a thought while we were walking down the road... I realised it had been a good long while since I remember seeing anything on social media from Burger Theory (since I don't do Facebook), and there was a sense of dread about what we would find when we headed around the corner.
Turns out the little voice in my head was right, there was a completely different (burger) story there, and a quick search discovered that BT closed their CBD store in mid June and are only operating at Flinder Tavern in Flinders Uni (which is only open during the week sadly).
Firstly, why the fuck did nobody tell me? Secondly, I realised later that with one thing and another (and probably due to the fact we saw a very limited number of Fringe shows this year) I hadn't actually been there at all this year (or at least, I hadn't posted an Instagram pic, which I did every time). Third, I'm a sad panda.
The image above isn't every BT burger I've ever had, but I think it's ever BT burger I ever had/photographed in the brick and mortar store between 2013 and 2018 (well, 38 burgers, 2 frozen custards and 2 shots of the store). If I'd gone for every BT burger or shot of the BT food truck, it would have been a much bigger image. All the way back to the giant chocolate chip cookie that started, no, not started, cemented my relationship with BT.
Rob and Dan have been nothing but sweethearts to me since the beginning, and I've been one of their biggest cheerleaders. They've always done what was right for them, and they've never played safe. Be that cooking black beans or quandong chutney until the wee small hours, branching out to Pearl's Diner (those pulled pork buns... *drool*), the brief appearance of the breakfast menu (and the fact that I got to try that out before it was officially launched), the Art Burger series (those art prints still have pride of place on my wall), the Melbourne store, or making their burgers with kangaroo meat (and to the haters I say a hearty "go fuck yourselves" and I bet most of you never even bothered to try it).
And the Upside Down (or Inside Out, I forget) burger (second from the bottom, second from the right) is still my favourite of all the Burger of the Month offerings. I mean a toasted sandwich burger, what is not to love.
I certainly hope it's not the last we see of them... but even if BT were to disappear entirely, I know that Rob and Dan will succeed at whatever they turn their attention to next. However if it does, I want the damn Truck Sauce recipe (for personal use only).
I just couldn't bring myself to actually have lunch at the burger place that's taken over the old BT spot. I mean I'm sure they're perfectly lovely, I just couldn't. Too soon.
Anyway, we ended up having lunch at Betty's Burgers and Concrete Co... which wasn't bad. I mean the patties were pretty flat, and they really need to throw their buns on the grill. But the flavours were pretty good, and they get bonus points for onion rings.
And that's it really.
An odd week.
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