January 2006

Holy shit. It's a new year already!

After seeing in the new year on Bondi Beach, We decided to go to the HomeSexual Party at Home Nightclub. It was a long party, starting at 8pm, although we only arrived at 10pm. I managed to last until about 5am before I decided it was time to give it a miss. (Oh god. I must be getting old!) Greig disappeared with a blonde. :-)

As part of the Sydney Festival, Greig and I joined a small group (if about 20 people is a small group) for a picnic in Hyde Park to have a look at a piece of installation art called "Blue Invasion". It was unanimously agreed that the "Bathroom Experience" at our 2001 D.H.M.G.L Party a was heaps better and a lot less expensive to put on. Give it a very wide miss.

This month is Greig's 40th birthday but unfortunately finances wouldn't quite allow me to whisk him away overseas, letalone whish the two of us away. Instead I managed to organize a dinner for him with just some of our "A-List" friends. It was either that or organize a huge surprise party that no doubt wouldn't have been a surprise at all and I would have neglected to invite someone and got into all sorts of trouble from them for it. Besides, finding a venue large enough to hold all Greig's friends would have proved to be a problem. I'm not sure that the Royal Hall of Industries charges these days.

Towards the end of last year we decided to sell the house at Dulwich Hill. Our pet lesbians moved out just before Christmas and it was either spend a huge amount of money that we don't have on renovating, or cut the old girl free. We decided it was in our best interests to cut her free. This month we signed the paperwork with the Real Estate Agent to put her on the market. The general feeling is that it will be an easy sell.

Club Shéd - the hottest ticket in town.

Of course, January is when we hold our annual housewarming party - the New Dulwich Hill Mardi Gras. (Don't go asking why we still call it Dulwich Hill when we now live in Petersham and we're selling the Dulwich Hill house anyway. It's all too complicated.) The Shed was swamped with about 100 of our friends all eating, drinking and having a generally merry time. This year the weather was a bit cooler than previous years so it wasn't necessary to take over the street. Some people did of course, but they were mostly smokers and we don't worry too much about them.

We threw the last people out at about 4am and then started the very slow process of cleaning up. The extremely slow process - it took us about a week to finish. Actually, now that I think about it, I still haven't fixed all the lights up again. Our dining table is still bathed in red and blue spot lights.

I finally managed to get Subaru to mostly fix my car. They admitted that the Brant / Subaru immobilizer alarm (I only mention the names for the benefit of Search Engines) isn't quite 100% compatible with the Subaru RS which will cause delays in the immobilizer disarming. This is apparently "normal".

We explained that it was in fact more "normal" for a car to start every time you turn the key. They gave us a loan car while they tried to "diagnose the cause" of the problem and called to confirm what the problem was. We told them that they would have to remove the alarm and make good any damage to the dashboard and either install a suitable alarm system or refund the cost of the alarm.

Naturally, they didn't want to do this. Service said that we needed to talk to sales and sales said we need to talk to service. It wasn't until they realized that they weren't getting the loan car back until the problem was resolved that they actually started talking to each other and took some action. They installed a new alarm system and agreed to replace the damaged panel in the dashboard. I need to take the car back to them next month to get the dashboard fixed, but at least the car starts every time now.

Jimi prepares a pile of tasty
and not at all fattening treats

It was my birthday as well this month, but I didn't turn 40. Jimi decided that he wanted to take me out to dinner so we went for a lovely dinner at a Mexican Restaurant. Greig bought me a new wireless keyboard/mouse/remote control thingy for my upcoming Media Center project.

We attended Jimi's annual Australia Day BBQ, where we burnt some meat on a fire and drank alcohol. We also had a lovely lunch with Con and Will. Will is one of Jimi's best friends and Con is his hubby. They provided a very civilized lunch with lovely food and wine, charming company, and Jimi.