Whups. Hungover.

A weekend of giddy social whirling - two birthday bashes (curse all you Capricorns, clustering in the social circle in a sort of astrological clump), plus a lunch in honour of herne_kzn's flying visit to the Mother City (more notice next time, damn you!), and the dread jo&stv's extremely enjoyable housewarming last night. Not only is their new house ideally suited to entertaining, with its deck, pool and open spaces, but they're dashed good at putting together a perfect people-mix: enough close friends to be safe and familiar, enough new faces and people I don't often see to be interesting. The visit of everymoment and family to CT did, I have to say, up the quotient of Small Humans to hitherto unknown levels, but I think the non-reproducing Scrooge-like die-hards among us survived the experience fairly well. A swimming pool is apparently a very levelling thing, and happy kiddies splashing around in the water are curiously heart-warming. Not that I was in the pool any stage, the crowd levels being a bit high for my comfort in a swimming costume, but I went mildly mad with my nice new camera. Fruits of the labours available here.

The first few weeks of this year, with their combination of heatwaves and the horrible angst, guilt, self-loathing and conviction of my own worthlessness engendered by these thrice-damned book updates, came to a sort of head last night, and I proceeded to become somewhat sloshed. Apart from rendering me prone to attacks of the dreaded Comedy Hiccups, this usually makes me extremely voluble and determinedly polysyllabic. (Random snippet from a conversation with one of the new faces: "Are you tipsy? because if you are, you're also very highly educated.") 4am-wake-up with pounding headache aside, it also seems to have been cathartic and positive, because in between waiting for Flickr to cogitate over my uploads, I've done a stonkload of work on the book this morning, and am comfortably within an up-swing in terms of thinking that what I've written may not actually be all bad. I may not have Chapter 1 done by the end of the day, wolverine_nun, but it'll be bloody close.

I should add, for the sake of posterity, that my Evil Landlord was considerably drunker than I was last night, owing to the equally evil jo&stv feeding him quantities of Pimms. My sense of the later parts of the evening is a little blurry, but I do seem to remember him being thrown into the pool with all his clothes on. I am relieved to note that the perpetrator of this outrage was one of jo's seedy actuarial co-workers. It is reassuring to consider that our own social circle is beyond such infantile high jinks. Or, at the very least, considerably more aware of said Evil Landlord's skill with a rapier.