the beginning of a new season

i actually did clean my pad yesterday! between rooms, i went hunting for a birthday present and an element of a wedding present. i found a couple of options for both the former and the latter, and bought two copies of michael chabon - the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay (one for me, one for a gift).

i also got started on the wedding present itself: it's begun nicely, i hope i prove good enough for the finishing as well :)

then i went to train. i got to the mall a little early, so i went hunting for another element of the wedding present - a nose ring. it's very difficult to persuade tattoo-parlour workers that you're buying a ring and not planning on inserting it into your body.

the training was insane. i spent most of it working myself to dizziness, which meant stopping every now and then to breathe before rejoining the fray. this worked fine until the fighting: in the middle of a round, my body just stopped responding. that's very bad, in case you're wondering, and i had to "soak damage".

we ended the three hour training with stretching and massages. the latter was unexpected, and i taught a couple of kids a thing or two - there was much awe and wonder when i sorted out the neck and back of a girl who suffers chronic pain in the area. there is much good to be made of being a chronic sufferer myself.

i met up with karnaf for a beer and a chicken salad that was way over the top both in taste and quantity, then took my smelly self home for a shower and a two hour nap. i spent half an hour getting ready for the party, then hopped into the car with gco, his girlfriend and a friend of his from the last israeli trance party i went to (please notice the date - that's messed up).

we did some shopping at tiv tam, where i bought cupcakes. i was the only person who seemed to appreciate them. we hung around until directions to the party became available - i'd already noticed that his girlfriend wasn't at ease with the rest of us. on the way there, things turned sour and she eventually decided she was going to leave us at the party and go home.

it took gco a long time to calm her down, during which time i got to know his friend and discover a naive know-it-all ultra-liberal pseudo-politically aware ne'er-do-well. he's not a bad guy, though, and after a lengthy discussion - i'd like to say debate, i think it might well have been - we began to get along in spite of our differences.

i ran into a couple of old friends at the party, which was extremely lucky because gco's girlfriend and friend decided at 8am that they were ready to go.
faders.
and the party only got interesting about two hours later...

aside from the chicken salad and the cupcake, i had a really decent shuwarma at about 2am. since then and until around 3pm all i ate was handfuls of a really tasty cinnamon cereal, which gave a lot of people the willies and the impression that i'm a health freak. in fact, one of the guys i met later on asked me what hell someone like me was doing at a party like that :P

friends: i made a couple of new ones, really nice guys. i met them through one of the old ones, and when it was time to go i took the role of designated driver which they were all really grateful for. and i was too, both for being able to get home and for the fun of driving a manual vehicle :)

music: minimal minimal. that translates to "very boring" and "difficult to distinguish", but around 10am the dj's began injecting groove and i had a lot of fun.

people: LOVED the people! excellent crowd, beautiful faces and great big smiles, loads of silliness and the guy who got hit on the back of the neck with my frisbee didn't strike back. we did put the frisbee away, though.

venue: really nice spot, dusty as hell. excellent mist system above the dancefloor ^_^

weather: OMG. it was fantastic right until the moment the sun came out, at which point it turned into "fiery annihilation". lots of sunscreen, hats, shirts, water, and stomping in the shade (and grinning into the mist) ensued.

i wore my orange overalls, and i was surprised to get comments on how great my outfit was :)
i did manage to sleep an hour before daybreak, but i'm still amazed that i was still digging (although by that stage it was more like "patting" :P) by noon when the sound went down.

we stopped by the organizer's apartment for a couple of hours, exquisite espresso and alfajores, fun conversation, brilliant music and the intermittent passing out. i just got dropped off at home, and now that i've had a shower and set the washing machine running:

i can see my feet! now i'm clean, but how am i going to unpack my bag? do i call up the french girl from thursday night yet? i MUST brush my teeth, emergency! sleep is for mortals! zzzzzzzz...