fades gracefully away

Goldarnit, I must be getting old. Last night's departmental bunfight thingy was surprisingly good fun; highlights included a postgrad contingent singing Roxette hits in slightly drunken chorus on the front lawn, and an animated half-hour discussion on contemporary graphic novels with a fellow New Department Member (sic). (For those of you into such things, he's particularly enthused about Preacher and spits utterly on the name of the Hellboy movie on the grounds that it does not adequately match up to the original). I have also noted for future reference the name of the dept. member who, discovering I'd actually made (i.e. cooked) snacks, commented "You're such a hausfrau"; she will be hunted down and exterminated at my leisure. However, three glasses of white wine over four hours were apparently enough to make me (a) feel as though I shouldn't have been driving home, all the way home, and (b) make me feel grumpy and faintly hungover all day today. Age. Bleah.

Good points about today:
- watching 3 episodes of Buffy Season 3, two of which I've never seen before (and there are another five or six this season which will also be new to me, which is a very good thing to look forward to);
- cooler weather, with real clouds and wind and stuff;
- concocting an entirely new and surprising salad for supper (roasted butternut pieces, fried haloumi, croutons, cos and butter lettuce, onion sprouts, spring onions, rocket)
- accompanying Stacey to a doctor's appointment in order to babysit Maia, who was angelic while I looked after her, I suspect just to spite her mother; Stace, however, achieved revenge by sneakily photographing me holding said baby and laughing helplessly because the darned child is a combination of sprung steel and eel genes, i.e. she wriggles (and, no, don't bother Stace for the picture, I shall bribe her not to divulge it in the interests of my street cred);
- doing absolutely no work whatsoever.

Bad points about today:
- aforementioned faint almost-hangover;
- a particularly baroque outbreak of Capetonian wantonly slow/bad/unexpected driving, probably because it's Friday;
- an hour's communing with the piano, designed to stave off a brief depression, which is stupid because my currently levels of piano-playing is deeply depressing, and besides, Roxette;
- a brief depression;
- Ounce bringing in a dead mole (I like moles, and do not wish them ill even when they re-enact the Battle of the Somme on our front lawn);
- doing absolutely no work whatsoever.

Bother. The bads have it, by a narrow margin. I shall now grump off to bed, pausing to throw a brief astral apology in the direction of young D@vid, whose house-warming I am failing to attend this very eve owing to failure of gumption.