This weekend’s been unusual, for me anyway. It’s been social, at least on one day, and on the other something I’ve been planning to do for some time.

Saturday began with only one fixed item in my diary, a “burning things” party in the evening at 8pm over at John and Katie’s place. John loves burning things and the clearing up of his garden and the erection of a shed made a big enough pile for it to be worth a party to burn it. It was merely a lucky accident that it was also bonfire night. There was also a nacent possibility of finally meeting up with Grim and Holly to see the new(ish) Wallace and Gromit film, Curse of the Were Rabbit, however, due to Grim being rather tied up with the problems caused by his work’s employment changes (and possibly their management hitting the self-destruct button for internal IT systems) no plans had been able to be made.

So, this is how it began. I texted Grim asking if plans were going ahead of whether I should do my normal Saturday chores assuming that nothing was happening. I got no reply, so assumed the worst and went out. It was only at about a quarter to one that, while in the alcohol section of Sainsbury’s getting stuff to take to the party, I got a phone call from Grim asking if it was too late to meet up.

To cut a long story short, I managed to get home, unpack the groceries and get out the door by quarter past one.

Reading is awful. I just thought that needed clarifying a bit. OK, there are worse bits and not so bad bits but trying to park there is one of the worst. On Saturday all the car parks were virtually full. That is, they were said to be full by the signs on the way to them. After a half hour queue in traffic I finally managed to get a parking space and got to the pre-arranged meeting point about five minutes late. Having seen the traffic I was quite expecting not to find Grim and Holly waiting, and they weren’t. So I texted Grim telling him that I was in Starbucks and waited.

About half an hour later came a call, they’d been held up by traffic.

Anyway, finally, we met up, found somewhere for me to get some lunch and had a good old natter before it was time to pop over to the cinema and watch the film. Not bad, but I think The Wrong Trousers was better. I found that the secondary characters were a bit weak and I think they ran out of jokes. The end of the credits was good though.

So, by the time we were out of the cinema it was gone 6pm. We said our good-byes and departed.

The journey home was far less full of traffic and managed to do it in 40 minutes, as opposed to the 1 hour fifteen minutes in the afternoon. This allowed me time to get some food, catch up with the usual web pages of the day and e-mail which I’d not read in the morning before heading out to the party.

Can you believe that it’s almost impossible to find fireworks on sale on the 5th of November? Well, it seems to be. The most any of the guests at the party could muster was about 5 packets of sparklers. Obviously, other people around Oxford had had better luck as it sounded like a war zone. Oh well. Anyway, the garden incinerator did its job and the company was good, so who cares? I got home at 2am and went to bed.

Sunday had been forecast to be wet. This time the BBC weather forecasters were right, so I decided to do the thing I had been planning for the first truely wet Sunday I found this winter, have a marathon showing of the whole of the extended version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I started playing the DVDs at 10:30, after finishing the Sunday morning phone call to my parents, and watched throughout the day with only about an hour’s break to get dinner and at the same time watch Scrapheap Challenge. The last DVD span to a close 12 hours later.

Anyway, so that was my weekend. I wonder what this week at work will bring. Hopefully it won’t entail as many things breaking or not going to plan as last week.