No, I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a Harry Potter fan...

Yessss! It's Thursday night and I'm not back at work until Tuesday morning. (Bank holidays and time off in lieu really do come in handy when you're short on the old annual leave.) That's four days of freedom, baby! Or, at least it would be if I didn't feel so icky. As previously posted, I thought I felt a bit funny after The Meal That Was Not Good on Monday (and I thought it might just be because I know my friend was also ill after said meal), but now I'm not so sure. For starters, I haven't actually been ill - and I'm sure something would have made a technicolour appearance had it been food related. No, I'm just feeling - well, icky is the only way to describe it. Run down and sickly and headachey and a bit poorly in general. I hope it goes off soon as there's a food fayre in town tomorrow and being a bit of a food-obsessive, I'd really like to go.

Anyway. Something which put me in a better mood instantly today was seeing a trailer for the next Harry Potter film, due out in July. The trailer is probably nothing new and existed online for ages, but it's sent me into a tizz and now I want to read Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince again, just to make sure I remember the story properly and see what bits they've cut out of it. I'll probably end up reading the seventh book as well for good measure - a) to refresh my head about where the story is going and b) because that's my favourite of the books. Eeeee it's so exciting! Oh, hush now. Yes I know I'm heading for 30 years of age but that says nothing.

And on another completely different note, this also cheered me up no end today:

Cats really do rule the internet.

Tea time tales...

We've had a flurry of birthdays in our little group of late, coupled with some lovely birthday tea nights out in own after work to celebrate. But tonight decided to stay closer to home and go very local! There's a new little Italian restaurant just opened in our village and we thought we'd give it a try. However, no matter where we go in the world and no matter how good the reviews are from everyone else - it always seems to be our group who end up saddled with catastrophe and bad service. Something ALWAYS goes wrong. It's like a law - we must have faces that say 'yes, please treat us badly, we don't mind at all!'

I have a whole host of appalling service stories. Taking the top spot however was the time when a waitress tipped a whole plate of spaghetti bolognaise down my friend S's back, ruining her dress. No apology. The saving grace was that it was cold spaghetti I suppose, so no 3rd degree burns - although the fact that she was serving it cold in the first place is not very comforting. And she tried to short change us. Tonight wasn't nearly as bad as that, but it wasn't great. I'm not going to name names as it's a very new restaurant and is entitled to some teething problems, but really. Why would you employ staff who can't be bothered to listen to what customers order, and make it up as they go along? (Two of our meals came out wrong, even though we repeated the order twice as the waitress seemed confuzzled.) And we'd all finished by the time my friend G's dish came out. And when it did - yep, you guessed it - it was also incorrect.

Somehow I don't think we'll be venturing into that restaurant for a wee while. Especially as I now have the knowledge that my friend J has spent the remainder of the evening since we parted ways and went home locked in the bathroom with her head down the loo, saying hello to her pasta again. How delightful. And it may just be that I know this fact now, and I may just be being paranoid and looking for things that might not be there - but now I've got a funny queasy feeling too. Great. I could really do without a night of crying huey in the bathroom.

Hen dos and hen don'ts...

I normally avoid hen parties like the plague. I just don't get them. There's something unnecessarily chavvy and seedy about them. You might just think I'm being a cranky old crone - and you might be right. But I hate them with a passion - all that forced 'entertainment' and wearing ridiculous L-plates and flashing sashes. Tack and tat personified. Shudder. Even the very name of them strikes fear into my heart. 'Hen dos'. No, no - I'd really rather we hen don't, thank you. Saying that, I have been to a few decent hen parties in my time that happened to be lovely days out - a nice meal somewhere and a few cocktails. None of this awful veil-wearing, PVC fancy dress in town, throwing up in the street and dares to kiss as many random strangers you can gubbins. Eurgh.

Of course, some people can take hen parties too far. I know of one lady who was so obsessed with her wedding (Bridezilla complex - honestly, I like hearing about people's wedding plans in general conversation and what have you, but there comes a point when Brides are putting their bridesmaids on diets and telling them to dye their hair all the same colour that they really need to be told to calm down) and her ego grew so much that she had no less than FIVE different hen parties, all with different people, themes and in various parts of the country. And indeed the continent. No, no, no. And WHY? Don't these people mean enough to you to actually attend the wedding? No, she just wanted another excuse to be the centre of attention. Five times.

However, due to stupid work things I missed a friend's hen party yesterday, and I'm gutted as it looked like the sort of hen do I would have actually enjoyed myself at rather than making snide comments in the corner about Ann Summers merchandise. She just invited all her mates over to her house from all around Europe - male and female - to have a few drinks and a catch up as she's getting married in another country and the wedding isn't going to be a giant circus. See? That sounds nice. None of this 'last night of freedom' rubbish. If you think like that then you shouldn't be getting married. Marriage isn't about losing your freedom and spending a jail sentence with one other person forever. It's a partnership. And it certainly isn't about heading to Blackpool for a weekend of vomit and willy-shaped party favours. There. Rant over. For now.

The Easter bunny forgot my address...

I love bank holidays. They're even better when you get an extra day off work bolted on to your annual leave for free. Get in. And what's been even better is that we had a lovely Easter lunch yesterday and I didn't even have to cook it - my mother dearest decided to host! You can't beat Mum meals. Even if she does decide that the best 'universal' starter to suit everybody round the table is that 1970s crowd pleaser - prawn cocktail. (Although I can't complain too much as she does leave out the revolting nuclear tainted pink Marie Rose sauce, and adds nice lumps of white crab meat to the mix. With shredded cucumber and lime juice.)

Anyway, to more pressing matters. Easter eggs. In my opinion the best Easter eggs ever in the world bar none are the weeny little Cadbury's Buttons ones that cost about £1. The chocolate egg tastes so much better than normal chocolate for some reason! (Probably the excessive amounts of extra sugar they pump into them when moulding the eggs, but shush.) Then you have the added bonus of finding a bag of chocolate buttons inside. Fantastic. However, I have a bone to pick with the Easter Bunny this year. Did I buy eggs for others? Yes I did. And despite several hints of a not-so-subtle variety about cheap Cadbury's Buttons eggs, did I receive one? No I did not.

No Buttons egg. Not even one solitary egg. Or Mini-eggs. Not even a paste egg that my sister normally makes and stinks my mother's house out to high heaven with a boiling, staining concoction of coffee and onion skins. (Okay, I don't like boiled eggs but that's neither here nor there.) I suppose you know you're getting older when even the Easter Bunny forgets your address. When I have children I really want to hide mini Easter eggs around the garden and make an egg hunt for them. (Or get The Other Half to hide them so I can take part too - that sounds like a better plan.) However hard I try, I don't think I'll ever grow up. Do I have to? Oh yeah, people already think I have. Hence the zero Easter Eggs situation. Harrumph.

Acceptable in the 80s...

Carnage, cocktails and costumes - the three Cs of a successful party! I feel surprisingly fine today. Maybe it's because we've only just finished clearing up the residual crap so have had something else to concentrate on all day - or maybe it's down to the fact that I gave up on the Del Boy cocktails and started drinking the non-alcoholic plain pineapple juice when it all became too much round about 11:30pm when the 80s dancing competition ended? Hmmm. Anyway, it was like, so totally awesome.

Fashion Wheel, Kerplunk, Spirograph, Screwball
Scramble, Operation, cocktail umbrellas, armbands,
neon...how many 80s relics do you remember?

Everybody made the effort to dress up which was brilliant. Neon Barbie and Ken (matching sun visors and vests!), Madonna (more bracelets and lace than you could shake a stick at), The Hoff (with curly wig, chest hair, leathers and orange skin), Alex Drake (Ashes to Ashes), the 1984 LA Olympics, many generic 80s costumes in varying neon colours featuring legwarmers and awful make-up - and we had two iconic 80s doctors in our presence - Ghostbuster Dr. Egon Spengler and Doc Emmett Brown, to bring a bit of science to the proceedings. Egon's proton pack was made from a cereal box wrapped in a bin liner with a vacuum hose poking out of it. Genius.

All you need for a DIY 80s party:

Food
Anything full of sugar, colourings, and leftover from primary school birthday parties - fairy cakes and crispy cakes, crisps (Space Invaders and Monster Munch), party rings, jammie dodgers, rocket lollies, pickled onions and cheese on sticks. I topped it off with a Mr. Men birthday cake.

Cocktails
'Del Boys' - pineapple and coconut juice, Malibu and pineapple slices (from a can of course). 'Club Tropicanas' - orange and mango juice, peach schnapps and lemonade. Decorate both to the hilt with mini umbrellas, those plastic monkeys, glittery streamers on sticks and fruit in the glass.

Music
My crap 80s iPod playlist came in VERY handy. Gather up as much electro-pop and synth as you can. Think Wham!, Cyndi Lauper, MJ, The Boss, A-ha, Kylie, one hit wonders plus film soundtracks. And make sure you have an 80s dancing competition.

Costumes
Several people picked an 80s character or icon, but most dressed in general 80s attire. Armbands, legwarmers, off-the-shoulder tops, big hair, crimped hair, lace, bangles, stilettos, and - would you believe it - as much neon as you could possibly wear.

Games
We all raided our garages to procure such relics as Fashion Wheel (still with its original coloured pencils!), Operation, Rubik's cubes, Kerplunk, Spirograph and Screwball Scramble. I also found a bag of Trolls. The drunken Kerplunk tournament was a particular highlight, however.

Decorations
Afore-mentioned bag of trolls came in handy to decorate the room. As did streamers and balloons in as garish-as-possible colours, luminous table confetti, Barbies, My Little Pony, (I think someone may have brought a Care Bear?) and just general neon-ness.

Dude. It was like, so totally tubular.

Happy birthday to me...

Howdilly ho. And happy birthday to me! (Well, yesterday.) I'm on a week's holiday from work and intend to string this birthday lark out as long as humanly possible to mark (or mask) the fact that I'm now fast approaching 30 and should be behaving in a bit more of a grown up manner. Or something. The flood disaster is almost all repaired (woohoo!) and the damage was not nearly as bad as we first thought, so now I'm knuckling down to trying out recipes from my new Hairy Bikers cookbook and that all-important task of planning my birthday party. (I don't have to grow up straight away, do I?)

So, what's it like being on the other side of 25? It's not so bad. I still consider myself to be mid-twenties. (I can get away with that for another year, surely?) And just to be contrary, so far there's nothing grown-up at all about my planned partay. The theme is the 80s - so we're having an all-out kitsch fest. 80s games, 80s clothes, 80s music, 80s cocktails, 80s crap party food - the works. I need to make a trip into some neon-clad shops very soon for supplies. I have a feeling this party may hurt everyone's eyes with the sheer amount of neon that'll be on display in the house.

Actually, I am being quite grown up at the minute - not only are The Other Half and I visiting his mum in hospital everyday (she's had a horrendous sounding operation to remove some vertebrae and have metal rods inserted in their place - and is on the mend), but I've pro-actively remembered to make myself an appointment with my doctor without receiving the shameful 'your 3-year check-up is now overdue' letters through the post. (Girls, you know which check-up I'm talking about. It's that not-painful-but-no-less-unpleasant procedure that's necessary yet icky.) So, I've got a nurse invading me with what can only be described as a miniature loo brush to look forward to tomorrow. Oh joy.

Like that bit in Superman when the Hoover Dam bursts...

Back in early March, I somewhat stupidly wrote a post about how well our bathroom renovation seems to be going. What in the name of all that is good and holy was I thinking of?! I've cursed my house! Well, you might have gathered that things aren't in fact running smoothly at all. For starters, it's taken almost a month to reach a point that's somewhere near a finished product (and almost a month of strategically planning when is a safe time to nip for a wee amongst the building rubble that has taken over the place), and just when we thought everything was pretty much finished last night and therefore safe to turn the water back on...it turns out it wasn't. Oh no.

Water erupted from every possible mechanical orifice that it could. Like geysers, only colder. And indoors. The bathroom is flooded, and in turn - so is the kitchen as that's the room directly below the bathroom and the laws of gravity had to carry the water somewhere. Then, we tried turned the water off completely at the stopcock in the kitchen - alas, to no avail. It just kept turning! And water kept gushing! There's now a tidal wave downstairs being haphazardly collected by a bucket wedged under the leaking tap, while people who I hope know what they are doing are busy freezing pipes to replace the broken stopcock. And have dug up several floorboards in the process. Argh!

This has resulted in me having to work from home today in order to empty out the overflowing bucket of water from the busted pipe every twenty minutes - and an email of much ambiguity went around my colleagues proclaiming that I wasn't in the office today "due to plumbing problems". I foresee having to explain several times over tomorrow that this was not a euphemism. Sigh. I hope this is fixable sharpish. All I wanted was a working bathroom - that's not too much to ask for, is it?