Sleepy Mondays

Mood: A Little Bit Tired

Why can’t weekends be three days long?

My usual Monday gripe is that the weekend is never long enough. Not that I have had an exceptionally busy weekend or anything, but just that I wish I could stay in bed a little longer on Monday mornings.

I shouldn’t complain. I’ve had a really great weekend, filled with fun activities such as catching up with friends, good long sleep-ins and lie-ins and quality time with my family and J. I even got around to restocking the Asian part of my food cupboard and doing my laundry, and even indulged in my love of cooking by making a really yummy Indian dinner last night for J and me.

Friday night was my niece Renée’s birthday party with the family. Everyone gathered at Dad and Mum’s place for a family meal, resulting in 12 people sitting around the massive dinner table. All you could hear was children’s laughter and baby babble, almost drowning out all the adult conversation where topics would start and never quite finish. This of course was to be expected, as the centre of attention was a little one. But lately, I’ve noticed that whenever all the babies are together, the adults never ever quite finish any topics of conversation!

Poor Dad. He always looks so overwhelmed when the little ones are about, running around and chattering loudly. J noticed this too on Friday night – Dad looked completely lost and seemed to give up on having any kind of adult conversation, as everyone paid slightly more attention to what the kids were doing or saying and thus not finishing the adult conversations.

Renée had a terrific night – she was so spoilt by all the presents! Auntie G and Uncle J gave her 5 presents – a gorgeous pink tutu with big silver sequins, a fairy wand covered in white sparkly sequins, a flower headpiece, and a gorgeous pink outfit (hot pink top with a gorgeous patchwork skirt that everyone thought was adorable). The pièce de résistance was the pink scooter from Grace and Vinay – I want one too!

Lots of photos were taken on the night – with my camera for a change – so I will post those once I’ve had a chance to photoshop them.

J stayed at his place on Friday night to get a good night’s sleep, as Miss M was staying overnight on Saturday and J had an early start to collect Miss M by 8am. I on the other hand had a lovely lie-in on Saturday morning until 9am, so I was well rested by the time I got to Chatswood for my lunch date with my friends Clayton, Imby and Mollie.

Clay and I met through soccer years ago and he is one of the very few people from soccer with whom I have remained friends. A couple of years ago, Clay moved back to Scone after a stint in Sydney, and since buying his house recently, has become an infrequent visitor to Sydney. A couple of weeks ago, Clay rang and told me he would be in Sydney over the weekend and asked if we could catch up for our usual yum cha lunch at Chatswood. I accepted without hesitation.

Mollie is Clay’s sister who I met almost 12 months ago – she is such a barrel of laughs and I love seeing her when Clay is in town. Imby, Clay’s girlfriend is a new addition to the group – Imby was introduced to the fine art of yum cha when she came to Sydney with Clay in March this year and she is now an avid convert. To round off the motley crew, Penny also joined us for a few dumplings.

It was a fun yum cha – lots of conversations, laughter and good food. But I felt like I didn’t catch up with Clay as much this time than previous occasions – we were sitting across the table from each other and it was hard to have a conversation over the top of everyone else’s. Never mind – I’m sure Clay and Imby will be in town again soon and we will go to another yum cha – hopefully J will be available to join us too.

After yum cha, Penny and I wandered around Westfield for a bit. Neither of us needed to buy anything – it was more a wander to walk off the lunch than anything else. Penny ended up buying 2 pairs of shoes … I enjoyed living vicariously through her! And even though I did not set out to buy anything on Saturday, I went home with 5 DVDs. Bad bad girl …

Saturday night had been booked out by Suz for weeks, so that we could finally catch up after not seeing each other for weeks and also to see the Sex And The City movie. What should have been a straightforward, easy going night will now go down in history as the night Gee and Suz needed to travel back in time to see a movie!

You see, I got an email from the fine people at Greater Union advertising cheap, $8 tickets for the SATC movie for all Cinebuzz members if they were to book the tickets online. So I went to the website and selected our seats and booked the tickets, and subsequently received the confirmation email etc. Saturday night, we went to the box office and got our tickets, and then took ourselves off to dinner. We had just enough time to buy our popcorn, chocolates and frozen cokes before the movie started, but to our horror, there were already people seated in our allocated seats. A bit confused, we saw 2 other seats further back in the cinema and decided to go and sit in those instead. Unfortunately for us, those seats belonged to someone else who turned up and curtly told us to move.

We took our movie snacks and our tickets and went back to the box office, a bit miffed and disappointed that our seats were sold twice. The girls behind the counter were very good – they went in search of their manager to try and resolve the situation, and offered their apologies along with tickets to the next session. At this point, Suz noticed something a little bit odd on her ticket stub.

Only I could manage to get us cheap tickets online and select the tickets for Friday instead of Saturday, which meant the date on the first lot of tickets that were printed said "Friday 27 June".

In hindsight, we were damn lucky that the girls even let us in to see the movie at all!

So now I can finally say I’ve seen the Sex And The City movie. I’ll put up a review later. (And yes, I’m aware that I now owe 4 movie reviews!!!)

Because we got out of the movies so late (around 12.30am), I didn’t get to bed until well past 1am, which meant I spent all of Sunday morning asleep. I guess my body needed the sleep in. I finally climbed out of bed at around 1.30pm and took myself to Chatswood for my Asian groceries and the ingredients for dinner. The rest of the afternoon was spent catching up on my laundry.

My Butter Chicken and Rogan Josh were very yummy. J liked the dishes too. We will definitely have those again!

Even though I had my sleep in yesterday morning, I was exhausted by 8pm. I tried so hard to stay awake as J put on a few episodes of Bleach (Japanese anime that J got me completely hooked on) but alas, I fell asleep during a crucial episode.

It would have been lovely to have had more sleep this morning, considering the really bad night of sleep J had (apparently, my new mattress is too hard for him and he is still getting use to the firmness) – his tossing and turning woke me a few times during the night. But I can’t complain – I did all the work I had to do by 11.30am this morning and the rest of the day has been pretty cruisy. And I’m off to a wine club launch / wine tasting event tonight. Here’s hoping J will be able to sleep better tonight!